The fifteenth of August 1976, Österreichring. Lella Lombardi finishes the Austrian Grand Prix in twelfth place, four laps behind the winner, at the wheel of a RAM Brabham. Nobody knows it yet, but it is the last time a woman starts a Formula 1 Grand Prix. Fifty years have passed since then.

On 24 October 2026, in Austin, Alisha Palmowski won F1 Academy with three races to spare: the women’s championship that Formula 1 launched in 2023 precisely to reopen that door. She is the series’ fourth champion. Read together, the two stories say a lot about where we stand: today women in Formula 1 are found in the garages, in the teams, in the grandstands. On the starting grid, no.

It is easy to assume the reason is physical: strength, stamina, a neck that has to cope with the g-forces. I read it differently. The rules exclude nobody, and the FIA president, Mohammed Ben Sulayem, restated it in 2022: under FIA regulations, women and men can compete on equal terms. The problem is a funnel. Few girls go in at the top, every step of the ladder costs more than the one before, and if nobody comes out at the bottom of the funnel, the first thing to look at is how many went in.

The women who have raced in Formula 1

In the whole history of the World Championship, five women have been entered for a Grand Prix, and only two managed to start. The first is Maria Teresa de Filippis, who takes a Maserati 250F to the start in 1958 and, over two seasons, adds up five entries and three starts. The second is Lella Lombardi: 17 entries and 12 starts between 1974 and 1976, and a record that still stands. At the 1975 Spanish Grand Prix, sixth at the flag, she scores half a point: the race had been stopped before three-fifths of the distance after Rolf Stommelen’s accident, and points were halved. She is the only woman ever to have scored World Championship points.

The other three never started. Divina Galica, a former British Olympic skier, failed to qualify in all three attempts between 1976 and 1978. South Africa’s Desiré Wilson missed out on qualifying for the 1980 British Grand Prix, but that same year she won a round of the British Aurora Formula 1 championship at Brands Hatch: she is the only woman to have won a Formula 1 race of any kind, albeit outside the World Championship. Giovanna Amati, in 1992, tried three times to qualify with Brabham and is the last woman entered for a Grand Prix.

After Amati it took twenty-two years to see a woman on track again during a Grand Prix weekend: Susie Wolff, in 2014, in practice at Silverstone with Williams. Her session lasted four laps, cut short by an oil pressure problem. In all, Wolff took part in four practice sessions.

Why there are no women in Formula 1

To reach Formula 1 you need two things that build up over the years: results in the junior categories and super licence points, the FIA permit without which you cannot race. You need 40 of them, earned over the previous three years. This is where the funnel narrows. Every step, from karting to Formula 4, from Formula Regional to F3 and F2, demands a bigger budget than the one before, and whoever starts from a smaller base reaches the top in even smaller numbers.

The numbers from the grassroots show it clearly. In the Champions of the Future Academy, an international karting series backed by F1 Academy, girls made up 5% of the grid in its first year and 30% in 2025. It is the figure for a single series, not for karting worldwide, but it says one thing above all: when the base widens, girls come through.

Then there is the money. In grassroots motorsport a female driver, like a male one, has to find sponsors for every season, and in my view this is exactly the step where the funnel narrows most. It is also the point where a brand can genuinely make a difference, and I will come back to it.

What F1 Academy is

F1 Academy was created to widen the funnel at its narrowest point, the move from karting to single-seaters. Formula 1 announced it in November 2022 and launched it in 2023: it is a Formula 4-level championship for women, often called women’s Formula 1, with Tatuus F4-T421 cars and a 1.4-litre turbo engine. Since March 2023 it has been run by Susie Wolff.

Its economic model is its real strength. Formula 1 subsidises the cars and each driver pays a contribution: €150,000 in the first season, down to €100,000 in 2024. From 2024, moreover, the ten established Formula 1 teams each back one driver, who races in their colours (Cadillac, which joined Formula 1 in 2026, will follow from 2027), while the others are supported by the series’ partners. And since 2024 the standings have awarded super licence points: 10 to the champion, a quarter of the 40 required.

There have been four champions so far: Spain’s Marta García in 2023, Britain’s Abbi Pulling in 2024, France’s Doriane Pin in 2025 and, this year, Britain’s Alisha Palmowski, a Red Bull driver, who wrapped it up in Texas. The prize is not money but a career step: García received a funded seat in the Formula Regional European Championship for 2024, Pulling one in GB3 for 2025. Pin, who raced in Mercedes colours in F1 Academy, was promoted by the team to Formula 1 development driver for 2026.

The women Formula 1 already has

If the grid is still all male, the rest of the paddock is less and less so. In 2025 Haas made Laura Müller race engineer to Esteban Ocon: she is the first woman to hold the role full time in the history of Formula 1. It is the role closest to the driver, the voice he hears on the radio all weekend.

And the audience has already changed. According to a Nielsen study from December 2024, covering 46,000 people in 37 markets, 41% of Formula 1 fans are women. The 2025 Global Fan Survey by Formula 1 and Motorsport Network adds that, among people who have recently got into Formula 1, three in four are women, and that 23% of the fans surveyed say they follow F1 Academy, a share that rises to 42% among the women who responded.

What is in it for a sponsor

Brands have noticed. F1 Academy has partners such as TAG Heuer, American Express, Puma, Lego and Salesforce, and since 2026 Sephora, which besides the series also backs a driver, Natalia Granada. In commercial terms: it is a property with a measurable audience, different from the average motorsport audience, and with a story that gets written while you support it.

The same holds, on a smaller scale, for an individual driver. Backing her in the junior categories means entering the funnel where it narrows and staying with her for several seasons, with the chance to tell the story of a journey rather than a single weekend.

Where brands most often trip up

When a brand approaches women’s motorsport, in my view there are three main stumbling blocks. The first is treating it as a one-season image exercise: the funnel widens over years, and a driver needs a pathway, not twelve months of visibility. The second is buying only the livery: a logo on the bodywork with no story around it remains an empty sticker, in F1 Academy as in Formula 1. The third is presenting the driver for her gender rather than her results: it is the quickest way to make a serious sponsorship look like window dressing.

Where to start

Our work, in these cases, starts from a different question from the one that usually comes up at the first meeting. Not how much a livery costs, but which stretch of the funnel a brand wants to help widen, and which audience it wants to speak to while doing so. From there we build the presence, the activations and the story. We cover this on our page about Formula 1 sponsorship and in our article on women and sports sponsorship.

Fifty years after Lella Lombardi, the door to Formula 1 is not closed. It sits at the bottom of a funnel. And a funnel is widened where you go in. Always.