Women Can Challenge Men In Formula 1, Says More Than Equal

There are obvious physical reasons why men and women don’t compete directly against each other in many sports. But motor racing is not one of them. There’s no anatomical difference stopping women from beating men when driving a car round a track. Yet no female driver has even competed in Formula 1 since 1992. More Than Equal hopes to change that. I talked to CEO Ali Donnelly about how the organization is planning to champion female driving talent from an early age.

“The More Than Equal organization was founded about a year and a half ago by David Coulthard, the Ex-F1 driver,” says Donnelly. “He was interested in doing something to make it easier for women and girls to get on in motorsport.” Karel Komarek, a Czech entrepreneur, was brought on board as another founder. “The concept is that there hasn’t been an early detection system in motorsport for female drivers and there hasn’t been a development program to take girls with potential through to their fruition as a motorsport driver.”

“That is the gap that we’re seeking to fill,” continues Donnelly. “We’ve had lots of great initiatives in motorsport and there are lots of programs, brands and teams who are doing good things like F1 Academy. But our concept is a bit different. It’s more about how we can help high potential female drivers to move through the sport more seamlessly, which has been quite difficult for female drivers.”

Creating Female Motor Racing Role Models

“It’s a complimentary approach to other initiatives like F1 Academy,” continues Donnelly. “We’re independent. We’re not connected to a team or a series. Our perspective on the F1 Academy and the former W series (which ended in 2022 after three years) is that one of the challenges for women and girls is the very small amount of participation. Less than 10% of all motorsport participants around the world are female. That’s a very small pool. We’re here to champion and support initiatives that change that. One of the key concepts is that if you can’t see it, you can’t be it. This has become a cliche, but it’s true. You need role models and high-profile visibility to aim at. If you are a girl coming into sport, you want to look up and see yourself.”

“There are lots of tangible examples of sports that have done really well off the back of female success,” says Donnelly. “In the UK, the FA has some interesting stats about the growth in girls’ participation after the England women’s team won the Euros. We haven’t had enough female role models in motorsport at the top end. F1 Academy is doing the sport a great service in that respect and hopefully you’ll start to see some tangible links in the next few years between growing participation rates and the kind of profile that series is getting.”

“We are scouting the world for young, high potential female driving talents,” says Donnelly. “We’re using data, working with engineering firm the Smedley Group, owned by Rob Smedley. He’s a data engineer who used to work at Ferrari. Smedley Group is helping us to scrape the existing performance data, such as racing times and results, to help us to identify a long list of girls who have the potential with our support to climb the ranks. We will choose 10 to 20 girls to come into the program to receive high performance coaching and support that is relevant to their age and gender.”

“We’ve just hired two coaches,” says Donnelly. One is Sarah Moore, a W Series driver who was also the first to win a mixed-gender series, and the other is Jordan King, a Formula 2 and IndyCar driver and Formula 1 test driver. “There hasn’t been a program like this in motorsport for female drivers because the programs that have existed have been around a particular racing competition like the W series. We fill an important gap.” More Than Equal’s research, published in its “Inside Track” report revealed this. “Many respondents told us that they come into the sport without enough information about how they should be training. They don’t have enough advice as to the different series. They are struggling to get funding. We’re trying to fill that space between a girl starting in the sport and getting right up to F4, F3, F2 and F1.”

More Than Equal is also considering how talent can be found outside motorsport, including esports racing. “We’ve hired a lot of people from outside motorsports because we want to bring different ideas,” says Donnelly. “The person running our program came from British Cycling, and I’ve come from Sport England, where I worked in lots of different sports. We’re open to innovative ways to find talent. In this first year, we are focusing on existing drivers. We’ve had about 400 applications from 70 countries. A large number is from the UK and the US, but it shows you the scale of demand there is for a program like this. We’ve talked about talent transfer because some of our employees come from sports where they’ve seen that system work very well. But in year one it’s a more traditional straightforward exploration of drivers who are out there now and performing well enough that we think there’s potential.”

Media Profile Has A Central Role

Media publicity will be key to getting the equality message across. “The media has a really important role to play,” says Donnelly. “The success other women’s sports have had generating proper investment shows that. Our Inside Track research project found that female fans felt very strongly that the media should be doing a much better job of promoting opportunities and trumpeting success in a way that doesn’t conform to outdated misconceptions. That surprised us because we do believe that the media and motorsport is working hard to cover good news about women in most sports.”

“If you look at that research, 66% of fans said that media coverage reinforces gender stereotypes and that deters female participants,” says Donnelly. “When we took broadcasters through this, they were disappointed. It does reinforce the importance of consistent coverage, with access to female role models on television and on social media. This is true of every woman’s sport that’s grappling for position, now that storytelling and engaging with individuals is key. One of the reasons Drive to Survive has been so successful is because people can connect in whatever way they want with specific drivers. They feel like they get to know them. We’re quite far away from that with female drivers.”

Tennis is perhaps the poster child of female sporting equality. Although women don’t compete directly against men, they do have equal rewards and arguably similar media coverage. “Tennis is a good example because it’s doing incredibly well from profile and prize money perspectives. But that’s taken a very long time and enormous strength of character from people like Billie Jean King. We haven’t had that moment in motorsport. We’re more like horse racing, which has had a female jockey, Rachael Blackmore, win a Grand National. This is not dissimilar to a woman winning an F1 race. It’s a similar elite end of the sport. But we haven’t had a Rachael Blackmore moment in motorsport. Tennis is a good place to look for inspiration, but we’d be fooling ourselves if we thought we were in any way comparable to tennis at this juncture because we just haven’t had that breakthrough moment. Hopefully it’s coming.”

Women Making Sporting Progress

There are motor racing series where women are already competing equally against men, including Extreme E and World Rallycross. “Extreme E had the benefit of being a new series,” says Donnelly. “When you start something new, you can be pioneering. It is more challenging for the series that have been around a long time. When we interrogated Formula One’s female fan base last year, they very much wanted to see women driving. Many series are waking up to the fact that in 2024 there must be mixed gender sport. It isn’t okay forever to have all male groups constantly. It’s not just Formula One, but many other racing series – Formula E, IndyCar, NASCAR.”

Ultra-marathons are a sport where women have been able to compete successfully against men. Courtney Dauwalter has beaten male competitors over 100-mile distances, but it took a decade of training. “That’s one of the reasons why our program strategy is to start working with drivers at a young age,” says Donnelly. “There are very few female drivers who have been training at the level they should have been early on in their career. There is also scant research on how you work with female athletes in early teens. This is true of all sports and there’s even less research on how you work with racing drivers at a young age to maximize their potential and to understand exactly what the strengths of a female body are, where are the weaknesses, and how to work on those. The trainers on our program have experience with teenagers and female athletes, who go through puberty in a different way to male athletes. That needs to be considered and training adjusted to deal with that.”

“Anything’s possible in sport,” says Donnelly. “Those drivers who are breaking through already have had to fight hard to get there, given all we know about the male dominated barriers that women face in the sport. But imagine if they had been in a training program since they were ten years old, which was designed for their bodies and their ages. That’s what we’re hoping to prove. Less than 6% of all research in sports goes into women. That stat is from a great book called The Female Body Bible and the author team has come to speak to us at More Than Equal.”

Women’s football has lots of money now, as the profile and audience grow. “Therefore, you would presume that it’s a ripe sport for deeper research,” says Donnelly. “Yet even that sport’s far behind. Motorsport, like other sports, is lagging even further behind. We just hired a great head of research, Dr. Fran Longstaff, who has experience both in women’s sports and on the kind of tech and digital side. She’s exploring what we need to know to make our program successful. That involves societal research around culture and inclusion, and what physically we need to understand about our drivers. We will also be collecting performance data from the drivers that we work with, which will be relatively new data to the sport. A detailed account of the performance of younger female drivers doesn’t exist. We will learn a lot about how you train young girls in the sport and that’s something we want to share with the industry because we want everyone to get better at this.”

More Than Equal will be deploying this as it moves into action this year. “Around May, we will announce the first cohort of drivers to join our program,” says Donnelly. “We’re currently looking at the applications, plus the data that we’ve collected from online competitions, to identify the talent that we want to be the first to join the More Than Equal driver development program. One thing we’re super conscious of is that progress in this sport depends on how much money you can generate either by sponsors or family to climb the ranks. We want to make sure that the drivers that we’re working with can access investment as they progress. We’re out there finding partners in motorsport and others to develop a pool of investors and sponsors for a few years’ time as our talent emerges up the ranks. They’ve got to have access to that because it’s an expensive sport to take part in.”

Giving Young Female Drivers What They Need To Succeed

“They get technical coaching,” says Donnelly. “We will work with them at races and afterwards to give them the training you’d expect from a driver coach. They get engineer and mechanics reports and a performance coach. They do physical preparation, performance psychology and some medical support. This is the kind of wraparound care you would expect an athlete to receive from a program. Then we add community support around personal brand development advice for agents about how to build their reputation and then access hopefully a pool of interested brands and investors.”

“This is no difference to what somebody might have in a high-performance program in another sport,” says Donnelly. For example, rugby, which is her own background. “You get picked up by the England set up at 15, you are immediately given access to coaches, nutrition advice, gym membership, physiotherapy, psychological support. Using your data, they tell you where you need to make gains, where you need to stop focusing. You will also probably get some image rights advice, social media guidance, media training. That is effectively what we are doing but local to where the person lives. If I’m a driver in Germany and I get picked up by More Than Equal, I’m going to get all that support coming to me, which is quite significant investment from us.”

“We didn’t want to set up a residential academy because we didn’t think that was a good idea for young drivers,” says Donnelly. “We thought it would be best for them to do what they’re doing and have our support wrap around that. While this is pioneering because it hasn’t been done in motorsport, we are following a very trusted process that other sports have been doing for a long time. The whole process is designed to make sure that we’ve got female drivers emerging ready to be professional racers, and that they’re truly exceptional, ready to climb the ranks into F1.”

“We’re not going to manage the drivers individually,” says Donnelly. “I’m sure they’ll have their own agent or manager. But we need to make the case better for why it’s a good idea to invest in women in motorsport. The days are gone for just putting your hand out and saying this is a good thing to do because it’s women. We need data to show people that this is a good idea because it will give you a commercial return. There’s a whole section in our report about what female fans in particular think of brands who invest in women, and they think very highly of them.”

“There’s a real appetite to support brands who back women in motorsport because so few do,” concludes Donnelly. “It’s up to people like us to bang the drum and say this isn’t just a good thing to do. It’s good for your business. And if you do it, there will be a reward for you at the end. It’s not just about feeling good. Motorsports have not been good enough at making that financial case. But we’re getting there.”