Everything you think about F1 Academy is wrong. Since its launch in 2023, opinions have been plentiful, but facts are harder to come by. The series marked a visible step forward for women in motorsport: a glossy, all-female grid backed by Formula 1, aimed at widening the pipeline and shifting the narrative. But here’s the catch: F1 Academy isn’t a proving ground for the next female F1 driver — it’s a billboard for the idea that women belong in racing at all. It's less a finish line and more a starting flag, spotlighting raw talent still in development while the sport scrambles to fix the ecosystem around them.
And that’s precisely where the disconnect lies. Expecting it to produce F1-ready talent is like demanding that a pre-teen in Manchester United’s youth academy start in the Champions League. In that context, it sounds borderline absurd to be platforming such junior talent, but F1 Academy is serving an additional purpose that sends a louder message than lap times ever could: it’s telling the world that women’s sport is cool and worth watching. It's building a culture around female athleticism. That idea might feel radical in motorsport, but it isn’t new. The WNBA is having a culture-shifting moment in America, not because something changed overnight, but because the narrative caught up to the product, which has been in development for three decades.
The problem isn’t that women aren’t good enough. The problem is that motorsport has never been designed to find out if they could be. F1 Academy isn’t trying to fix the top of the ladder - it’s trying to build the bottom. It’s not about giving someone a seat right now, it’s about dismantling the systemic blind spots that have kept generations of women from even starting the engine. Because the biggest obstacles aren’t just visibility, money, or even talent — it’s much more complicated than that.
Of course, female drivers aren’t given equal amounts of track time and training, and sponsorship dollars that could make-or-break a career are nearly impossible to come by, but the barriers are far more systematic. The biggest issue for women in motorsport is that we don’t even know what we don’t know yet.
“At the heart of it all is a lack of knowledge. Not only about their capabilities and potential, but also how to get the best out of them in the car,” Fran Longstaff PhD, the Head of Research at More Than Equal tells Motorsport.com. “Humans are the best storytellers in the world so when there's a knowledge gap, we fill it with an explanation. If you haven't seen a female in motorsport, you might say it’s because psychologically, they're not resilient or aggressive enough, and physiologically, they haven't got a strong enough neck. But there's no research to support that narrative, and it’s really worked against female drivers over the years,” she says.
More Than Equal was launched by former F1 driver David Coulthard to find the first female F1 world champion using high-performance development and data-driven insights. The not-for-profit is now the research partner of F1 Academy and is “creating psychological, physiological and cognitive training profiles of drivers at different stages of development,” Longstaff explains.
“We’re also looking at gender differences, but what’s more interesting is figuring out what the characteristics are of the best drivers at those different development levels, then asking ‘how do we train our drivers to have those characteristics?’” She went on, “Over the past 10 years we’ve seen Olympic sports investing in female health and performance. Like, how do ovarian hormones affect performance? That's a total black hole in motorsport, even though it's one of the most cognitively demanding sports in the world … without research, it’s like you're solving an unsolvable problem.”
So what does this knowledge gap look like in practice? Jamie Chadwick, one of a handful of women who has ever driven a modern F1 car, says her ability to improve came to a surprising halt during her time in the Williams Racing Academy. “We’d do these fitness tests in the Williams training camp and my scores would be the exact same as the boys. Then I’d get in the car and struggle a lot physically which I didn’t understand then and still don't,” she tells Motorsport.com. “It’s very under-researched.”
“Until we see a woman get much, much higher, and closer to F1, we won't know what the restrictions are. It might be some small things that either prevent women from being able to compete at that level - and that's something we might have to accept - or something we can easily change,” she explains. There’s even a chance researchers like Longstaff will find performance areas where women outperform their male counterparts.
Another major hurdle for female drivers right now is the experience gap. It’s not entirely unique to racing — in other elite, equipment-heavy sports with a high barrier to entry, women face the same limitations. Sailing could ostensibly open itself up to more women, but much like you can’t take a Formula 1 car for a Sunday drive, you can’t quite take an America’s Cup boat out for a casual practice session.
“In Sail GP, their biggest issue is that they haven't got enough women who are experienced enough with the big boats,” Chadwick, who has taken part in Sail GP practise sessions, tells Motorsport.com. “So they’ve made a mandate that every team needs to have at least one female. It might seem like a forced thing in the short term, but it gives them opportunities where they can learn.”
Motorsport, naturally, is facing similar critiques. “There's a lot of arguments around F1 Academy and different female-focused initiatives, but by giving people experience, it’s only going to increase their opportunities to progress on up. And if they don't, then the next generation will have an even better chance,” Chadwick says.
Perhaps the biggest issue that F1 Academy solves is visibility. Men have had a decades-long head start in the world of racing purely because young boys were told that becoming an F1 driver was an attainable goal. A recent survey conducted by More Than Equal showed that 49% of fans didn’t even realize women were allowed to compete in F1.
“How do you feed a pipeline of female drivers if they don’t even know that it’s possible?” Longstaff says. “F1 Academy has totally nailed that. They've nailed their sponsorship model of the drivers, and what they’re doing for the sport is addressing that visibility issue. Now, what you're seeing is entry-level karting has 25-35% female representation because a little girl can watch TV, see a female driver there and know that it’s a possibility for them.”
Longstaff says that finding a female driver with the potential to thrive in F1 would be like “looking for a needle in a haystack” without a strong pool of talent - so her team is striving to fix that. “We're now developing a system where we can pull in loads of different data points about junior drivers and look at where they rank in the system. We can also identify those who are on a really sharp performance improvement trajectory,” she explains.
Chadwick, who launched her own karting series to help increase female participation, says F1 talent spotters are starting to look more seriously at young girls rising through the ranks. “There's a big push from F1 teams. Everyone is secretly kind of desperate to find a future female superstar. But it's still tricky, because there's such a low level of participation that it's tough to really find someone,” she says. “We’re now seeing F1 representatives go to kart tracks, and we haven’t heard stories like that since Lewis Hamilton.”
However, as the sport gets more popular, another hurdle is that it’s becoming much less meritocratic at the junior level, as Washington Post correspondent Kevin Sieff recently explained. “It’s now crowded with the sons and daughters of multimillionaires (and actual oligarchs) who crisscross Europe every weekend. The circuit is a traveling carnival for the global elite, a series of racetrack parking lots colonized by parents in luxury athleisure wear,” he wrote. Although every effort is being made to provide opportunities to boys, and girls, of varying backgrounds, a child like Hamilton - who had no financial backing in his early years - almost certainly wouldn’t be able to make it in today’s world of professionalized mini Grands Prix.
F1 Academy critics love to point out that the winners of the series still aren’t close to earning a seat in F1. The prize for Marta Garcia, the inaugural winner in 2023, was a fully-funded seat in Formula Regional European Championship (FRECA) while the 2024 champion, Abbi Pulling, is now competing in GB3. The Brit, who had a dominant F1 Academy campaign with 9 wins and 14 podiums, is adamant that it’s the correct next step. “Some people might be saying I should go to F3 but it’s quite a big jump from the F1 Academy car, whereas GB3 is a good medium,” Pulling says.
She explains that the jump between series isn’t just about speed - it’s about how the car handles and how a driver must recalibrate their instincts. “The F4 car [used in F1 Academy] has very little downforce, it’s based on mechanical grip so you need to understand how to use that downforce in a new car … Copse at Silverstone, for example, is a break and a lift in an F4 car whereas in a GB3 car, it's a little lift and you turn in flat, so it's a very big jump,” she says.
The female talent pool is so small right now that, simply put, not everyone has what it takes to become a top-tier driver. Logan Sargeant, who had an F1 seat nine months ago and has since left racing altogether, is proof that men can also find themselves without a seat due to lack of skill. But that’s not the case for Pulling, an incredibly gifted athlete whose dexterity and determination is undeniable.
In another lifetime, with the infrastructure in place from the time she started karting and a clear pathway ahead of her, Pulling might have had a real shot at reaching F1. The unfortunate reality is that right now, phenomenal female talents in F1 Academy probably won’t find themselves racing in F1, but they’re laying the essential foundations for the women who eventually do.
“It’s just a waiting game. What F1 Academy is doing is increasing the license holders at the early stages of racing, and getting girls into karts. But they're not going to get to F4 immediately - they’re only eight years old - so give it time, and in 10 years when they're 18, we’ll start to see them in F3 and F4. It’s not going to happen overnight and sometimes people need to remember that,” Pulling says.
Garcia is also realistic about her current limitations. “My target has always been to get to Formula 1, but obviously that's not easy. You need a lot of economical support so I started thinking more about GTs, LMP, prototypes and even Formula E,” she explains. “We get two years in F1 Academy and if you're not good enough, say in the top five of the championship, then you might not be good enough for that [next step].” Garcia, however, was dominant in F1 Academy’s debut season and even she struggled tremendously in FRECA. “You learn a lot, and learn not to give up,” she says. “I think what F1 Academy is doing is just getting better and better.”
Pulling agrees. “It's all going in a positive direction, but there's still not 100% of the infrastructure needed,” she says, noting it’s an issue across all sports. “The likes of the WNBA and women’s football in the UK are helping women’s sport get more viewers and more respect, and if F1 Academy has a small part to play in the bigger picture, I'm happy to be a little piece of that puzzle.”
There’s a persistent narrative that women’s sports are simply less interesting than men’s sports. It could be argued that it all comes down to marketing and cultural perception. Why do we care about women’s gymnastics, female figure skating or tennis legends like Serena Williams? Because we’ve been told that it’s cool to do so.
People tend to think they’re immune from being influenced by cultural narratives and marketing. But lobster was served to prisoners and used as fertilizer until it was rebranded as a delicacy and diamonds weren’t considered all that valuable until an infamous marketing campaign inflated their value. Culture has told us that most women’s sports are less exciting, not because that’s objectively true, but because that narrative has been strategically - and often unconsciously - reinforced. Just like diamonds or lobster, value or excitement is not intrinsic, it’s manufactured, marketed, and maintained. Women’s sports are no exception.
Culture doesn’t reflect reality; it constructs it. And that construction can be rebuilt, as we’re seeing with the WNBA in America. But it’s taken time, and Caitlin Clark wouldn’t have become Caitlin Clark without thousands of players and executives putting in work over the past three decades to create the perfect storm for the league’s popularity explosion in 2024. What does that tell us about women in motorsport? It’s going to take time.
The sporting world also reached a point where everyone was leaving money on the table by not acknowledging the elephant in the room: women control more than 70% of all purchasing decisions in the US and account for about $31.8 trillion in consumer spending globally. Women don’t influence the economy, they are the economy, and the brands, leagues and teams investing in women are seeing a real ROI in viewership, merchandise sales, and sponsorship value. Even if executives don’t care about gender equality for altruistic reasons, they do care about dollars in their pockets. Perhaps it’s just a coincidence that F1 Academy was only launched when the commercial opportunities became so unavoidable.
By the time the series began in 2023, female fans not only accounted for almost half of F1’s viewership, but they had helped the sport remain at the forefront of public consciousness by building invaluable fandom and community. Susie Wolff, the managing director of F1 Academy, understood the need to get buy-in from the motorsport community - then think bigger. It’s why she brought Charlotte Tilbury on board as a key sponsor and welcomed in celebrities like Kendall Jenner with open arms. She isn’t just trying to help F1 Academy drivers on an individual level, she’s become the de facto CEO for the plight of all women in motorsport.
So, more female drivers are getting their foot in the door thanks to F1 Academy. What now? When they enter the space they’ll find that women only account for about 10% of the workforce. Engineering and technical roles are filled almost exclusively by men, though Laura Müller is F1’s first female race engineer in its 75-year history. Women are slightly more visible in media with the likes of Laura Winter at F1TV and Natalie Pinkham at Sky Sports, but men still dominate analysis, commentary and legacy journalism. Even in the content creator space, female influencers face scrutiny and gatekeeping that their male counterparts don’t.
As far as the numbers go, F1 is still a boys club, and the first cohort of women given opportunities to work with teams may have to bear the brunt of that fact in order to make the garage a more inviting place for female drivers down the line. Chadwick tells us it’s normal for women to “not want to make any noise.”
“It’s taken a bit of time for me to actually develop a voice but I’m older and I feel more comfortable now,” she says. “It’s really important that if anything isn't right, environment-wise or culturally, that you speak out and try to make sure that it's changed, because otherwise the next generation that comes through won’t experience anything different.”
The 26-year-old doesn’t want to “overcorrect” and become a poster girl for performative initiatives, but she says there’s still work to be done that might not be obvious from the outside. “For my whole career, until I was in my 20s, I was one of the boys. I laughed at their inappropriate jokes about women, went along with it, and acted like I was fine. The mechanics and engineers thought ‘Oh yeah, she's one of us,’ but then the next young girl that comes through is expected to be in the same environment. So now I mark my territory and if I feel something they say is wrong, I'll call them out on it.”
And if you thought we were done talking about the systematic hurdles that women in motorsport have to clear, there’s a curveball coming your way. Social media presents a phenomenal opportunity for female athletes because they drive higher engagement than their male counterparts, making them highly attractive to sponsors. For some women, like former F1 Academy driver Bianca Bustamante, sponsorship dollars that were driven by her robust social media presence allowed her career to continue. But disproportionately, women are expected to become part-time influencers while their male counterparts can focus entirely on racing.
“I have around three million followers across all platforms and I’m here now because of it,” Bustamante tells us in late 2024, after two years in F1 Academy. “The hard work I’ve done building my brand has helped me afford to race. I didn't have any support from my parents financially so [social media] wasn’t even an option, it was something that I had to do.”
She’s worked with multinational, billion-dollar companies like Google, Cisco and Optimum Nutrition, and though she enjoys creating content, it adds extra stress to her plate. “It can be very tormenting at times, and the pressure and the workload can be insane … I feel like I'm not allowed to make mistakes, because everyone's always constantly watching and waiting for you to fail,” she says.
Bustamante used her time in F1 Academy to convince major brands that female drivers, even in the early stages of their careers, were worth investing in, which has likely helped lay the groundwork for the young women following in her footsteps. “The main thing I’ve done over the past two years is maximize opportunity. You've got an amazing chance to be alongside Formula 1, to meet sponsors, to meet companies and brands, and to find the funding that you need to move up the ladder,” the 20-year-old explains.
We’ve come a long way since an American racing team offered Emma Kimilainen a seat in 2010 in exchange for a nude photoshoot (she didn’t accept the offer, and subsequently spent four years away from racing). But just because women can do it all — film a TikTok ‘fit check at 1pm, qualify on pole at 2pm, and remain gracious as ever throughout - doesn’t mean they should have to. I doubt Max Verstappen even has the Instagram app on his phone.
“I really struggle with the social media side of things, because I'm solely focused on racing,” Pulling says. “I want to perform my best, and to do that, I need to have 110% of my focus on driving, so I’ve struggled in the past when I've had to [spend a lot of time] focused on raising funding for myself. I now have sponsors and partners which has made my life a bit less stressful - 2024 is the first year in my racing career where I've been able to solely focus on my driving, and that's such a big pressure taken off my shoulders.”
Pulling is highly aware that having a strong social media presence is an asset and one of the best ways to connect with fans, but that doesn’t make it any less of a commitment. “There’s definitely a pressure to do it, even as someone who’s not as confident on-camera. Selfies aren’t my thing so I really have to force myself, but it's what the fans love the most,” she adds.
The next step in F1 Academy’s growth is an upcoming Netflix docu-series, ‘F1: The Academy,' which will be released on the streaming platform next month. The show, produced by Reese Witherspoon’s company Hello Sunshine, will give the ‘Drive to Survive’ treatment to the young women who competed in the 2024 season. Lia Block, the daughter of the late rally champion Ken Block, tells us she filmed scenes away from the track at her home in Utah, while cameras followed Pulling home to the UK as she spent time with her family during the off-season.
It all sounds very reminiscent of ‘Drive to Survive,’ which platformed individual characters and was complemented by some very heated on-track action. The biggest difference is that multiple people tell us the F1 Academy show was largely void of any friction, even when the entire grid was brought together. “I don't think many championships get every single driver together and it’s such a friendly environment,” Pulling says.
Perhaps, though, this is where male and female athletes diverge. Longstaff says one of her team’s most surprising learnings was the importance of community in aiding female driver growth. “When you’re treading new ground you would imagine that’s super lonely, and what we found was that the creation of a community and a critical mass — which you see with F1 Academy — is how you can really accelerate,” she explains. “The learning happens together and drivers are passing that between themselves to improve.”
The point of F1 Academy was never to catapult a woman into an F1 seat overnight. It was to help build the scaffolding that would make such a leap plausible, then probable, and eventually inevitable. Right now, the progress feels incremental — because it is. But there’s power in gradualism when it’s persistent, data-driven, and culturally resonant. The girls entering karting today may never know the systemic disadvantages that defined the experiences of Chadwick, Pulling and Bustamante, and that’s the point. Over time, the names at the top of the timing sheets will stop surprising us. And the question will change from ‘Why isn’t there a woman in F1?’ to ‘Who’s next?’ F1 Academy won’t give us a world champion tomorrow. But it might be the reason we get one at all.
