To be fair we watch Wolff have a pretty dismal season. Her sponsors have given
her a pink car as a marketing ploy. Pink does not help her cause. All the
men on the circuit see her coming a mile off. They are determined not be
beaten by a girl and it makes her challenge even harder. Suffice to say we
all agree the pink car is a mistake.
Pink cars aside though, Wolff is a respected driver. She is as fit as the men
– as it appears you have to be jolly fit for this racing thing. Something to
do with the G-force putting a lot of strain on your neck. The controls look
like the controls of a games consul. Except this isn’t a game. This is high
risk real danger stuff.
Wolff’s mother finds it hard to watch. Harder because she is her daughter
rather than her son? “Yes, because she seems more vulnerable,”
she reveals in the documentary. Her son, the Bafta-nominated David Stoddart,
incidentally, is the filmmaker. He’s gone for the safer option.
For a woman in a man’s world, Wolff still has rather conventional attitudes to
family. She will not drive after having children. She doesn’t feel it is
right to leave people who are entirely dependent on you to go and to
something so dangerous. For male racing drivers it is different.
They just get on with their lives whether they have children or not.
Research on the female brain has found that women are, in general, more risk
averse than men. A Formula 1 car accelerates from 0-100mph in under five
seconds. But there are women who buck the trend just as there are men who,
like me, like to go slowly.
Formula 1 must be one of the most male dominated sports there is and yet there
is no physical or mental reason (take note Stirling Moss) why a woman should
not compete against the men. Becoming
a test driver, as Wolff has, is the last step on the ladder before racing in
Formula 1 itself. Will we see her up there on the podium with Button
and Hamilton? If anything would get me to watch cars whizzing round a track
again and again, making a noise like a million flies caught under a glass,
the site of a woman driver on the track certainly would.