It rings out like sound effects pressed on a talk radio broadcast — rhythmic, rapid zrooms lasting a fraction of a second, traveling in the space between each word. Catherine Bond Muir could be hitting buttons for impact, but, of course, she’s not. Muir, the founder of W Series, the world’s first international woman-owned motorsport championship, is attending a three-day on-track test at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya in Barcelona, Spain. Behind her, 4-cylinder turbocharged 270 hp engines tuned by Autotecnica Motori in the series’ Tatuus Formula Three T-318 race cars (comparable to F3 specifications) speed by, one after another. 

Over Zoom and in her work, Muir aims to educate about the struggles women face in motorsport while simultaneously working to eradicate those barriers. The sounds behind her have no gender. So why does the Formula series? On Netflix’s Formula 1: Drive to Survive, superfans and casual viewers alike are brought into the fast-paced world of the most popular motorsport. We’re introduced to the drivers, their teams, their track, their dreams and their decade-long rivalries. Now in its fourth season, with some drivers new and old (2021 brought about a remarkable rookie class), you might notice that, well, there are no women driving. That’s because there haven’t been any F1 women drivers in 46 years. 

Though more than 900 drivers have participated in F1 Grand Prixs over the past 73 years, only two have been women: Maria Teresa de Filippis in 1958 and Lella Lombardi in both 1975 and 1976. Muir thinks W Series can fix that by addressing the single reason so few women race: money. “It’s a prohibitively expensive support, in large part funded by conservative sponsors who only want to back the racers they believe could be the next champions,” Muir tells Tudum. “Michael Schumacher, Lewis Hamilton, Max Verstappen — they want that [driver] on the podium.”

Muir says that most drivers use the same avenues to get into F1: childhood kart racing where they demonstrate natural talent at 6, 7 or 8 years old, or wealthy parents willingly paying for “lots of training and testing in high-quality carts.” They’ll progress to the junior F4 category, where, if they start winning, they’ll enter F3, F2 and, eventually, for the most talented drivers with access to the most resources, F1. Since women are rarely given the same training at the same ages, Muir says they “have a tiny percentage of comparable time in a cart in racing and in testing, if you compare them to equivalent men of their age. [That’s] because money hasn’t gotten to them the whole of their career.”

Catherine Bond Muir, founder of the W Series, is pictured on the podium with drivers Beitske Visser, Jamie Chadwick and Alice Powell at the inaugural W Series Championship.

Dan Istitene/Getty Images

The issue of money — sponsorships, cars, additional practice time and testing — is systemic in professional motorsport, but there’s debate over the solution. IndyCar driver Pippa Mann began racing nearly two decades ago, but she’s only begun working with male clients who are paying her as both a coach and co-driver in the last two years. Though she recognizes the barriers women drivers face, she believes separating women and men drivers only deepens the gender divide. (It’s worth noting that the W Series is free for its drivers to enter, pays their expenses and awards its winner $500,000.) “There are some very talented racers who would have otherwise been left on the sidelines without that opportunity,” Mann says. “This I 100% understand. I 100% support those racers. I think this is a really good opportunity for them. But when you have a double champion with the name recognition [driver] Jamie [Chadwick] has, and you’re not prepared to help fund her for a seat in F3… ” she pauses. 

Her concern is that women drivers working outside of the Formula channels will get pigeonholed in the W Series, so she is more interested in “funding the ladder” and ensuring women get the same opportunities in the same races at the same ages as their male counterparts. “As female racers, we are racers first, and our gender comes second. We grew up dreaming of winning races, and winning championships, against everyone — the same as every male racer does,” she wrote on her blog. “We did not grow up dreaming of being segregated, and winning the girl’s only cup.” 

Pippa Mann with a young fan at Indianapolis in 2017.

James Black/Icon Sportswire, via Getty Images

To the casual viewer, the lack of women drivers in Formula One can be attributed to misogyny, cultural stereotypes that argue “women are worse drivers than men” or “nobody watches women’s sports.” Those feelings certainly fuel the harassment women in motorsports face, but, as is the case with bias, these ideas are demonstrably false. “If I was going to listen to the comments of people about how no one watches women’s sports, the W Series would not have existed,” Muir says. “In the first season we had in 2019, we had six races in different European countries. We were the second most watched motorsport in the UK [after Formula One]. It demonstrated that, if you get a good TV deal, people will watch. Fans don’t care whether it’s men behind the helmets or women.” It just has to be entertaining.

There’s also the issue of liability: If a woman driver messes up on the track, the failure often falls on them and whoever funded their drive. When that vitriol hits social media, it impacts their corporate sponsorship. “There’s a very small but very vocal portion of the internet that’s going to have a massive amount to say about [me making a mistake] in the most extreme terms possible versus if ‘Joe Man’ makes exactly the same mistake in the car next to me,” she says. “The problem is, if you do something either that is wrong or is perceived as wrong, the targeting is much more vitriolic and prolific. And the brands who support you are also targeted. They have to be willing to be like Mercedes with Lewis Hamilton and stand with him. You have to be willing to denounce hatred.” (It’s worth noting, too, that Hamilton is the only Black driver in Formula One history.) 

Mann, left, racing in the 2019 Indianapolis 500.

Clive Rose/Getty Images

In the last 18 months, Mann has been leading an organization called Shift Up Now, which raises money for women drivers to use in various championships. “It’s money that’s going to help you buy a few more sets of tires, or it’s going to help you pay some of your travel costs,” she says. “It’s going to get you to this race weekend so that you can do better in this event for the sponsors.” Their aim is to support women in races where they can compete alongside men for championship titles — and, in doing so, chip away at the decades-long misogyny that has plagued the Formula series. 

“For years and years, men would say things like, ‘I’d love to get a woman in Formula One if only there was one qualified,’” Mann explains. “At the time, Simona de Silvestro, possibly the most talented female road course racer in an open-wheel car, had just come out of a couple of seasons of IndyCar where she’d been on the podium several times. She never got a fair crack, never got to drive modern equipment, even in testing.”

There’s also a crucial element nearly invisible to the uninformed spectator: F1 is a physical sport. “Over the course of a lap, you’ve got up to 5 gs going through your body and your neck,” Mercedes driver George Williams recently explained. “Imagine yourself lying on your bed and somebody puts 50 kilos on [your] side. That’s what it feels like.” For its physical demands alone, the argument has been made that motorsport, and certainly F1, should be thought about as traditional sports, where women and men compete in separate divisions. “[W Series] functions on the basis that men and women can race equally, but there are lots of people who don’t believe that. If we did some scientific research, then we can answer the question for once and for all,” Muir says. “So let’s sort it out, but we do it scientifically.”

Tatiana Calderón, with her teammates at the unveiling of Alfa Romeo Racing’s 2020 Formula One car.

Eric Alonso/MB Media, via Getty Images

Many women drivers work extremely hard to compete with male drivers. Colombian racer Tatiana Calderón, who added 9 centimeters to her neck to deal with the stresses of an F1 car, is one of just a handful of women employed even as a test driver. She’s also landed a few super impressive podiums, at the British Formula Three and the World Series by Renault. (And if that’s not convincing enough of her talent, check out this video of her overtaking 2021 Formula One World Champion Max Verstappen.) “Drive to Survive [might not show] how demanding driving a car is,” Calderón says over Zoom, from Europe, the weekend after her IndyCar debut. “I have to train so hard to be able to just drive the car, let alone push the car to its limits. Just to sit in a Formula One car, you need a lot of training to drive that well.” 

And since it’s so expensive to practice, race and test the vehicle, drivers don’t get to practice behind the wheel all the time. “It’s not like other sports, like tennis, soccer, where you can play basically all day, every day. For training in motor sports, everything is so limited.” That’s unfortunate because, as Calderón says, “the car is the best gym. And money buys performance.” Calderón says she dedicates a lot of time to exercising her upper body, her shoulder, her forearms, her neck, her lower neck, her legs. “As a female, we have 30% less lean muscle than men and you have to compensate somehow,” she argues. “You need endurance, because it's a two-hour race.” It’s also incredibly taxing, mentally: “You have an engineer talking to you while you race these other 20 guys, and if you miss your braking by 5 meters, you’ve [crashed] into the wall.”

Tatiana Calderón, when she was racing Formula Three, in 2014.

Hoch Zwei/Corbis, via Getty Images

Cars are also designed with men in mind, which means there’s a disparity in who gets access to the best chassis. “A lot of the equipment has been made with the measurements of men, simply because we don’t have enough women,” Calderón says. The only way to change that, she says, is by having more women on the track. “Parents take the boy, not the girl, to the go-kart track. This has to change in order to get more girls. It’s a cycle. When you get more girls, you get more respect. It becomes normal to see girls and then it won’t be an issue.”

Despite all that’s working against women — and other minority groups — from getting to the highest echelon of global motorsport, some professional racers remain optimistic about the future. Muir’s W Series recently partnered with Formula One, upping its visibility to impressive heights. Calderón is also part of the FIA Women in Motorsport commission, which is working on a diversity program. Mann is continuing to build Shift Up Now and racing, in a bright pink car, so that other girls can see her on the track and view their gender representation as a strength, not a hindrance, in a notoriously conservative sport. Representation is a starting point, but there’s still more work to do. 

“We need funding,” Mann explains. That’s it. “Funding means you have the opportunity for seat time. It means you have the opportunity for testing. It means you have the opportunity for new tires. It means you have the opportunity to sign with the team that’s further up the pack. It means you have the opportunity to make a mistake and have the race car repaired even if people are saying things about you on the internet. It means you have the opportunity to have the time to learn and to get better. Fund the ladder.”