Formula One has reached a striking milestone: 50 years have passed since a woman last started a world championship Grand Prix, with the sport still searching for a female driver capable of breaking the barrier and reaching the modern F1 grid.
The last woman to start an F1 world championship race was Italy’s Lella Lombardi, who competed in the 1976 Austrian Grand Prix.
The milestone comes as a new generation of female racers attempts to climb the demanding ladder from karting through junior single-seater categories and ultimately into Formula One.
Among them is 17-year-old Swedish driver Alexia Danielsson, who is competing in Formula 4 and dreams of becoming an F1 driver.
I don’t think anything is impossible, you just have to really go for it. How long? I have no idea,” Danielsson told Reuters.
One organisation attempting to accelerate that progress is More Than Equal, founded in 2022 by former F1 driver David Coulthard and entrepreneur Karel Komarek.Its aim is to identify, develop and support female drivers capable of competing at the highest level.
We’re not a race team, we don’t have shiny cars with shiny stickers, we’re not a race series,” More Than Equal chief executive Tom Stanton told Reuters.
what we do is build drivers” Tom added.
The organisation’s first group of six drivers was selected from around 1,000 applicants, while its second intake of eight came from approximately 1,500 candidates.
Stanton said the number of talented female drivers is growing.
There are starting to be more female drivers out there,” he said. “Also, they are performing better.” he added.
Formula One has also created the F1 Academy, an all-female series designed to provide young women with a structured route towards higher levels of motorsport.
Yet the ultimate objective remains much bigger than simply increasing participation.
The ambition is still that we want to see the first female driver win that F1 Championship,” Stanton said.
For now, however, the wait continues. Lella Lombardi remains the last woman to start an F1 championship race half a century later.
