F1: Where are the Women Drivers?

When John Oliver ripped into FIFA prior to the 2014 World Cup, he gave us the Sausage Principle: “If you love something, don’t find out how it’s made.” Detail after detail of the murky workings of football’s top body, it turns out, are clearly at odds with the pure, emotional surges of passion that define the global devotion to the war-substitute ‘beautiful game’. John Oliver certainly did nothing to kill anybody’s passion for football (not even his own), but I must confess to being left embittered. Which, all said and done, is a rather mild reaction compared to the scale of injustice one is aware of.

Corruption in sport is disillusioning to various degrees and takes away from the discipline and toil of the people who make competitive sport great. The shining stage which the talented young athletes of the world occupy exists against the background of a ruthless, wealthy business class that has found the best way to milk our love of real-life drama for their financial gains.

It doesn’t help, then, when you realise that in addition to the financial murk that operates behind the scenes, the most popular sports are also the site for a far more fundamental, viscerally offensive endorsement of sexism.

I’ve been a Formula 1 fan for sixteen years now, and as I write this I realise that makes up about one-fourth of the sport’s 65-year history. In that time the sport has built a bigger footprint across the world, its circus travelling to shiny new circuits in countries like India, China and the UAE. There is finally a non-white world champion, and the nationalities that have raced in the sport are no longer confined to Western Europe. F1 has finally seen, with varying success, the participation of drivers from countries like India, Mexico, Indonesia and Malaysia.

But where are the women drivers?

It is telling that F1’s bosses, in their quest for diverse markets and audiences, have completely bypassed the inclusion of more women on the roster of the pinnacle of open-wheeled racing. This in spite of the fact that F1 is a sport for agile individuals with quick-thinking brains and fast reflexes. Attributes that do not necessitate a separate women’s championship, as good women drivers, trained well, continue to win in the lower Formulas, a stepping stone into F1.

You could be forgiven for thinking that there must be a “physical” reason why women don’t make the cut. Turns out, though, that it’s not as great a deal as it’s made out to be. Training right helps all drivers prepare for the G-forces they experience at very high speeds. Drivers who build less strength outpace their competitors by working on endurance. A difference in muscular strength, therefore, does not rule you out as a race-winner.

Susie Wolff, ex-Williams test driver. Image courtesy the Sydney Morning Herald

The only genuine disadvantage that may impede a racing career is economy. Racing requires access to cars and karts from an early age, so it is understandable why the bulk of F1 drivers have come from the world’s most prosperous countries. A lack of girls entering karting competitions and the junior racing formulas may also explain why significantly less than half of all racing drivers are women. But Formula 1 has seen only five women start a Grand Prix as opposed to over 820 men since it started in 1950.

Which brings us to attitudes. The Old Men of Formula 1 have a knack for sexism which helps them come up with gems of insensitivity. Bernie Ecclestone, F1’s chief executive, said women “wouldn’t be taken seriously” when asked about bringing more women drivers into F1.

It is pretty much a case of the jocks keeping the paddock to themselves. In the non-driving aspects of the F1 circus, women professionals are a visible presence, reflecting their greater participation across professions. One of India’s best motorsports writers for example. Or team bosses like Monisha Kaltenborn and Claire Williams.

Legendary drivers, meanwhile, have done little to help make the sport more gender inclusive. The greatest driver to never have won a world title, Sir Stirling Moss, said the difference lay in the mind games. According to him, women lack the mental strength for the sport. What a relief, then, that he did not add in the popular jibe of women being bad drivers.

This explains why the maximum women you see at race weekends at the “Grid Girls”. Unfortunate for a sport which prides itself on being at the cutting edge of innovation.

If you thought it was just the ancients who hold regressive views like this, you’re sadly mistaken. The once up and coming Mexican sensation, Sergio Perez, once said he would prefer that women stay in the kitchen rather than drive in F1.

The sport hasn’t got to where tennis is, so it will be some time before pay parity between men and women is debated, and an F1 start does a Novak Djokovic on us.

There are signs of a greater change, though. Carmen Jorda, the Renault F1 test driver, is 27, so she does have a chance of a race seat. An outside chance, but it exists. Meanwhile, the last driver to drive in a practice session on a race weekend, Susie Wolff, has launched the Dare to be Different campaign to bring more women into motorsport.

F1’s isn’t entirely surprising though. Recent deaths due to head injuries prompted F1 to try out better head protection for the cars, with ‘purists’ blasting the move saying it takes away the risks, and thus the thrill of the sport. There persists the uber-masculine narrative of knights going out to battle, the risk of death adding nobility to what they do. No surprises, then, that women who could be champions continue to contend not with questions of racing talent, but to be “taken seriously.”

We are a ‘sensitive’ nation. Or are we?

The times of today are the times of the offended. Judging by what we see on social media, where all of us write through a large number of platforms available to us, I suppose you could say ours is a ‘sensitive’ society. Given, though, that there is so much that happens in the country daily with the potential to offend, hurt, disgust or enrage us, what we choose to make the most noise about is a sign of where our priorities lie.

An offhand analysis would suggest that our greatest allegiance is to symbols and appearances, whether or not we understand what they mean. Artificial constructs of a happy, cheery, country whose problems aren’t really to be dwelt on.

No attribute of India, perhaps, is misappropriated as much as diversity. In our collective imagination, diversity exists for all practical purposes as little more than a colourful tapestry of rituals, clothes, traditions, facial features and cuisines. What our understanding of diversity does not include is that such physical diversity often extends to points of view. Points of view where what is sacred to one people is anathema to another, and the whole point of sharing this country is that we work on the most harmonious ways to live together.

Instead, all we do is co-opt this diversity for our tourism and cricket adverts, or to show that all of India, divided on countless lines, at least drinks the same soft drink and prefers the same motorcycle. Incredible, isn’t it, the splendour of our India? All hunky-dory until we question the ‘unquestionable’.

The teacher who taught me as a kid, and therefore whose teachings I cannot question, gave me a certain idea of India that is set in stone. To question it makes me an ingrate, and I am duty bound to ‘give it’ to those who do not see the country and its symbols in the way I do.

This collective business of ‘giving it’ to the anti-nationals, ‘nailing it’ with memes and counter-memes has built for us an atmosphere of fear and created a prison of the mind. Weapons are abandoned in a university bus with a threat to the lives of two student activists. Whether or not the threat is carried out (may heaven forbid the latter), where does it leave our universities, where to dissent and debate is indispensable towards building a stronger democracy?

In a classic display of the crude, reprehensible masculinity which really is the root of a lot of social conflict, a fringe politician with a penchant for polarizing the electorate on religious lines says he will not say “Bharat Mata ki Jai” even if a knife his held to his throat. It bears mention that no knife, even a metaphorical one, was held to his throat at that point. Look at the hate it has precipitated in the past few weeks, and how it has subsumed all other issues of debate. Then we have an FMCG entrepreneur and yoga instructor posing as a spiritual guru, who says he would behead those who do not say Bharat Mata ki Jai. This same person, mind you, abandoned a rally of his followers in disguise at the first threat of police action.

Go back to February, and you will remember the headlines being dominated by a “journalist” who started the #PakstandswithJNU hashtag, anticipating Hafiz Saeed’s need for the same. A decorated police officer and the country’s Home Minister accepted this as “evidence”.

What all this noise cloaks is the real problems that successive governments leave unaddressed, both the one led by the puppet PM whose personal integrity was a cover for the slimy dealings of his subordinates, and the one led by the incumbent mild-mannered, self-effacing man of iron who got his name pinstriped all over a suit.

When we do talk of ‘real’ problems, we talk of the ones our idea of India resonates with. The liquor baron who fled the law with billions in unpaid debts. The money stashed offshore by people of political and cultural eminence. Somehow, we miss out on the fact that over a million children die every year from causes that are easily preventable, and that a few litres of rainwater is all that lie between a farmer and the noose he has kept in a corner. All this while a minister finds it beneath himself to travel 40 km by road, preferring to use a chopper whose landing site costs 10,000 litres of water to prepare.

We fixate, instead on the demons who cheer the loss of our cricket team, to the point of wanting them injured or worse. We think that the army, deftly handled by civilian governments to function as their tool, is an otherworldly institution above reproach. We forget in our ire against the “invader” that if India truly must be governed by those who are its ‘original’ residents, first choice would go to the Dalits and the tribals. No one else.

We build a narrative where the soldier dying in the cold, the PM sleeping only while travelling, the emotional pull of what we were taught as children, is over and above all other considerations. We the beneficiaries of a benevolent state, unwilling to see that the comforts we live with, have come at the cost of the worst violations committed on fellow citizens. In condoning the worst we can do as humans as long as we don’t see it, our sensitivity and imagined compassion does not put our leaders in the dock. It implicates us most of all.