“Silverstone will be our biggest race ever”

27 June 2022

Ahead of W Series’ home race at Silverstone, on 1-2 July in support of the Formula 1® Lenovo British Grand Prix 2022 weekend, CEO Catherine Bond Muir analyses the season so far, and looks ahead to the rest of 2022 and beyond…  

“If you’d told me when we launched W Series in 2018 how much we would achieve in less than four years, I wouldn’t have believed you.

“Covid threw us several challenges (including no on-track racing in our second year), but you learn to adapt. We’ve had some fantastic wins since we launched – really entertaining racing on-track, partnering with Formula 1, expanding our fanbase by over 100 per cent, and being viewed in more than 200 territories globally in 2021, to name just a few, and we’re only just getting started.

“It was fantastic to see the cars back on the grid last year after an enforced break away from on-track racing in 2020. Due to Covid restrictions, we couldn’t have the celebrations that we’d like to have had with guests, fans, and media at W Series HQ. But this season has a much more open feel, and we started with a bang in Miami.

“The USA is a huge commercial market for us. We’ve had a significant spike in interest since our first race outside of Europe and our American debut – the 2021 season-ending double-header in Austin, Texas, last October. The idea of a women’s motor racing series has really captured people’s imaginations in North America and, with our increased activity in the USA, and an American driver, Chloe Chambers, racing with us, we are making a statement that America is a very important market for W Series.

“The increased interest in us from fans and the media so far this season has been absolutely fantastic. We have a groundswell of support from fans who love us and what we’ve got to work hard at now is increasing the numbers. We really want to build on the US market which is a hard thing to do – F1 has done it, principally, through Drive to Survive, so we need to find our own way of building in the US. We also want to build ourselves as a brand that is known by people outside of motorsport. Non-motorsport fans know what F1 is, and we need to attract new fans to the sport.  

“Every month that we progress, we get more commercial interest in W Series. Sophisticated sponsors want to know what they’re partnering with, so it’s difficult to get huge sponsors in at the early stages of any sporting series because you’ve got to provide them…