When Claire Williams was appointed vice principal of the Williams Martini Racing Formula One team, she hoped her promotion and the presence of Susie Wolff as test driver might open the door to an untapped market.
With women making up about 40 percent of the audience, it seemed a good time to approach brands more interested in female consumers than the average petrolhead.
The response was hardly deafening.
Photo: AP
“I said [to the Williams sponsorship team]: ‘Let’s go out there, let’s really go hard at female brands,’ and not one of them [brands] was interested,” said Williams, who was appointed deputy to father, Frank, in 2013.
It has now been 40 years since the sole occasion where a woman finished in the points at a Formula One race, Italian Lella Lombardi taking sixth place and half a point at a shortened 1975 Spanish Grand Prix.
Next year marks 40 years since any woman started a Grand Prix.
Formula One has become more inclusive — about 8 percent of Williams’ engineers are women — and has come a long way from the days when the sport was sponsored by oil, beer, cigarettes and even men’s magazines and prophylactics.
Wolff, who last season became the first woman driver in 22 years to take part in a Grand Prix weekend, is to be back on track in Barcelona tomorrow for the first free practice, but her dream of racing remains distant.
While Formula One supremo Bernie Ecclestone is convinced that a woman racer would be a commercial boost for the series, getting one who really excites the fans — and sponsors — has been the problem.
“For some reason, women are not coming through, and not because we don’t want them,” the 84-year-old said in March when he floated the idea of a women’s championship. “Of course we do, because they would attract a lot of attention and publicity, and probably a lot of sponsors.”
Efforts so far indicate the situation is more complicated and that simply appointing a woman driver to a role within a team is not enough.
While Wolff has shown she can do decent lap times, she is unlikely to progress beyond a testing role at the former champions, who were struggling, but are now back in the top three.
However, Sauber, who were in desperate need of cash last year and also have a female principal, had been grooming Simona de Silvestro for a race seat until the 26-year-old Swiss failed to find the necessary sponsorship.
De Silvestro, who has stood on the podium in the US IndyCar series and was Indy 500 rookie of the year in 2010, returned to the US instead in what was surely a missed opportunity.
“As much as people say: ‘We really want to see a woman in F1 and it would be such a great marketing exercise,’ the truth is, it has not happened,” Wolff told reporters. “So it can’t be that great, because nobody has actually made it happen.”
The reason, according to a motorsport marketing expert who has brought numerous top sponsors into F1, lies primarily in performance and the nature of a sport where men still make up 60 to 70 percent of the audience.
“If you are strictly a female-directed product, you’re most likely going to be wasting too much of your money talking to people that aren’t your core consumer,” JMI chief executive Zak Brown told reporters. “If I’ve got US$1 to spend, 30 cents of it is working really good for me, but I’m wasting 70 cents. Unless the product I have appeals to both men and women, and I like the female angle.”
“My wife buys my deodorant for me. I wear it, she buys it,” Brown said as an example.
Williams have several such brands, including Unilever’s Rexona deodorant and title sponsor Martini, as well as others, who use the sponsorship in education and diversity programs and for whom Wolff is a definite asset.
However, gender only goes so far.
“I think it would be great to have a woman driver, but what’s important is that you have a competitive one,” Brown said. “At the end of the day, any time in sport, gender aside, you’ve got to be successful to have a sustainable career.”
He cited IndyCar and NASCAR driver Danica Patrick, 33, as the sort of person with the track record to create sponsor interest had she switched to F1 earlier in her career.
“If there was a top-line female driver, the sales guys would be putting that in the mix of things to approach the marketplace with,” he said.
With limited seats available, Brown said it might take a company like Red Bull to bring through a woman on their production line of young talent.
“It needs someone with that same passion, desire and checkbook to make that type of commitment to go: ‘I’m going to find the next female [Sebastian] Vettel,’” he said. “I think she’s out there.”
Revelations of positive doping tests for nearly two dozen Chinese swimmers that went unpunished sparked an intense flurry of accusations and legal threats between the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the head of the US drug-fighting organization, who has long been one of WADA’s fiercest critics. WADA on Saturday said it was turning to legal counsel to address a statement released by US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) CEO Travis Tygart, who said WADA and anti-doping authorities in China swept positive tests “under the carpet by failing to fairly and evenly follow the global rules that apply to everyone else in the world.” The
Taiwanese judoka Yang Yung-wei on Saturday won silver in the men’s under-60kg category at the Asian Judo Championships in Hong Kong. Nicknamed the “judo heartthrob” in Taiwan, the Olympic silver-medalist missed out on his first Asian Championships gold when he lost to Japanese judoka Taiki Nakamura in the finals. Yang defeated three opponents on Saturday to reach the final after receiving a bye through the round of 32. He first topped Laotian Soukphaxay Sithisane in the round of 16 with two seoi nage (over-the-shoulder throws), then ousted Indian Vijay Kumar Yadav in the quarter-finals with his signature ude hishigi sankaku gatame (triangular armlock). He
RALLY: It was only the second time the Taiwanese has partnered with Kudermetova, and the match seemed tight until they won seven points in a row to take the last set 10-2 Taiwan’s Chan Hao-ching and Russia’s Veronika Kudermetova on Sunday won the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix women’s doubles final in Stuttgart, Germany. The pair defeated Norway’s Ulrikke Eikeri and Estonia’s Ingrid Neel 4-6, 6-3, 10-2 in a tightly contested match at the WTA 500 tournament. Chan and Kudermetova fell 4-6 in the first set after having their serve broken three times, although they played increasingly well. They fought back in the second set and managed to break their opponents’ serve in the eighth game to triumph 6-3. In the tiebreaker, Chan and Kudermetova took a 3-0 lead before their opponents clawed back two points, but
Taiwanese gymnast Lee Chih-kai failed to secure an Olympic berth in the pommel horse following a second-place finish at the last qualifier in Doha on Friday, a performance that Lee and his coach called “unconvincing.” The Tokyo Olympics silver medalist finished runner-up in the final after scoring 6.6 for degree of difficulty and 8.800 for execution for a combined score of 15.400. That was just 0.100 short of Jordan’s Ahmad Abu Al Soud, who had qualified for the event in Paris before the Apparatus World Cup series in Qatar’s capital. After missing the final rounds in the first two of four qualifier