A female racing driver has tentatively welcomed plans for an all-women’s formula one series.<\/p>\n
Bernie Ecclestone revealed in Malaysia last weekend that a separate championship just for women would spice up the sport.<\/p>\n
“It is only a thought at the moment,” he told reporters at Sepang, “but they could race before the main event, or perhaps on the Saturday so that they had their own interest.”<\/p>\n
Williams’ test driver is Susie Wolff, and Lotus has just signed Carmen Jorda as a development driver, but Ecclestone observed: “For some reason, women are not coming through (to race in F1), and not because we don’t want them.<\/p>\n
“Of course we do — they would attract a lot of attention and publicity and probably a lot of sponsors.”<\/p>\n
The proposal, however, was quickly slammed by Susie Wolff, who said she would prefer to continue her quest to join the grid as “a normal competitor”.<\/p>\n
“I can hand on heart say it would not interest me at all to win such a (women’s) race.\u00a0 I would rather not be in the race because what am I winning?<\/p>\n
“A race where they’ve just looked for any girl to make a grid up?” she wondered.<\/p>\n
With a slightly different view is Alice Powell, a 22-year-old Briton who has raced in several open-wheel series including F3 and GP3.<\/p>\n
“I have mixed views really because I’m used to racing against males,” she told Sky.<\/p>\n
“It’s one of the few sports in the world where men and women compete on the same level, and to me that’s quite special,” said Powell.<\/p>\n
“But I wouldn’t turn down an opportunity to drive a formula one car, so in that sense I think it’s a good idea.”<\/p>\n
She concluded: “My question would be how would it be funded, because funding is already really, really hard.”<\/p>\n
\u00a9 RIF | GMM<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A female racing driver has tentatively welcomed plans for an all-women’s formula one series. Bernie Ecclestone revealed in Malaysia last weekend that a separate championship just for women would spice up the sport. “It is only a thought at the moment,” he told reporters at Sepang, “but they could race before the main event, or …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":25926,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0},"categories":[3],"tags":[5169,59,5224,5262,5340,5107,3701,5226,5225],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28487"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28487"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28487\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28488,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28487\/revisions\/28488"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25926"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28487"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28487"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28487"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}