W Series’ first champion marks key step for women in motor racing | Giles Richards

Come Sunday afternoon at Brands Hatch, women’s motor sport will have its newest champion. When the W Series championship reaches its final round it will have successfully completed the first part of its aim of promoting women in racing and the grander ambition of finally returning a female driver to Formula One.

For chief executive Catherine Bond Muir the moment will be celebratory, but only the end of a long beginning since she started trying to find a way to bring more women into racing with the W Series concept. “Three years of planning for a three-month racing season,” she says. “But what a way to make history.”

Historically the venue could not be more apt. Brands is where Desiré Wilson won the British Aurora F1 Championship race in 1980. She remains the only woman to have won a Formula One race of any form and has a grandstand at the circuit named in her honour.

The finale is the conclusion of a six-race season that began in May and presents a two-way fight for the crown between Britain’s Jamie Chadwick and Beitske Visser of the Netherlands. Chadwick holds the advantage by 98 points to 85 after what has been a fiercely competitive fight. Chadwick has two wins and three podiums, with Visser taking one win, two podiums and two fourth places. A podium finish will clinch it for Chadwick.

The winner will receive a prize of $500,000, which will go a good way to improving their career chances, but the W Series is about a bigger picture. A woman has not raced in Formula One since Lella Lombardi 43 years ago and the fundamental problems are there are too few women entering racing and not enough money to back those who do. Created by Muir to address the imbalance,the W Series pays all of their 20 drivers’ costs, no financial backing is required and it gives them a platform to showcase and develop their skills in a single-make F3 car.

It drew criticism when it was announced, based on objections to segregating women from men in a sport where they already compete on a level playing field.

Concerns have been addressed this season. Chadwick has been taken on by the Williams F1 team as a development driver while Liechtenstein’s Fabienne Wohlwend has become a household name in her home country and now has enough backing to race full-time next year. The hugely talented 18- year-old Marta García, whose career had stalled due to lack of funding, has seen her profile rocket in Spain. In a sport where women were barely glimpsed, let alone recognised, this can only be considered a success.

Marta Garcia (right) drops her champgane bottel standing on the podium next to the winner, Jamie Chadwick, at Hockenheim in May.



Marta Garcia (right) drops her champgane bottel standing on the podium next to the winner, Jamie Chadwick, at Hockenheim in May. Photograph: Matthias Hangst/Getty Images

The races, part of DTM meetings, have been televised live on Channel 4, giving the series a profile that has been essential. “We are new and innovative, and this summer has demonstrated that people are happy to watch women’s sport,” says Muir. “When I started to plan this people told me I was completely nuts because people don’t want to watch women’s sport. But viewing habits are changing.”

This year’s football World Cup proves that definitively but equally the organisers have been unafraid to think radically. The drivers were selected on merit and they swap cars, engineers and data at each race, ensuring none has a technical advantage. They are given training, physical and mental, and there is a remarkable, collective sense of purpose and friendship amongst them. They even threw-in a non-championship reverse-grid race at the last round in Assen just to see how it would go and delivered an absolute thriller. All of which is designed to appeal beyond the sport’s traditional audience.

“We would never be so arrogant as to compare ourselves to Formula One,” says Muir. “What we do want to do, and something that Formula E has been successful at, is finding a different audience.”

Maintaining this momentum after the flush of first-season interest is perhaps the more difficult task now facing the W Series but, for the moment, Brands is the culmination of a job well done.

source: theguardian.com