A “Formula One” series for women is gaining momentum.
On the surface, that might be well-intentioned. A look around the world’s major racing series is pretty telling: most drivers or riders are not only men, but most are also from the ethnic or racial majority in their home country. Efforts aimed at boosting diversity in racing—in all positions—have serious justification.
But on that same surface, there’s a huge problem with creating a separate division, whether for women or for anyone else under-represented in the headline-hogging categories of motorsport.
Women already have a racing series, as do other competitors who would add diversity to racing’s most visible role:
Every damn one of them.
So, where does one end a conversation that acknowledges a lack of opportunity for racers diverse in gender, racial or ethnic background, sexuality, or other attributes, yet rejects the notion of a segregated PR tour on a ladder to nowhere as the solution?
First, ask where one begins: with recognition that diversity in motorsports does not require a “proving ground,” where racers possessing the factor in question are allotted their own space and allowed to show off their skills. The truth is that if you think of any reason anyone might add diversity to racing, you can find someone in the relevant group of people who has already proven they belong—as if they ever had to.
Indeed, racing’s problem—unresolved and more than likely worsened by a separate series—starts here: understanding how success in the first opportunities to bury any skepticism, outdated in the most positive light and befitting of no time period in the most accurate, has been followed by so few chances to break the present-day homogeneity.
Racing has never been a sport for white men.
Ironically—and unfortunately—that statement may have been easier to support in a long-ago era.
Make no mistake: no one wants to go back. At some tracks, women drove; at others, they couldn’t even enter the pits. Black drivers like Rajo Jack couldn’t contest officially sanctioned competitions, and on the outlaw circuit sometimes had to spoof their ethnicity. Where they could race as themselves, people resembling them weren’t always allowed to spectate.
Women like Sara Christian and racers of color like Wendell Scott often started their careers only by allowing themselves to be promotional gimmicks for local speedways. “Look at this woman who thinks she can drive!” “Come see a ****** race.”
And when the trailblazers were finally allowed to be there purely on their own merit, the world around was less welcoming. AAA-licensed Joie Ray once slept in a jail cell because no one would provide accommodations to a black man as he traveled the country to drive his sprint car.
Despite the problematic and the atrocious, there was still something markedly different about racing from the 1920s through the 1970s. Diverse racers, unwanted as they may have been, showed up.
To be clear, an embarrassing chapter of our history deserves no romance. The pioneers never should have needed to do things by only their own approval.
But back then, at least they could.
Amidst more overt resistance to diversity, the sport was still easier to access. It was focused on cars, and going fast was more heavily mechanical. “Spec series” didn’t exist. You might not run well, but you could bring something acquired used, something built behind your home, something barely modified from production. Rules that allowed for ingenuity gave those without the financial resources a chance: the rich, buying the best of the best to race as a hobby, against the scrappy, whose deep love of the automobile or the motorcycle meant deep knowledge of the secrets to speed.
No one needed a team owner to hire them. No one needed a major sponsor to support them. The only voice of “no”—and undoubtedly, there were many such voices—could be that of the promoter denying entry.
When that happened, racers organized.
The Colored Speedway Association and Atlanta Stock Car Club were series created by black racers, for black racers. Motorcycle races at the Hines Farm Blues Club attracted hundreds of black riders. In Britain, the Women’s Automobile and Sport Association was formed by female drivers who wanted more opportunities to race. These were not separate classes created by the powerful to appease others in an underhanded attempt to keep them out; these were organizations started by, owned by, and operated by their constituents, not to self-segregate, but to take control of and ensure consistency in their own ability to compete.
Rather than playing in someone else’s box—a “yes, but only here”—racers responded to “no,” banding together to create their own “yes.” Many on these tours still raced against white drivers or against men when they could.
Of course, it’s unfair that Charlie Wiggins had to pose as a janitor to work on Bill Cummings’ 1934 Indy 500 winner and couldn’t sit in the stands to see teams compete with his innovative fuel mixtures, let alone enter the cars he built and drove to four Gold and Glory Sweepstakes wins. It’s wrong that so little is known of Lett Hill, Delphine Lewis, Cora Miller, and Marian Thompson, the women of color who raced in the Club and would undeniably be remembered if they had been part of the earliest NASCAR races.
But they raced in something they created—not something created for them—and that matters. One of the Atlanta Stock Car Club’s best, Charlie Scott, became the second black driver in NASCAR when he raced on Daytona’s beach course for the most prolific team owner of the time, Carl Kiekhaefer.
He earned that ride because Kiekhaefer’s defending champion driver, Tim Flock, noticed him racing in Atlanta, which Scott never could have done regularly enough to be seen without organization.
Other “early days” racers included Mel Leighton, who won a handful of sprint car features in white fields; Margaret Allan, a 1930s sports car and rally driver competing at Le Mans and Monte Carlo, who started out by entering hill-climbs in her family’s road car; and “Mouse” Fuller, a dominant match racer in Chicago.
Among each was that consistent theme: needing minimal approval, and creating that approval for themselves when others denied it.
That continued into the 1970s. George Wiltshire drove his own cars in stock car races, reaching what is today NASCAR’s Cup level, in part because NASCAR rules allowed cars from lower divisions to join the Cup fields at bullring short tracks when the entry lists weren’t full. Janet Guthrie made it to both the Daytona and Indianapolis 500s; she never would have if starting out in a near-stock sports car hadn’t been a viable way to launch a professional career. Malcolm Durham and Eddie Flournoy gained fame in drag racing, not just for driving, but for the cars and motors they built. In Africa, white-dominated rallying integrated with racers like eventual Ugandan national rally champion Sospeter Munyagera, the first indigenous African driver in the East Africa Rally, entering a humble Saab road car in 1969 that completed the course—something none of the expensive Saab race cars managed.
The ability to start small, yet not be doomed to never advance, allowed for on-track achievement that was sometimes ahead of societal progress.
When there were issues, there was another common refrain: organization. The Black American Racers Association (BARA) endeavored to get a driver of color in the Indy 500, using both European and American racing series to develop potential candidates that might one day drive for the Vanguard team part-owned by BARA founder Leonard W. Miller.
Coyle Peek raced in British Formula Ford, achieving a best result of second-place in a series that never would have hosted him without black racers working together. Benny Scott, a psychology professor in California, drove formula cars stateside, winning in Formula A and impressing in Formula 5000. Scott’s career began in an old Renault stock car; he was able to race because a wide variety of cars—affordable ones, ones that competitors could work on themselves—were able to race. Tommy Thompson succeeded Scott, but was killed in a USAC Mini-Indy crash at Trenton Speedway.
BARA’s team also supported Randy Bethea, a Tennessee stock car driver who once beat Cup star Darrell Waltrip, highly favored at his home track, to the pole at Nashville’s Fairgrounds Speedway in what would become today’s NASCAR Xfinity Series. Bethea was already a racer because stock cars were still accessible on the local level. He was able to become a formula car driver (and a successful one, especially in wet weather) because all racing was accessible enough to be reached with homegrown support.
Whether doing it on their own or with the help of their own organizations, the path was clear: diversity in racing came from those who contributed to it needing no one else’s approval, and that was made possible by a car-or-bike-oriented culture that kept barriers to creating the “yes” tied mostly to having the requisite passion and prowess.
For the original names of motorsports diversity, racing was their sport, and they were doing it their way.
Today, few drivers—including those with fewer obstacles and more privileges—race solely by their own approval.
A cultural shift in racing, paired with advancing technology and popularity, transitioned the sport from a professional hobby to a business-to-business sales vehicle. In few series can a driver race something they’ve built; none are meaningfully linked to a route to the top leagues. Today’s racers are rarely working-class mechanics looking to prove their expertise on the track. Most are marketing tools, a face for corporate events, someone to take executives around the track in a sports car, someone to build fan engagement with a brand.
To race today, one needs approval. Loans start the process. Sponsors and investors pick it up. There are team owners and influential competitors. There are more opportunities to be told “no,” and essentially zero opportunities to be your own “yes.”
The more approval required, the harder it gets, even when there are diverse team owners or sponsor executives. Black car owners have fielded white drivers. Proudly women-owned-and-run companies have sponsored men. In part, that’s their right—they’re entitled to make the same decisions any other business makes. But it’s equally that one “yes” is not enough.
In the past, a “yes” from an organization like BARA could take a driver somewhere more. Now, a woman might own a team, but if her sponsor’s executives want a male driver, her hands are tied. A black-owned company might sponsor a car, but the team owner may not agree on who should drive. Diverse drivers may be represented by less effective management if the best firms have turned them down, stifling potential deals, while powerful figures in the sport may be working behind the scenes to aid their preferred pilots. Crew members and fellow drivers on the team also get a say in who they want to work with.
Imagine if the competitor who called Benny Scott a “baboon” in the 1970s had instead been the number one driver on a team for which Scott was trying to race in the 2010s.
Sometimes, those who would say “yes” can’t, not because another party denies it, but because no one else has said “yes” before. Dr. Jim Logan wanted a black driver for his IndyCar team—the first in which a person of color had a 100% interest. A structure conducive to “no” from the very beginning meant that no one had climbed high enough on the ladder to be seriously considered for the ride.
BARA’s Miller, and his son Leonard T., have spoken often on the struggle to acquire sponsorship. Some companies claim that they’d love to, but can’t justify backing a driver who doesn’t look like the fans seeing their logo. Others are open to it, but only if they can control the driver to ensure diversity in motorsports means a boardroom-friendly face. At one point, the Millers started targeting companies that were being sued for discrimination; the situation was so dire that it seemed only someone who felt obligated to do something for PR purposes or as part of a settlement would get involved.
Meanwhile, modern organizer and former driver, Chris Miles, was turned down by a potential sponsor which informed him they didn’t have a product for a black audience.
That company sold motor oil.
Tellingly, one prominent black driver on the international racing scene, Jann Mardenborough, secured a factory-backed ride with Nissan only because the automaker took a non-traditional route in seeking talent. Mardenborough’s skill with the driving simulator, Gran Turismo, earned him a role in actual race cars.
Good thing you don’t need to fit the oil executives’ image of a racing driver to buy a PlayStation.
It’s been no different for women. Sponsorship cut the careers of Guthrie, Johanna Robbins (née Long), and Kenzie Ruston Hemric off at various stages in their ascents. Funding and mismanagement drove Simona de Silvestro out of open-wheel racing, and kept her from Formula One—though she thankfully landed on her feet in Australia’s Supercars. Beitske Visser likewise turned to full-bodied race cars, where manufacturer-backing facilitates the flow of approval to drive. Countless women can tell stories of sponsors who expected not a racing driver, but a model—or team owners who expected a girlfriend.
Even Danica Patrick, once the master of the modern game of getting a “yes,” couldn’t put together a full program for 2018.
And for some drivers, those “yeses” actually hurt.
Consider NASCAR’s Drive for Diversity. It’s certainly an answer in the affirmative—race cars on the course to the top for drivers only sparingly represented in NASCAR’s history—but it’s an answer with a cost. Fan and media expectations that a driver represent their entire gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, faith, or other part of their background are pressure enough on diverse racers.
When racing in a diversity program, those expectations become part of the job description.
NASCAR did not create Drive for Diversity to fulfill a driver’s mission; they created it to fulfill theirs. While those goals may intersect with the objectives of a driver—the exciting Darrell Wallace, Jr., wouldn’t be in the Cup Series next year without the program, and it arguably accelerated the careers of Daniel Suárez and Kyle Larson—D4D’s success is not inherently aligned to sending talent to the pros. For the program to benefit NASCAR, the participants must be marketed based on what makes them diverse. They have to be the face of something bigger than just their own driving. They have to answer questions the competitors we usually see in the best of rides would never be asked.
That amplifies the failures. An unsuccessful journey isn’t just a knock on the individual; it’s a knock on everyone they were forced to represent. No one argues men can’t handle a race car when particular drivers’ crashes become recurring jokes. Voices that would otherwise be credible, like David Coulthard’s, have used examples of struggling women drivers against the entire gender.
Worsening the issue, those approved may not have always been on merit when the objectives go past racing—Bobby Norfleet received assistance from NASCAR in putting together a Truck Series program, only for it to be suspected that his entire CV was fabricated, as he has done in media communications for two of his nieces—making failure not only higher stakes, but higher frequency.
The current pathway also limit the successes. The program, not the driver, is the main determinant, and where the racer is in control, the standards for success—more than just what happens on-track—are often higher than what other drivers are expected to do in their early development.
The modern “yes” is still not the same “yes” given to others. It’s a qualified “yes.” A “yes, if you’ll be the icon of diversity in racing.” A “yes, if you’ll enter the sport the way we want you to enter it, in a separate program or separate series that would defeat its purpose if the top series’ drivers actually resembled the general population.” A “yes, if you’re attractive and not too outspoken.” A “yes, if you can handle a pressure placed on you that we place on no one else.”
Sadly, in a motorsports world where someone else’s approval is now required, drivers have to take whatever “yes” they can get.
It would be dishonest to ignore the under-represented racers succeeding today, doing so in contrast with the climate described.
In the NHRA, driver diversity is healthy. Brittany Force won the Top Fuel title this year, which Shirley Muldowney had already done in 1982. Erica Enders-Stevens, Antron Brown, J. R. Todd, Angelle Sampey, Cruz and Tony Pedregon, and Ashley Force Hood are just a small sample of modern names who have excelled in American drag racing’s top tiers. Some recent NHRA racers have been doubly diverse: Peggy Llewellyn, a woman of color who made the Countdown playoffs in Pro Stock Motorcycle with a historic finals win, for example, or Reggie Showers, a black Pro Stock Motorcycle rider who uses prosthetic legs.
There are sponsors in the NHRA. There are car owners, some of them with big teams. The races are on TV.
But if any pro series is still connected to its roots—the roots where people could be their own “yes”—it’s the NHRA. Drag racing’s culture never lost sight of the “auto” in “auto racing.” It’s still a sport for gearheads, not just those who love going fast, but love the process of making something go fast.
Anyone with a car can start drag racing legally. Sometimes, there’s no need to invest in transportation; at the lowest level, competitors race the car they drove to the drag strip. The pressure’s low for drivers who might stand out, with what’s racing being of more interest than who’s racing.
Without many barriers to entry and with fewer expectations to be more than yourself, the true focus on the car has made drag racing accessible—and accessible under the official NHRA or IHRA banners. That’s given examples to look up to, from the earliest times to today’s champions. It creates a cycle: the more who do it, the more who feel welcome or inspired, and the less of a story it becomes to be there.
That lets the racers control what role diversity plays in their narrative, which is important when drivers in other disciplines, like de Silvestro and George Mack, have been willing to talk gender or race—Mack requested chocolate milk if he were to win the Indy 500 in order to make a statement—and have lent time to programs that help improve the climate for young participants, but draw the line on race weekends. de Silvestro has pointed out that the racers look the same with their helmets on. Mack wanted to be remembered as George Mack, not “the black driver.”
In fairness, not all the praises for drag racing are as simple as a strong connection to car culture. It’s certainly easier to get a “yes” when your father is John Force or John Paul DeJoria, and there would presumably be more women winning in F1, MotoGP, or NASCAR if the sons of the well-known competitors or major sponsors were instead daughters. Likewise, just because someone can self-start doesn’t mean they have a clear, self-controlled path to the pros.
Still, the link between diversity and the old-school, entry-level style of racing holds true beyond just the NHRA. Motorcycle racing of all forms has been aided by the affordability and bike-obsessed climate surrounding both the first steps in dirt and tarmac racing. When Michael Jordan started a Superbike team, he was able to pluck Montez Stewart out of the regional series Stewart had already carried himself into.
In Africa, indigenous racers have struggled to gain footing in the high-cost, tightly regulated formula cars, but have broken into the rallying and motocross scenes. In the rallies, everything from former factory-backed racing equipment to production vehicles can run before car—not driver—crazy fans. Charles Muhangi became a regional champion. Patrick Njiru, who broke through in the Kenya National Rally Championship as a race winner and then a series titlist, earned international acclaim when he finished fourth overall in the 1994 Safari Rally, at the time part of the World Rally Championship. Helen Kagendo Shiri and Tuta Mionki teamed up in 2013 to become the first indigenous Kenyan women to compete together as driver and navigator in a rally outside Kenya, doing so in an old Subaru that would never be accepted in the high-dollar universe of corporate motorsport.
Mara Reyes has won in trucks (both pickups and tractor units), production-based sports cars, and quirky touring cars in Mexico. She’s also been a standout in late models. While Reyes eventually earned big-name backing, she was able to make her own name because motorsports culture in her home country remains more “garage” than “paddock.”
Unsurprisingly, burgeoning racing scenes in the Caribbean often feature drag racing and near-stock rallying or touring because of the appeal of working on vehicles not confined to set specifications. Sometimes, with enough freedom, knowledge out-maneuvers money. In Palestine, Maysoon Jayyusi, Mona Ali, and Marah Zahalka entered a male-dominated local racing scene in autocross, where they can customize their own cars with low budgets and high innovation.
Perhaps Billye Jean Dent Armstrong illustrates it best. Her career began in the 1950s, an unwelcoming era for a woman of color. She raced into the 1970s, earning recognition as she climbed into the televised ranks of drag racing. And while high costs paired with new layers of approval forced her out, she was still able to work her way back in 1995 because drag racing remained true to its culture and retained a robust grassroots presence. Her under-funded, classic car had a place—and that meant its driver had a place, too.
That the closest professional equivalents to the hobbyist divisions feature the most diverse driver lineups today is no coincidence.
Applauding those who have made it, in the NHRA and outside it, doesn’t change the overall situation. That many still go unrecognized reveals much. That we are to be satisfied with one driver in a field of thirty-three as “mission accomplished” tells more.
Somewhat oddly, a program that mostly benefited white, American men gives the greatest warning: Red Bull’s U. S. Driver Search. Once Scott Speed reached Formula One, Red Bull stopped developing American drivers out of karting. Americans, of course, were still not winning in F1. They were not meaningfully advancing toward F1. American racing series were not on F1 bosses’ radars. The sport hadn’t grown one bit in America.
It’s easy to take the Red Bull approach when it comes to diversity, assuming that because someone has earned their place as a counterpoint to the lack of diversity, all talk is without merit.
But success is despite a structure of required approval and recurring denials thereof, not in disproof of one’s existence.
A women’s series doesn’t change those structures. It doesn’t change the attitudes and the concentration of power that make navigating them so hard. It isn’t something that women have created or own, and it isn’t something that gives women the ability to say “yes” to their careers if everyone else declines.
On the contrary, it’s just another negative answer, only longer. “No, you can’t race for me—but you can pose for a photo, cosplaying in a firesuit, and give me some positive press if you win in my little, meaningless game.” And it’s a reason for further denials—an argument that racers don’t need any help because there’s already an entire series for them.
In a sport that better represented diversity in a time we hope we’re better than, no one needs more opportunities to be told “no.”
So, to answer where the conversation ends, think about where it began—with people who found a way not because they had more grit or entrepreneurial spirit, but because they raced in a time when people could be their own approval, or collaborate to approve each other. Think about letting people say “yes” to themselves. Think about how early organizers have left a legacy, and how organizations now wouldn’t have the power to advance drivers as far as they used to. Embrace the irony that a sport refocusing its philosophy on the cars would change who drives them.
Because until those ideas gain momentum, good intentions will be as far as the good goes.