MOTORSPORT: Racing still a man's world

Women still find it hard to crack the top echelons of motor racing, and even when they do they don’t have a history of staying in their seats.

Women racers have been in the spotlight again recently though, with news that Scottish-born Susie Wolff will drive a couple of practice sessions for the
Williams F1 team this season and Swiss IndyCar racer Simona De Silvestro has become an “affiliated driver” with the Sauber F1 team.

And in America, where women have done best in recent years, there has been controversy about NASCAR’s Danica Patrick.

Richard Petty, Australian Marcos Ambrose’s team owner and known as “The King” because he won 200 major NASCAR races and seven premier series titles, has said that Patrick could only win a Sprint Cup race “if everybody else stayed home”.

Petty conceded that Patrick – who now features annually, scantily clad, in advertisements during the SuperBowl, which commands the biggest audience on US television – “has helped draw attention to the sport, which helps everybody”.

Petty just doesn’t rate her as a race driver. He created a storm, but said that “if her name had been Danny nobody would have said anything”. And he denied that he was sexist.

Women still account for perhaps only one per cent of race drivers globally.

V8 Supercars has had Leanne Tander, wife of Holden Racing Team’s Garth, most recently. Before her were Melinda Price and Kerryn Brewer, who finished 11th in the 1998 Bathurst 1000 as the Castrol Cougars driving a Larry Perkins-prepared Holden Commodore.

Tander – who almost won Australia’s major open-wheeler award, the Gold Star, in 2007 – and Price are now mothers. Price has also had to beat breast cancer.

Corporate lawyer Amber Anderson came as close to racing V8 Supercars as driving the safety car for quite a time.

Queensland 19-year-old Renee Gracie is racing in the Porsche Carrera Cup, hoping to be the next woman in V8 Supercars – and dreams of NASCAR too.

Victorian Chelsea Angelo is 17 and still at school but is making her Formula Three debut at Adelaide’s Clipsal 500 this weekend. She has won in Formula Ford at Sandown and set a lap record at Phillip Island.

Her sights are sky-high. “My ultimate goal would be to become Australia’s first female F1 race driver and win the world championship,” she said.

Only five women have been given a chance at F1. Three of them failed to qualify for a race.

Italian Giovanna Amati was the last to try, in 1992, but was dropped by the old Brabham team after failing to make the grid at three GPs.

Amati’s late countrywoman Lella Lombardi, is the only woman to have finished in the world championship points in a grand prix. She was sixth in the 1975 Spanish GP, but was awarded only half a point because the race was cut short.

Spaniard Maria de Villota crashed into a stationary lorry at a British airfield after her first and only straight-line test run with the lowly Marussia F1 team in mid-2012.

She lost an eye and 18 months later died in a hotel from what were thought to have been lingering neurological injuries.

There is a generalisation that women are not physically strong enough for race driving.

But Dr Riccardo Ceccarelli, who runs the Formula Medicine training facility in Italy through which many F1 drivers including Australia’s Daniel Ricciardo have passed, said strength was not as important as many people thought.

“Our research shows a driver needs to spend just 30 per cent of their time on physical training and the other 70 per cent on brain training,” Ceccarelli said.

“If you can train the brain to be more efficient it’s easier to multi-task and that will make the bigger difference in terms of performance.”

The most successful woman driver in motorsport history has to have been France’s Michele Mouton, who competed in the World Rally Championship between 1974 and ’86 and won four events.

Sydney’s young Molly Taylor won the first Ladies Trophy in the European Rally Championship last year but is still a long way from the heights Mouton reached.

Christian Horner, boss of top F1 team Red Bull Racing, said “the best marketing thing that we could do would be to have a female driver”.

“At the moment there isn’t one that could cut it at the front, but there are some very talented young girls coming through and it’s only a matter of time.”

Austrian ex-F1 racer Dr Helmut Marko is Red Bull tycoon Dietrich Mateshitz’s adviser on motorsport and oversees the energy drink company’s junior development program through which Daniel Ricciardo was groomed.

“We are looking for drivers based on performance, not by [gender] quota,” Marko said.

On the other side of the coin, Susie Wolff laments that “one of the main issues is that young girls have no one to aspire to [in F1] growing up, whereas a
young boy can grow up wanting to be Sebastian Vettel [world champion the past four years].”

F1 supremo Bernie Ecclestone can’t foresee a woman on the GP grid again, but he’s 83 and up to his ears in legal battles. Wolff can see it happening within a decade. “Definitely. It would just take a massive leap of faith for one of the teams to give a female a chance,” she said.

“There are many people within F1 who would like to see it happen.”

But any potential woman GP driver will have to bring abundant proof of skill and racecraft as much as sex appeal.

Four of the 33 drivers in last year’s Indianapolis 500 in America were women.

Britain’s Pippa Mann was one of them. While Janet Guthrie, Lyn St James and Danica Patrick have acquitted themselves well in that classic, Mann said a woman would have to win races in Europe’s GP2 to come into F1 calculations.

Neither Susie Wolff – formerly Stoddart, who has raced in Germany’s DTM touring car championship and is married to the Mercedes motorsport boss and Williams F1 shareholder Toto Wolff – nor Simona De Silvestro have done that, and they are not headed in that direction.

Wolff’s 2014 track schedule with Williams is simply the first practice sessions at the British and German GPs and one official F1 test.

De Silvestro has been in IndyCar since 2009, was rookie of the year at the Indy 500 in 2010 and last year finished second in a race at Houston.

Ahead of her at Sauber are the race drivers, German Adrian Sutil and Mexican Esteban Gutierrez, and Russian teenage reserve driver Serge Sirotkin. That’s just for starters, before any new stars appear this year.

Danica Patrick came close to winning the Indy 500 before her switch to NASCAR. She did win in IndyCar, on an oval track in Japan, but was a disappointment on road courses – which would make it hard for her to contemplate F1.

Patrick started NASCAR’s Sprint Cup in a blaze of glory last year, taking pole position for the Daytona 500, but she finished on the lead lap in only 12 of the season’s 36 races and wound up 27th in the championship.

As if Petty’s recent remark was not harsh enough, Fox Sports writer David Whitley said of her at the end of last season: “Patrick proved she can drive a stock car better than 99.9 per cent of the earth’s population, but her first full season in Sprint Cup proved she really has little business racing against the other 0.1 per cent, which, sadly for her, comprises the weekly starting field.

“Patrick’s marketing appeal allows her to be held to a lower standard, but [using a tennis analogy] she’s starting to make Anna Kournikova look like Venus Williams.”

Equally caustic a few years ago was Michael Waltrip, a two-time Daytona 500 winner and another former Ambrose team boss and still a driver and commentator, who said of Shawn Robinson after she drove a few races for his team: “I think she is an excellent interior decorator.”

Amber Anderson noted that women drivers stand out in male-dominated race paddocks simply by being of the other gender but felt they were more heavily criticised or judged than men.

“So if you do something wrong it can take a long time to recover,” she said. “Common problems I’ve encountered in racing range from pure condescension and indifference to hostility.

“Run by men, for men, motorsport is about as blokey as it comes.”

Register to comment on this article.