ALESI wrote:
If, as people suggest, the general level of female competitiveness is so low, then a women's only series is a terrible idea. The best way to improve is to compete with people better than yourself and 'up your game' to beat them. A women's series would likely produce one dominant woman who would then still probably not be at F1 level and with nothing to aspire to, where is the motivation to spend that extra time at the gym or in a simulator?
It would be a much better idea for a team to find a promising youngster and school them much like McLaren did with Lewis.
All of this. Specifically with regards to the last part: a few years ago, Red Bull signed Beitske Visser in their RBJT after reasonable (not superb, but quite alright) results in her rookie year in Formula ADAC. However she failed to improve in her second year, and was dropped again. So although she has arguably been the best/leading female single seater driver in Europe of the last years, even that wasn't even remotely enough for RBR to persist and invest in her. The following years she competed in FR3.5 and GP3 with very limited success, and she has made the switch to GT racing now.
Two years ago, Sophia Flörsch was regarded as a great up and coming talent. While she is still only 17 and a lot is still possible, she has had a hard time in German F4 and hasn't finished in the top 10 overall standings in two seasons.
Coming to my overall message: this is the state of affairs currently and it shows why some ideas are just too far out there, such as:
- having a women-only single seater championship in F2 cars
- forcing F1 teams to race one male and one female driver
The first idea: there just aren't enough competent female racing drivers to fill up a grid of F2 cars without it turning into a ridiculous comical show.
The second idea: see previous, but with two added negatives. Firstly, they would just be humiliated by their male teammates. Secondly, they would take seats off of drivers (young, aspiring F1 drivers or established ones) that would actually deserve a seat on merit.
So both ideas would do far more harm than good, unless "good" means providing comic relief in the margin of "actual racing".
There is more sense to the idea of an entry-level series, F4 level or maybe even karting. The risk of this series though is that without much more interest from young girls, the result of this will be that there is still not enough talent entering, the winners would then graduate into a mixed gender championship and they would be at the back once again. Again this would do more harm than good.
So in the end... It all starts with young girls showing interest in the sport. That is what should be worked on.
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