Motorsports is looking for the next Danica Patrick. And the one after that
It has been 14 years since Danica Patrick became the first woman to win a top-class race in a major motorsports series. At the time, pundits predicted her victory in IndyCar would usher in a new era of female racers.
But today’s landscape shows a more complicated picture.
For every success, there have been even more setbacks. There currently are no women driving full time in Formula One, IndyCar or NASCAR — and, historically, very few have ever competed, even though these series are not exclusive to men. The Indianapolis 500 had featured at least one woman in its field for 20 straight races starting in 2000, but none participated in two of the past three seasons. And the W Series, a women’s racing league that runs as part of Formula One Grand Prix weekends, canceled its 2022 season prematurely because of funding problems.
“It was probably a bit naïve to think that one woman’s success could make an immediate impact,” said Beth Paretta, an automotive entrepreneur and longtime advocate for women in motorsports. “Sure, it was great to see a feel-good story like Danica’s, but something needed to be done back then to sustain that momentum — and we still don’t truly have that.”
Paretta, 48, has made it her mission to correct that. In 2021, her IndyCar team, Paretta Autosport, became the first mostly female team to compete in the Indy 500, featuring a female driver, Swiss racer Simona de Silvestro, and an all-woman pit crew. The team has since competed in a handful of other IndyCar races, though it is not a full-time participant within the series.
Paretta said her goal runs deeper than just promoting talented female drivers. Racing is still a male-dominated sport, she said, from the administrative roles within teams to the race strategists. “You can often count the number of women in the paddock on one hand,” she added.
Her hope is to shine a spotlight on women working in all facets of racing to inspire the next generation.
“Typically, for women in racing, we’re not used to pointing out that we’re women,” Paretta said. “In fact, we kind of hope you don’t notice — we just want to do our jobs and get on with it. So accentuating women in motorsports is an uncomfortable adjustment for us, but we’ve come to realize that we have to do this if we want our kids, and our kids’ kids, to normalize this.”
Susie Wolff, a British former race car driver who has worked in various roles within motorsports, agrees that increasing gender diversity in racing behind the scenes is essential to ultimately producing more female racers.
“It’s not just about putting a girl in the car,” Wolff said. “There are generally 20 or 30 drivers on track, but thousands involved in making a race happen. On-track drivers get the most publicity, but it has to be much more than that.”
Wolff knows firsthand what it is like to be one of the few women in a racing garage. In 2012, she signed as a testing and development driver for the Williams Formula One team, and two years later she became the first woman since 1992 to participate as a driver in a Formula One race weekend. In the summer of 2018, she became the team principal of Venturi Racing, a team in the electric racing series Formula E. She said she has been met with skepticism at every job she’s ever taken.
“I will never forget when I was announced as team principal,” she said. “I was with 16 journalists, and the first question was, ‘What qualifies you for this job?’ The second question was, ‘Did your husband get you this job?’ And the third question: ‘How can you manage the travel involved, since you just had a baby?’” Wolff is married to Toto Wolff, the long-standing team principal of the Mercedes Formula One team.
By the end of her tenure, spending one year as chief executive, she had silenced the critics by bringing Venturi from nearly last place in the constructors standings to a championship contender. She is hopeful that women who assume roles in racing in the future will not need to endure the same type of scrutiny she did.
“I was successful, and suddenly everything about my gender and being the only female didn’t matter,” said Wolff, who left Venturi after the 2022 season.
Another obstacle facing women who want to race, Wolff said, is the lack of defined pipelines for them. Breaking into higher levels of racing is difficult, often carrying a steep financial cost, and there are few dedicated programs designed to encourage and support girls. That is partly what inspired Wolff in 2016 to establish Dare to be Different, a nonprofit organization that promotes motorsports to girls.
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