3 Days on the Track With the Women of F1 Academy
For fans, Formula One’s Miami Grand Prix was yet another glitzy bender. For the young women in the driver’s seats, it was history-making.
Halfway through the first day of racing at Formula One’s Miami Grand Prix last weekend, with the temperature climbing into the mid-80s, I found F1 Academy’s Lola Lovinfosse seeking respite from the heat and her impending duties in the team paddock. (That’s racing speak for the temporary space where cars get souped up by a team of traveling mechanics.) Having momentarily ditched her logo-riddled racing suit for a more casual matching Puma set, the 18-year-old French driver remarks in affectionate teenaged monotone — and monosyllables — that she’s “hot” and the race weekend is “good” so far. We’re both surveying the offerings inside the Academy’s futuristic hospitality space, where drivers, team employees, and friends of the series stopped throughout the weekend for burrata, Ferrari Champagne flutes, or air conditioning — whatever tickles their fancy, or their willingness to post and tag on social media.
Lovinfosse has her blonde hair piled in a floppy top knot, spidery mascara-painted lashes shifting this way and that as she takes in the spectacle of it all: Just one alley over, her name and photo are displayed proudly above a bullet-like car that rockets up to 149 mph, while Hello Sunshine camera crews lurk around the corner, poised to grab content for their upcoming Netflix docuseries about F1 Academy. Lovinfosse is a sponsored Charlotte Tilbury driver, but that doesn’t stop her from sneaking a few free setting sprays and lip oils from the makeup station erected in the room. Manned by two makeup artists offering touch-ups and sweat mopping, the makeshift vanity is decked out in the same fuschia, magenta, scarlet-red, and blush-pink lips as those plastered on Lovinfosse’s vehicle. She smirks over her shoulder to see if she’s been caught in the act, before disappearing into the mid-morning humidity once more.
Just a few years ago, the prospect of seeing a woman race in the upper echelons of Formula One seemed like a pipe dream decades away. Unlike in basketball, the sport isn’t actually segregated by gender, but exorbitant costs, longstanding misogyny, and paltry recruitment efforts have resulted in an F1 grid composed entirely of thick-necked men. But as of 2024, that pipe dream, though still ambitious, doesn’t look so far off. With the advent of F1 Academy — an all-women feeder series that serves as a sort of training ground for young talent aiming to race with the sport’s elite — 15 female drivers between the ages of 16 and 25 are getting unprecedented access to the salivating crowds that have rendered the sport a buzzy (albeit often problematic) cultural institution. Now entering its sophomore season, the Academy is sharing race weekends with F1 superstars like Lewis Hamilton and Daniel Ricciardo, broadcasting its races on ESPN for the first time, and seeing new public support from F1 itself: Each of the ten teams (including Ferrari, Red Bull, and Mercedes) is supporting one Academy driver, providing access to racing simulators, private training facilities, physical trainers, nutritionists, and the coveted clout of their team Instagram pages with upwards of 13 million followers.
“The biggest thing for me is that I’ve always struggled financially, so [Alpine] is helping me take a huge financial burden off my shoulders,” says Abbi Pulling, the Alpine Academy driver who won double pole position on Friday. “But also technically and physically, I’m much stronger and much fitter now after working with them. They’ve really put me through my paces.”
This evolution, though, hasn’t been easy. Back in February, when Charlotte Tilbury became the first female-founded brand to sponsor a car in F1 history, the backlash was swift. Certain fans, mostly men, were unable, or unwilling, to wrap their noggins around the idea of femme-coded partnerships on a racetrack. A car so unwaveringly feminine, in this space, was radical in its lash-batting camp. It also became a tool for gut-checking the unconscious biases fans and drivers alike had absorbed over the years: reductive stereotypes like “girls can’t drive,” or “women drive slow.” “When I saw the car design I was like, ‘That’s punchy,’” Susie Wolff, the managing director of F1 Academy, tells me approvingly from her onsite office. “Would we have seen that — a livery with hot lips and lipsticks — three years ago in this sport? Never.”
Within those painstaking few years, the Miami Grand Prix, in particular, has become a watering hole for American celebrities and brand vultures hoping to dip their toes in the crystal waters of a sport on the rise. Throughout the weekend, the Miami Dolphins’ bright-green astroturf served as a backdrop to paparazzi shots of Tom Brady, Travis Kelce, LeBron James, Blackpink’s Lisa, and Ed Sheeran. Driver Max Verstappen’s girlfriend, Kelly Piquet, posted photos of herself in the paddock wearing a $1,600 patbo rhinestone denim jacket, while Brittany Mahomes opted for a $1,790 pink gingham Versace corset and matching $1,290 miniskirt as she traipsed through the race’s VIP section. Elsewhere in the Hard Rock Stadium, a shirtless Steve Aoki performed to a fist-pumping crowd stationed at fake beach cabanas, while bros in aviators double-fisted Red Bull vodkas and repeatedly screamed, “Woo!” The neon turquoise painted across the venue created an illusion of a plastic underwater grotto, as though peering into a fish tank of excess and navel-gazing stupor.
“Formula One is seen as this big glamorous sport that is very inaccessible. If you haven’t got that golden ticket that gets you into the F1 paddock, you’re excluded,” Wolff says. “But this … this is a moment in time that I’ve never seen before in my 35 years in the sport … that actually, people want to see us succeed.” Us, of course, meaning the perpetual underdogs: female drivers.
In Miami, the Academy’s paddock is modeled after F1’s, which is, save for some barricades and a security turnstile, a five-minute walk around the corner. But, at Wolff’s urging, this little sister of a garage is fan-facing, so the drivers, female mechanics and engineers, and race strategists get crucial face time with attendees. At several points throughout the weekend, the stanchions blocking off the area are removed entirely, drawing crowds of women and girls with fine line tattoos, pleated skirts, cowboy boots, and Ferrari corsets. One little girl with curly hair and a wide brim sun hat drags her mom over to the paddock, pointing at the car belonging to Visa Cash App Red Bull driver Amna Al Qubaisi. The girl wears headphones to protect her ears from the hornet’s nest of cars zooming on the street circuit nearby, as if she’s done this before.
“I’ve never had this much exposure in my racing career ever,” 21-year-old Red Bull driver and Amna’s younger sister, Hamda Al Qubaisi, tells me of the crowds. “Driving on track, I never had this many people watching me, so it feels amazing to have that. Even back home, a lot of Emirati girls now want to get into motorsports, and they’ve told me ‘You’re the reason my father allowed me to race in the first place.’”
There are also, somewhat surprisingly, a handful of guys buying into the hype. Outside of those working in the Academy garage, grown men frequently stop Wolff, Alpine driver Abbi Pulling, and McLaren driver Bianca Bustamante for selfies as we tail the drivers from the race track back to the paddock. On Sunday, during our walk down to the Academy’s second race of the weekend, two men in their 20s, one in a Hawaiian button-down and another in a cutoff muscle tank, appear giddy awaiting the 15 female drivers’ showdown. Back at the hospitality space, a middle-aged Miami native who works in sustainability waits patiently for an autograph from Wolff, who he loves “so much.” Inside, a quiet dad hosts his tween daughter and her friend at their first race. Both in McLaren polos and Converse high tops, they admit, blushing, that they’re both obsessed with F1 driver Oscar Piastri. When I ask if she’s excited to be here, the man’s daughter flashes her braces at me, as she says, “This doesn’t feel real.”
“I’m a dad, and I think [women in this sport] deserve every single opportunity,” Red Bull driver Sergio Pérez said Thursday from the shade of a Hard Rock Hotel pool cabana, although his own daughter, he laughs, isn’t quite ready to take on the adrenaline of racing herself. “You can see that more and more there are females in very important positions, not just as drivers, but as decision makers in the teams.”
Because the Miami Grand Prix marks the first and only American race on the Academy’s schedule this year, it’s a critical meeting point for female fans, who have been clamoring for inclusion in the sport since long before the runaway success of Netflix’s Drive to Survive. Accordingly, Wolff and her team have strategically siphoned some of the usual Miami glamour to the F1 Academy paddock, including a surprise photo opp with Tommy Hilfiger in the flesh, his ambassador Kendall Jenner, and Academy driver Nerea Martí (the brand, it seems, has provided Martí a lifetime supply of cropped Americana polos). Charlotte Tilbury can be seen bouncing around the Academy grid under a branded umbrella, shaking her auburn tresses and squealing at content creator Lissie Mackintosh and Ferrari WAGs Rebecca Donaldson and Alexandra Saint Mleux that they’re absolutely “rocking it!” And while the lens flares and general commotion around the track is nothing but beneficial to F1 Academy’s quest for visibility, the added sheen inevitably distracts from the beating heart of the series, which is the drivers themselves.
The whole cast of characters — from the sweet but stone faced Mercedes driver Dorianne Pin to the bubbly and photography-obsessed Bustamante — are a jubilant group capable of drowning out any empty chants of empowerment or privileged posturing from the grandstands. They’re hungry to win, but these fierce competitors are also performing at a level that bolsters the image of the entire sport: On Sunday, Bustamante took home P2 in the perfect appetizer to Lando Norris’ entree of a Miami Grand Prix win, while American Chloe Chambers nabbed P3 in the weekend’s first race, marking F1 team Haas’s first-ever podium in the sport, male or female. “I’m 19, so I can’t drink,” Chambers giggles, as she cradles her trophy and winners’ non-alcoholic champagne bottle.
“When you’re a racing driver, you kind of have to be the superhero in your head. You’re fearless. You’re faster, quicker, stronger. You can’t let anything anger you or frustrate you, you have to keep your eyes focused on what matters,” Bustamante said of her own P2 drive. “When I’m that person, I see things differently. I act differently. And it is quite creative to have that kind of alter ego.”
With Wolff at their wings, these young women have taken on the massive burden of equity in motorsport not so much by choice, but because no one has gone where they plan to go. The sacrifices are staggering — Bustamante identifies her “Roman Empire” as never getting to “wear a cute dress and dance with a boy” at prom, while the Al Qubaisi sisters recount the many nights spent away from friends and family in garden-variety hotel rooms — and the series itself is an imperfect solution to a decades-old systemic issue. But all of that melts away when Bustamante gets in the car, where she has already become the race-car driver she’s spent most of her young life dreaming about. “I wouldn’t have it any other way,” Bustamante says. “I love what I’m doing. I love the person I get to be.”
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