Marussia's announcement yesterday that Maria de Villota has joined the team as a test driver caused a fair amount of consternation on Twitter, and was, depending on your level of cynicism, well timed to still be relevent for International Women's Day (IWD) today, or spectacularly badly timed to miss IWD by 24 hours. I suppose I can't talk - this post will only make it out on IWD with 15 minutes to go!
The two stories (de Villota and IWD, keep up) have reminded me of a couple of related thoughts that regularly slosh around my brain which gives me an excuse to let them loose onto this blog! The first of thoughts is that I would genuinely love to see a female racer breaking into Formula 1. I see no reason why a woman couldn't compete in the sport, and I'd love to see it happen. But F1 (and motorsport in general) is a testosterone-driven environment, and historically many have been dismissive of female drivers. In her book, The Pits, Beverley Turner (1) for example suggested that many in the sport recognised that women could have the talent to race in F1, but either lacked the kind of motivation to win that a man has or, even worse, just weren't pretty enough to be promoted to the sport. That's a pretty major pair of prejudices!
It seems attitudes are changing however, as evidenced by Christian Horner's recent comments that he expects to see a woman race in F1 within a decade. But, while team managers may be becoming more open to the thought of women drivers, again I have to put my cynical hat on. Its impossible to mention women in motorsport for more than a few lines without coming to mention Danica Patrick. Danica has proved two things to the male dominated world of motorsport. Firstly, positively, she has proved that women can race with, and beat the boys. Secondly, with more negative consequences, she has also proved that women can be pretty in a race car, and be a highly marketable commodity for teams and sponsors. Do an image search for Danica on Google - you will struggle to find a picture of her in clothes, let alone in a race car. I have no issue with this per say. Its up to every individual to choose whether to pose for semi-naked pictures - certainly many male F1 drivers have no issue when the pay check is right! But for female racers it does serve to confirm the stereotype that women need to be 'marketable' in order to get into the sport. And that is a negative trend, and may help explain to some extent some of the thawing of views on this subject.
It should be said that Maria de Villota seems to have avoided the Danica Patrick route off getting her kit of to stoke attention (amongst other things). Do a Google search for Maria and you do get a page full of pictures of a racing driver, rather than of a swimwear model. But the news has still been met with regret from many commenters, such as F1 Kate, an F1 blogger. This time however, the concern is that her racing career to date simply doesn't support any claim to a place in F1, even as a test driver, and that she is simply buying herself some F1 seat time (probably a token amount), and giving Marussia an easy headline. The reactions seems to suggest that I'm not the only to think therefore that Maria's appearance in F1, however limited, could actually do further damage to women's place in the sport, as covered excellently by Joe Saward in his blog post, 'Lets Get Real'. There is still a lot of prejudice in the sport towards women, and by bringing in a pay-driver in order to raise funds and grab some headlines can only confirm the prejudices to many people. It has been refreshing however to see so many commenters (see this on F1 Fanatic for example) taking a positive mindset towards the idea of women in F1, if not to the idea of Maria de Villota in F1.
Instead of forcing women through the ranks, we need to look at helping women access the sport, and encourage those with talent to stay in the sport. In this way more women drivers will be able to emerge through the ranks with, hopefully, many talented women starting to rise to a level where they too can show they can beat the boys, as Danica has done in Indycars. More can be done to promote the sport and break down any barriers stopping more women taking up the sport - I hope initiatives like the FIA's Women & Motor Sport Commision can start to tackle this, working with those women already in the sport, and identifying those outside the sport who may get involved to find out what can be done to help more women and girld into the sport at all levels.
All of which brings me to the second thought bouncing around the hollow space between my tabs, which is, to my mind, one of the main reasons many women are put off motorsport - grid girls. Bloody grid girls.There still exists the out of date notion in our sport that draping semi-naked girls over cars in some way adds 'glamour' to the sport. The only sense in which the word glamour can be used in this sense in in the same way as it is used to describe 'Glamour Magazines' - the particularly cheap and tacky end of the men's mag market. As noted before, I was always a big Jordan GP fan, but hated the tendency of the team to use flesh to promote itself. As soon as I heard there was a new 'glamour' model named Jorden I realised there was a sad inevitability to seeing her ample charms poking out around various bits of yellow Jordan GP carbon-fibre.
This is the image many women see when they look at motorsport. They see the tacky grid girls. They see the dolly bird lined up as the drivers go to the podium. It doesn't put all women off, but it does put many off. They see their roles defined on the screen - the boys do the racing, the girls get their bits out and applaud the winner. Even low level club racing falls into this trap, trying to raise a series' profile by making it more glamorous by adding flesh to the podium/grid. I really can't say how much this irritates me, and I know it irritates many of the female fans I watch the sport with.
The worst part is that this doesn't even accurately reflect the real role of women in modern motorsport. Last August I attended a taster day to get experience of marshaling before doing a full day on the banks. On the day we met a range of people around the circuit involved in the operation of the event, and many were women. At one point I was on the grid, seeing how race starts were organised. The chief start line marshal, the post chief on Post 1, the Clerk of the Course, the driver on P3 (and other drivers on the grid) and the Chief Marshal for the meeting were all women. In the next week I found a video of the event online (yes, OK, I was looking for it to see if my heroic pushing of a stranded car was on there!) - the only women in the video were the presenter and the grid girls. Technically only part of the grid girls got in many shots - their arse and legs mostly. Of course you can't thrust behind-the-scenes people in front of the camera to prove the point - but to anyone watching that video, yet again, the roles were clear - men are drivers battling for victory, women are scenery, battling to keep their cheeks in impossibly tight pants.
To be clear, I do not want grid girls banning - I want the sport to grown out of them. I also do not mean any disrespect to grid girls themselves. They are all committed to what they do - and no doubt put up with a lot of hassle while doing it. Many are big motorsport fans themselves, often involved in other areas of the sport too.
And so I leave this post with some links for any aspiring girl racers out there. Celebrate International Women's Day by seeing what motorsport can offer you and get involved -
Girlracer
British Womens Racing Drivers Club
I'm off to await hate mail from fans of grid girls (and possibly from gird girls themselves)!
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(1) Beverley Turner's book is a string of unrelated complaints about F1, some of which are spurious in the extreme, and some of which hit the nail bang on the head. From the point of view of someone from outside the paddock, the chapter on women in F1 seems to be more valid than many other of the complaints, even if some of the points in that chapter are still a bit wide of the mark. Its worth reading though just to see how much one person can dislike Eddie Irvine!
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