Fifty Years On, Why Is It Still So Hard to Be a Woman in Motorsport?

There is something deeply uncomfortable about the way motorsport talks about women.

We are always talking about the "future"…

The next generation, the next breakthrough, the next young driver who might become the first woman in modern Formula 1, the next initiative that will make the sport more accessible, the next academy, scholarship, test programme or diversity campaign that will finally change the numbers.

And yet, somehow, the "future" never quite arrives.

This week marks 50 years since Lella Lombardi became the last woman to compete in a Formula 1 Grand Prix. Lombardi raced in the 1970s and remains the only woman to have scored points in a World Championship Grand Prix. Half a century later, Formula 1 has become the richest, most technologically advanced and commercially powerful version of itself in history. It has expanded into global markets across the world, transformed its media operation and built an enormous female fanbase.

But, despite all this, there is still not one single woman on the grid.

That should be shocking, but has instead become a statistic that we repeat every few years, usually accompanied by photographs of Lombardi and a familiar promise that “change is coming”.

And perhaps that is why the rise of F1 Academy deserves a more complicated discussion than it usually receives.

The championship has been an important intervention - giving women professional machinery, manufacturer support, television exposure and, crucially, the opportunity to race against other women at a high level in the hopes that this opportunity will lead somewhere.

But there is an uncomfortable truth underneath its success: F1 Academy exists because the conventional pathway was not producing enough women.

Male drivers don’t need a separate Formula 1-affiliated championship to create a viable route through the junior categories. They have already-established feeder series: karting, Formula 4, Formula 3, Formula 2 and, for the very few who make it, Formula 1. A talented male driver can enter that system without his gender ever being a consideration in whether the pathway itself is available to him.

Women can take that route too, but historically far fewer have been able to sustain it. F1 Academy was therefore created in 2023 not simply as another junior championship, but as an intervention: an attempt to correct a pipeline that had consistently lost female drivers before they reached the level at which Formula 1 teams were prepared to consider them.

Of course, this is a positive thing in changing the landscape of motorsport for women, but it’s also worth asking why this alternative route has had to be created in the first place.

There is a danger that the success of F1 Academy will become confused with the success of the wider system. We can look at a grid full of talented women, backed by major manufacturers and competing under the Formula 1 umbrella, and quite reasonably call that progress. But when the end result is that women are increasingly encouraged to progress through a separate ladder, while men continue to use the established one, it’s hard to say that we have changed the ladder...we have simply built another one alongside it.

In this way, there is a subtle difference between inclusion and integration.

F1 Academy should not become a place where female drivers are expected to prove themselves indefinitely before being allowed into the main, male-dominated system. Its purpose should be to make the transition into that system easier, not to create a parallel career structure that women remain trapped within.

There are a million burning questions that make what happens after F1 Academy as important as what happens inside it:

What happens to the champion and runner-up? What happens to the driver who is fast enough to progress but does not have the budget to take the next step? What happens when a manufacturer changes its priorities, a sponsor walks away or a seat simply does not exist?

Weug's Predicament

Maya Weug’s experience is a particularly uncomfortable illustration of that problem. She finished second in F1 Academy in 2025, winning three races and taking nine podiums, yet her 2026 racing plans subsequently unravelled and she has spent much of the season trying to rebuild a professional programme.

Weug’s recent post was not the kind of announcement motorsport fans like to celebrate. We saw no new contract, no podium photograph and no announcement of a manufacturer programme. Instead, we saw a candid message about what Weug described as the “toughest year of her career”, explaining that she had gone from fighting for the F1 Academy championship in 2025 to having no confirmed racing programme for the remainder of 2026.

This is one of many clear cases which display how quickly a racing career can disappear.

Weug had spent years progressing through single-seaters, became Ferrari’s first female member of its Driver Academy and was being presented as one of the most significant prospects in the sport.

F1 Academy even supported her pursuit of a 2026 professional seat with a funded AF Corse GT test at the end of last year.

Then…the plan fell apart.

She was able to get three Belcar races under her belt, has demonstrated that she can adapt to GT machinery, and has also tested Formula E machinery and worked on the engineering side of the sport.

But she is not actively racing.

A racing career is not like a normal career in which a year away from the office can be inconvenient but survivable. Drivers are judged on momentum; needing mileage, results, sponsorship, technical familiarity and visibility.

A driver who spends a year out of the cockpit does not simply lose twelve months, they face losing the next opportunity as well, because their absence becomes part of the argument against them.

The Stopwatch Is Not The Whole Story

There is a very persistent argument about women in racing: if a woman is fast enough, she will make it.

It sounds logical but, in all honesty, the stopwatch is objective. It only starts measuring you once you have been given the opportunity to drive.

Even in a spec series, there are millions of differences between cars and drivers, with hundreds of outcomes that have nothing to do with lap time.

A lot of the time, regardless of gender it comes down to the same things:

Who gets into karting at seven years old? Who can afford to continue at thirteen? Who has a family prepared to spend tens of thousands of pounds on a junior career? Who gets noticed by a manufacturer? Who receives a test? Who gets an engineer willing to invest time in them? Who has the sponsorship network to progress from one category to another? Who can survive a bad season without having to stop racing altogether?

None of those questions are answered by the stopwatch.

They’re answered by money, access, geography, opportunity and, increasingly, by whether a team believes that a particular driver represents a worthwhile investment.

This is why the argument that “women simply need to be fast enough” is so incomplete.

Men have the advantage of competing within a much larger, already-established talent pool and a system that has historically been built around them.

Jamie Chadwick made a similar point this week when discussing the 50th anniversary of Lombardi’s final F1 appearance. Her argument was that the route to getting a woman into Formula 1 begins much earlier than Formula 1 itself: girls need to enter karting, stay in the sport and develop through the same competitive ecosystem as boys.

If only a small number of girls enter at the bottom, the number who reach the top will inevitably be smaller. If fewer women reach the top, teams have fewer examples of female drivers with established careers. If teams have fewer examples, the argument that there is "insufficient evidence of female talent" becomes easier to make.

The pipeline does not have to be deliberately discriminatory to produce a discriminatory outcome.

Weug’s situation becomes particularly uncomfortable when you realise how common it is for a driver to lose a seat because a sponsorship deal collapses or a team changes direction.

Male drivers experience it all the time.

But for a male driver, there are dozens of possible routes through the professional system. A single-seater career can move through Formula 3, Formula 2, endurance racing, GTs, Formula E, IndyCar or other championships, with those pathways often overlapping and feeding into one another.

For women however, the system is still being built.

F1 Academy remains an important part of that construction, with the 2026 grid comprising of 19 drivers, an extraordinary increase in structure compared to just a few years ago.

But the existence of a women’s championship should not be the final measure of progress. F1 Academy should be able to produce a generation of women who move into Formula 3, Formula 2, Formula E, endurance racing and, eventually, Formula 1. Now, it is becoming a highly successful destination in its own right, but the number of women progressing into the established professional system remains tiny.

At some point, the sport needs to confront the uncomfortable possibility that it has solved the visibility problem without solving the progression problem.

Overlooked Perspectives

Another issue that deserves equal attention is engineering.

Motorsport describes itself as an industry governed by data: obsessed with marginal gains and priding itself on being able to measure almost everything.

Yet for decades, the default racing driver around whom much of that knowledge was developed was male.

Driver ergonomics, seat design, pedal forces, steering weight, harness positioning, physical conditioning, heat management and fatigue are all matters considered only for the perspective of male drivers.

None of this means that female drivers need fundamentally different cars, but it certainly means that the industry has historically had far more data on male drivers than female drivers.

This imbalance is finally beginning to be addressed through research initiatives such as More Than Equal who are examining female-specific performance and ergonomics, and also working to identify and develop female talent before it reaches the professional level.

Formula E provides another interesting example of this imbalance.

CEO, Jeff Dodds, has said he believes Formula E would likely put a woman into its main championship before Formula 1 does. One of his arguments is particularly significant: female drivers are being given opportunities to test the same type of machinery they would ultimately race.

This is a small but important distinction...

There is a difference between giving someone experience and giving them relevant experience.

If the ultimate goal is to eventually have a woman competing equally in a Formula 1 car, they cannot spend their entire development careers being told that they are progressing while the machinery beneath them remains several steps removed from the level they are supposed to reach.

These same barriers exist on the other side of the garage too.

Getting into Formula 1 as a female engineer is still a battle in an industry where senior technical roles have historically been dominated by men.

The problem is not a lack of women capable of doing the job; it's how few have been given the opportunity to reach the point where their ability can be seen.

There are now notable exceptions.

Hannah Schmitz has risen through Red Bull’s engineering ranks to become Head of Strategy, having started there as a modelling and simulation engineer after graduating from Cambridge. Her strategy calls, including the famous tyre gamble that helped Max Verstappen win from 10th at the 2022 Hungarian Grand Prix, have made her one of the most recognisable strategists in Formula 1.

Then we have Laura Mueller, who became Formula 1’s first full-time female race engineer when Haas promoted her to work with Esteban Ocon in 2025. She had joined the team in its simulator department a few years earlier and worked her way up through performance engineering.

The fact that Mueller made history by becoming a race engineer in 2025 is revealing in itself. Race engineering has been one of the most important roles in Formula 1 for decades, yet it took until the sport’s modern era for a woman to even be given the opportunity to occupy that position full-time.

Schmitz and Mueller prove the point that women do not need different standards to succeed in Formula 1; they need access to the same technical ladder, the same responsibility and the same opportunity to build a career.

The fact that their presence is still described as “groundbreaking” tells us how much further there is to go.

Perhaps one of the clearest examples of how unusual it seems for a woman to occupy a position of power in Formula 1 is Claire Williams.

She became Williams’ deputy team principal in 2013, taking over the day-to-day running of the family team and becoming only the second woman in F1 history to hold a team principal-level role, after Monisha Kaltenborn at Sauber.

She remained in the position until 2020, overseeing a team that achieved successive third-place finishes in the Constructors’ Championship before its decline and eventual sale brought the Williams family’s involvement to an end.

Williams’ career is important because she exposes another problem with the idea that women simply need to “make it” into Formula 1.

Getting there is one thing; but being accepted as the person making the decisions is another.

Potentially the most important statistic is that now, six years after Williams left Formula 1, there is still no woman serving as a team principal or CEO of an F1 team.

Claire Williams is living proof that women are able to operate at the highest level of motorsport, and yet we are still not making ample space for them.

The Financial Problem

There is another uncomfortable truth that gets lost whenever this conversation becomes too simplistic: motorsport is expensive for everybody, but these economics have a particular effect on women.

Any driver, regardless of gender, can lose a career because they run out of money or sponsorships. But the extra effect on women is that they are entering a system in which there are fewer established professional pathways and fewer historical examples of commercial success.

Weug’s situation is therefore not evidence that the system has failed her specifically because she is a woman.

It is evidence of something broader: the system is extraordinarily unforgiving, and women have less margin for error within it.

Drivers like Weug should not have to become inspirational stories simply because the industry cannot find a place for them.

The longer Weug remains out of a seat, the more difficult her return becomes. This is the brutal reality of motorsport and is why continuity matters so much and why development programmes cannot simply identify talent and then assume the problem is solved.

The responsibility does not end when a woman reaches the professional paddock...that’s when it becomes the most important.

This week, the sport will rightly celebrate Lella Lombardi.

She deserves to be remembered not simply as a statistic, but as a serious racing driver who competed at a time when the barriers were considerably more explicit than they are today.

But there is something uncomfortable about commemorating her final Grand Prix appearance 50 years later and still discussing the possibility of a woman becoming a regular Formula 1 driver as though it were an extraordinary future event.

In the same amount of time, Formula 1 has gone from naturally aspirated engines to hybrid power units. Cars have moved from crude mechanical machines to rolling computers. Teams have become multinational corporations. Data has transformed almost every aspect of performance.

Yet the fundamental gender imbalance at the very top has survived all of it.

More women entering the sport is progress. More female engineers is progress. More female journalists is progress. More women working in team management, strategy, mechanics and performance departments is progress. F1 Academy is progress.

But none of these things should become substitutes for the original objective.

Women need to be able to race and build careers in motorsport equally.

The challenge now is not proving that women belong in motorsport, it's building a system that allows them to stay, progress and reach the highest levels without needing a separate definition of success.