A year ago I left Sport England, to join a nonprofit startup with an ambitious goal — to support female drivers and help them realise a dream of competing at the very top end of motorsport. Though I had lots of experience in sport, and in particular supporting women in sport, motorsport itself was largely new to me. Here are some things I’ve learned.

1. Mixed gender sports present unique and different challenges for women

I’ve spent all my adult life involved in women’s rugby in some way, and in my previous role at Sport England, I was also lucky enough to witness the work going on to improve opportunities for women in a range of other sports.

There are some peculiarities of motorsport that make it a hard comparator to other sports, not least how expensive it is, however I believe that female athletes in mixed gender sports have a much tougher road to acceptance and support.

For while it’s true that a sport like rugby presents real challenges to its female participants, (where there has been historical underinvestment and where outdated attitudes prevail) at least women are who are competing there, have the opportunity to retreat to an environment in which women are central, when they play in their own leagues, and compete in their own major events.

Competing right alongside and competing directly against men presents an utterly different challenge, with female drivers having to navigate a culture that has developed entirely and utterly for male athletes, with no real option (single gender racing series aside) to move to a lane which has been developed with them in mind.

When I tell people in motorsport about our work, they often say, ‘well women are welcome here’ and to this I turn to one of my favourite quotes which says that ‘everyone is welcome, is very different to we built this with you in mind’.

Female drivers had my respect before I got this job, but that has accelerated massively now that I understand even more how tough it is to make their way in this world.

2. Women in motorsport have plenty of champions but need more vocal advocates

There are lot of programmes and initiatives that champion women in motorsport, pointing out how incredible our female drivers are and highlighting women who are working in a range of other roles. This is all necessary in an industry where the number of women remains extremely low, but the sport also needs to bang the drum for where things could be better.

When we spoke to a wide range of women last year as part of our Inside Track report, we heard reports of ‘toxic’ cultures, where women are belittled or feel excluded, of overt and covert sexism, and of inappropriate language and environments which did not consider the needs of the women who worked there.

It is not negative to start pointing these things out, in fact it is necessary so that things can improve. We are talking here simply about trying to make sure that women do not face issues that men don’t have to think about, equality by any other name.

My observation a year in, is that this is a sport where people and stakeholders are reluctant to point some of these challenges out;  the sport is globally successful after all, why tar it with ‘problems’?

But no sport makes itself a better place for women and girls without going through a process of being honest about its shortcomings. We need people prepared to be a bit more honest here, or progress will not just be slow, but glacial.

3. Motorsport’s messy ecosystem makes true pathway development difficult

The structure of most major sports is similar. An international federation works with its national governing bodies (think FIFA and an organisation like the Football Association in England for example) to grow the sport, doing this fundamentally through running major competitions and investing to drive participation at grassroots level.

The vast majority of ‘competitions’ are therefore run and overseen to develop athletes to compete internationally, and to grow the grassroots and amateur base. All of these things in turn make the sport money.

Motorsport isn’t like this, rather there’s myriad ranges of series and competitions existing alongside each other, competing with each other, and largely existing as commercial entities, where athletes pay to enter.

These are not competitions built to sit inside a neat pathway, and it makes the ecosystem extremely difficult to navigate.

This system of course does serve many well, but is not as conducive as it could be to supporting those taking part to work their way systematically to the top.

There are, in my view, far too many competitions which seek to only serve those at the top, and which in turn put even more pressure on drivers and their families to stump up the cash to compete.

We hear a lot in motorsport about goals to ‘democratise the sport’. Encouraging all competitions to truly put the driver at the heart of their planning, and denying accreditation to events that can’t show how they do this, would be a good place to start.

4. The sport needs to get more serious about attracting and retaining women and girls.

There are a lot of new initiatives now designed to grow female participation — Jamie Chadwick’s being the most recent, and these are desperately needed, given female participation currently represents on average of only about 10% across all categories of competition.

While I’ve observed some well-intended ideas, especially from ASNs (the national bodies recognised by the FIA as the sole holder of sporting power in a country— the equivalent to a national governing body in the parlance of others sports) to welcome more women and girls into the sport, there is often limited understanding about how to specifically target that demographic and make them feel truly welcome when they get there.

When I worked at Sport England, I was lucky enough to help run a magnificent campaign called This Girl Can, designed to improve the activity levels of women. What largely made this campaign so successful was that it inherently understood that you needed to understand what stopped women from being as active as men, and then ruthlessly work to remove those barriers. (This worked by the way)

So, if we want more women and girls competing, we need to get serious about getting to know what it is about motorsport that might bring them in in the first place, and then understand what sort of environment is likely to keep them there. Some girls tell us when they turn up to a track, there are no female changing facilities or toilets for example. These are basic fundamentals that will obviously stop a girl coming back.

It would be amazing to see more of a focus amongst each ASN at very least, to drive female participation, and more sharing of best practice so that people can learn from each other.

Motorsport is an uber competitive sport granted, but sharing ideas and knowledge so we can make the sport more inclusive is a collaboration worth chasing.

5. Lack of women on the grid remains a glaring opportunity lost

When F1 Academy announced a partnership with global makeup brand Charlotte Tilbury last week, you could almost hear some pennies dropping about how motorsport could start to be benefit commercially from having women competing in higher levels of the sport.

As well as the fact that commercially, the sport would have a whole new world of female consumer brands open to it if more women were competing, if we learned anything from the success of Drive to Survive, it’s that fans love this sport’s ability to weave storylines around the narrative of each driver, team and leader.

As one of the only sports in the world which offers men and women a chance to compete side by side, there’s a ocean of fascinating stories to be told, if and when we see more of it.

We know that motorsport has a growing female base, Formula 1 itself says that around 40% of its fans are women and girls and when we asked that fanbase last year in our research, what they thought about the sport’s efforts to support female drivers, they were largely dissatisfied.

So more women on the grid means more commercial opportunities (which the FT wrote about very well last week), a chance to give newer fans what they want, and a chance to tell incredible stories. What on earth are we waiting for?

Finally, I am more convinced than ever that we can make a real difference More than Equal is just one initiative working to help female drivers. Formula 1 itself, through F1 Academy, is making a deep investment to give racing opportunities to drivers, and to encourage more women broadly into the sport.

Our approach is different (though complementary) where we are looking to support high potential female drivers early in their career, helping them to maximise their potential so they can carry on, on equal footing, and make their way up the sport. This approach was borne out of research that told us that early intervention was key and we’ve explored the success of other high performance programmes (largely Olympic sports) where working with talented athletes early on has been pivotal.

We also believe that the work we will do to increase the research and insight about how to support female drivers will genuinely help the sport. As well as collecting performance data from the cohort of drivers we’ll support directly, we’ll be commissioning and making public, other pieces of research to support anyone working with women in the sport.

That’s one year in. Looking forward to seeing what 2024 will bring.