How Alpine plans to bring more women into F1

While the W Series, the FIA Girls on Track initiative and the new More Than Equal campaign backed by David Coulthard are focused on promoting female racing drivers to the upper rungs of the sport, Alpine’s push also extends to engineering and other disciplines within the organisation.

As an F1 team with decent funding and the support of a road car manufacturer, Alpine has the resources with which to back its promise to change attitudes and promote female talent.

Even before the Race(H)er announcement the team has made steps on the driver side. In March it was announced that W Series driver Abbi Pulling would join the Affiliate programme of the Alpine Academy. A couple of weeks later Pulling had to the chance to experience the E20 F1 car in a street demo run in Saudi Arabia, as did local Aseel Al Hamad, a member of the FIA Women in Motorsport Commission.

Then in May Alpine announced that Alice Powell was coming on board as talent identification and development mentor for the Academy and the Affiliate programmes, with a special responsibility for mentoring Pulling as well as searching for new female talent.

Those initial steps have now fallen into place as part of a much bigger initiative in the form of Rac(H)er.

“The programme was born at the same time as we had the change to the Alpine brand,” says Alpine Cars vice-president of human resources Claire Mesnier.

“And the idea was, if we want to be world champions, we need to have the best driver in the best car possible.

“And obviously today we are not exploring the whole pool of talent. We are depriving ourselves of half of humanity, because we are not looking enough at women. So that was the starting point of this programme. And that’s why it concerns also engineering talents, and also racing talents.

“And while we were developing this programme, we didn’t stop any other initiatives, such as what we are doing in W Series with Abbi and Alice.”

As far as drivers are concerned the main challenge is always the small percentage of girls competing at karting level. Alpine team principal Otmar Szafnauer says that has to change, and the sport has to encourage more girls to want to take up racing.

“At a young age when you choose do I want to go karting, or do I want to go figure skating, or do I want to play volleyball? Not enough of them say I want to go karting,” says Szafnauer. “And therefore the pool that we’re choosing from is small. And if you…