Six hundred and eighty five days. That’s how much time will have stretched between Alice Powell pulling off a fabulous victory at Brands Hatch to conclude season one of the W Series and the opening round of season two at the Red Bull Ring in Austria.
Since that dramatic finale in August 2019, the all-female initiative was sent into a hibernation that was essential for its survival of the pandemic. Now it’s awake again, and its profile will be raised to new and heady heights by a blessed endorsement from above. In 2021, it’s a Formula 1 support act, appearing on the bill at eight grands prix from here on, its season concluding in Mexico in late October.
Opportunity: that’s the key word that Powell and her 20 comrades on the W Series grid use to describe a series that still has to occasionally bat away critics who dismiss it as segregation.
“It would mean everything to me to win the title, especially this year, when it’s on the F1 support bill,” says Powell, whose original single-seater career petered out in line with her budget in 2014. “I get asked why I’m doing it a lot, and the answer is that I wouldn’t have had an opportunity to race if it wasn’t for W Series. It’s an opportunity for the likes of me to get back out there but also an opportunity for other young girls to aspire to W Series, to help them up the motorsport ladder.”
Crucially, you don’t pay to race in W Series: you apply and then win your place purely on merit.
For boss Catherine Bond Muir, there’s plenty to be excited about 22 months on from the last race. “Number one, we’re going back racing again: that’s the most important thing after last year,” she says. “And two, there’s the unknown of the impact that F1 will have on us and the general excitement of racing on motorsport’s largest global platform.”
It’s an achievement – if not a total surprise to those of us who picked up on the interest that the W Series generated at Brands Hatch – that F1 has taken the series under its wing this early in its life.
Former McLaren team manager Dave Ryan, who still carries respect in F1 circles, heads the team of engineers and mechanics who run its 20 Tatuus T-318 Formula 3 cars, which use 1.8-litre turbo engines. David Coulthard, 13-time GP winner turned Channel 4 F1 commentator, is among the series’ directors. And in an age when gender inequality in sport is finally being addressed, the timing of the W Series couldn’t be better.
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