“If it’s got four wheels and it goes fast then, yeah, I like it”, Carol Glenn says. Growing up in Luton she watched James Hunt every week on TV. Her first dream car was 80s rally star the Audi Quattro. As an adult, her passion for motorsport then turned into a vocation. Glenn is a black British pioneer, working in the industry for more than three decades. But every one of those years has been a struggle.
“I have literally been involved in motorsport since 1988, but we still go through these silly petty things all the time, having to prove ourselves over and over again,” she says. “Meanwhile you watch people who just seem to sail through the system and get away with murder. So I’m fed up now. I just think: enough is enough.”
Glenn was the first black woman to become a race official in the UK but says she has struggled ever since to build a career in the sport she loves and has faced constant discrimination in doing so. Inspired by Black Lives Matter, and the actions of one of its unequivocal champions, Lewis Hamilton, Glenn feels it is time she spoke up too.
“I can travel as far as Knockhill in Scotland. I go to Alton Park, Donington, Silverstone, Brands Hatch, Cadwell Park. I travel all over the country for my sport,” she says. Glenn started out as a marshal, including five years at Le Mans. She became a race secretary and was a coordinator for World Superbikes. She now holds a licence as a clerk of the course, the person with overall responsibility for track management.
Glenn says she has experienced discrimination throughout her time in motorsport. In the early days it was explicit. “I think the term that would be applied now is ‘banter’,” she says. “When I would walk into race control they would say: ‘Stand by your car, she might pinch your wheels.’ They’d just go with that sort of ‘gangster’ tone with me. And I’d get the sexist things as well about my boobs or my bum. I’d get called Whoopi. It was that sort of thing you know?”
As damaging as the abuse has been the absence of support, of anyone she could confide in. “I suppose my shell got toughened, the wall went up around me a little bit.” Now in 2020 there is finally increasing diversity in some aspects of the sport. “In a lot of teams now there are people of colour,” Glenn says. “You’ve got engineers, mechanics, you’ve got a lot more females too. There’s not many of us [black women], you can still count them on one hand, but at least I know that if I feel upset I could talk to them.” There is still no one higher up the chain she could confide in, however. “I’d be seen to be weak.”
She says she has considered giving up her passion many times. “But when you love something, when you’re passionate about something, it’s quite hard to give it up.” Today, Glenn says, the hurdles black people face are different, more insidious. “For me within my own bit I still have to work hard to get on,” she says. “My dream is to be a steward in F1 but I’ve watched other people who’ve got their licences after me who’ve been pushed up the ladder quicker. When I question it, there’s no real answer. It does hurt. I’ve done all sorts of things and I’ve played the status quo but it’s taken me ages to get up that ladder.”
Glenn’s frustrations echo those of Hamilton whose calls for Formula One to “become as diverse as the complex and multicultural world we live in” have been met only with inconsistent gestures.
“I understand why he’s speaking out now,” Glenn says of Hamilton, who remains the only black driver in the history of F1. “He’s got to the stage in his life where what else has he got to prove? He’s a world champion. Not once, not twice, six times. He’s given a lot of young black boys, boys of all colours, aspiration. But at this present time, there’s nobody to follow Lewis Hamilton.”
This year, Glenn remains hopeful of making her own contribution to advancing young black British talent. “They are out there,” she says. “There are young black boys who are karting but their parents face a difficult call. They either don’t know what the next level is or it’s got very expensive.” Forming a collective with parents under the banner NRG racing, Glenn hopes to assemble a team that can act as a beacon to others. “We do our own driver programmes. We don’t have to rely on anyone else.”
Glenn laughs at the mention of Bernie Ecclestone and his recent contribution to the Black Lives Matter debate, in which he alleged that “in lots of cases, black people are more racist than what white people are”.
“Ecclestone is a fossil,” Glenn says. “His comments just do not surprise me, because I’ve met people like him. I’ve met them. And they’re still around. But my hope for motorsport is that it starts to represent the people in the world and the country. So it doesn’t just become a white male-oriented thing. Other sports no longer look the same, why not motorsport?”
