In Defense of F1 Academy

The Las Vegas Grand Prix is this weekend, and it’s not just the start of the final leg of the F1 season this year. This time around, it’s also the final race of the season for its sister series: the all-female, women-empowerment-coded F1 Academy. The fight for the grand prize, a fully-funded seat in a high-level motorsport series, is now more intense than ever after championship leader Doriane Pin surged to a 20-point lead over rival Maya Weug after the latter crashed out during the formation lap. Pin has everything to lose, Weug has nothing left to protect, and the grand finale could make or break both girls.

But as is the case with every F1 Academy race, the internet took the opportunity to scrutinize it. Social media quickly defaulted to the same tired tropes, trivializing the series and criticizing the girls’ mistakes more harshly than any Formula 2 or 3 rookie. Weug’s formation lap crash-out was enough to reignite the laziest joke in motorsport commentary: “wOmAn dRiVeR BaD”.

What happened to Weug is FAR from the worst crash in formula racing this year. Are we forgetting the notorious F2 race in Monaco, where almost half the grid crashed out on lap 1, forcing a lengthy red flag? Or the F2 sprint in Austria, where a similar multi-car wreck was so destructive, it warranted a mention in my F1 race recap? And that’s before we even get to the main event. F1 has seen cars and tracks rebuilt mid-weekend without anyone arguing that the male sex is unprepared for elite motorsport.

The more you look into it, the more you see how transparent the outrage is. When men crash into the barriers or spin off the track, the reaction is always limited to just the driver. It’s nothing more than a “racing incident”, maybe with “unlucky conditions” or a driver that shouldn’t be on the grid. But when it’s a woman, the blame metastasizes. It’s no longer about the individual, but rather the series— the very idea that women deserve space in motorsport at all.

Is F1 Academy the perfect solution for bringing more women into motorsport? No. But, there are some fundamental things about the series I think people tend to forget because the internet prefers to punch down. So here are some nuances the public seems to miss:

The name “F1 Academy” is kind of a misnomer. Despite the branding and affiliation with F1, F1 Academy isn’t a kind of “mini-F1” where seasoned professionals are auditioning for a chance at the real deal. Officially, it’s classified as a Formula 4-level championship, on par with regional championships like the Italian F4 Championship and the Formula Winter Series. Even the F1 Academy website says as such.

F4 itself is the “transition” level between karting and formula racing. So, many of the drivers in F1 Academy are making the jump from karts or very low-level formula racing. Aiva Anagnostiadis competed mainly in karting before entering two F4 championships ahead of her 2025 F1 Academy debut. The same goes for Alba Hurup Larsen and Ella Lloyd. Even drivers like Nina Gademan just started their formula car careers before racing in the F1 Academy. That means mistakes are going to happen. And you can’t ask a driver with less than a year of single-seater experience to perform like a veteran.

Girls in motorsport face structural disadvantages long before they would even have a chance at F1 Academy. According to a 2023 report from racing initiative More than Equal, women represent only 10% of all drivers across junior formula and karting series. And it’s hard for a woman driver to move her way up the ranks. That same report found they receive significantly less financial backing than their male counterparts, as well as fewer testing and race opportunities.

Clubs, sponsors, and feeder series are usually structured around male development pathways. Women enter the sport later, get less coaching, and leave the track far sooner (a woman racer’s career is about one to five years on average, compared with male careers stretching a decade or more). The disadvantage is built in from the beginning. Reduced seat time translates directly into weaker sponsorship prospects, which in turn slows development, which in turn leads to fewer results, and so on. It’s a circular chokehold that has everything to do with access.

We already went over some of the more notorious F2 crashes this season. But this feeds into my larger point: junior formula series are chaotic by nature, and even the most prepared male drivers can screw up. For example, Rafael Câmara came into this year’s F3 season as the next big thing, backed by the Ferrari Driver Academy. Even though he won the championship by over 40 points, his run wasn’t perfect. He retired from his debut sprint race in Australia after a three-car collision. He was taken out in the Barcelona sprint when an opening-lap incident pushed the top three starters off the track.

That’s what the junior formula series give us: races where even the most-hyped, most-prepared of the drivers get eaten alive by the chaos. But while these boys’ errors are framed as “learning moments”, girls making the same mistakes are framed as proof that women “can’t race.”

This ties back into Maya Weug’s crash during the formation lap last night. She’s not a bad driver by any means. As I said before, she’s currently second in the F1 Academy Championship. And she’s been remarkably consistent this season, with several podium finishes (including three feature-race wins). She only had to retire once before Vegas, and that was due to an electrical issue. Her crash didn’t even hit any other drivers, but reactions from the internet made it seem worse than the aforementioned F2 Monaco pile-up. The standard applied to her is not the same one applied to male drivers in much more dramatic incidents.

Again, I don’t think F1 Academy is the perfect solution to bringing more female drivers into motorsport. Only the champion gets the guaranteed seat in a higher-class series. The talent pool of women drivers is still small. And so on.

But it’s a good start. F1 Academy exclusively runs on F1 weekends, giving the drivers visibility on the biggest possible motorsport stage while giving them F1-standard infrastructure. The format (two practices, one qualifying, two races) gives each driver a consistent learning environment. And F1 teams seem to be embracing the series, with Mercedes and Ferrari putting their sponsored drivers in the same limelight as their main ones.

Besides, F1 Academy is still in its infancy. This weekend marks the end of its third season ever. There’s plenty of room to grow, and plenty of time to see where the women who drive in it go in the long run. Just… please stop stooping to sexist jokes the moment something goes wrong for one of them. Let the series and its drivers develop under the same margin for error you automatically grant the men.

That’s all for now. See you later for the races.

-F