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Atom A while ago, I blogged about the creation of the FIA Women & Motor Sport Commission's formation. Since then, it's kept a fairly low profile, until a couple of days ago. Now it has created a shootout for 13-15 year-old female karters, the winner of which will get a paid place in the Karting Academy Trophy series. Also, 10 young karters have been selected to participate in the first running of the shootout, on April 27/28.
Entries are by invitation only, with a selection of National Sporting Authorities nominating which of their karters meeting the necessary criteria (apart from the gender and age restriction, competitors must have an international kart licence of some description) would be best suited to the opportunity. This is a good idea as the NSAs are likely to have enough distance from the ground not to be influenced by false rumours that happen to have started near nomination day.
Interestingly, 8 of the 10 competitors are European. This may be a function of the short notice given and subsequent difficulty in securing visas. Hopefully in future this scheme will be expanded so that female karters in underrepresented parts of the world get the same opportunity.
The format is similar to the shootout for the FIA Academy for under-23 circuit and rally racers - two days of competition with the winner receiving the prize. The difference is that instead of there being 10 winners from 20, there will be 1 winner from 10. The odds are much lower, but with such short notice it would have been difficult to arrange for multiple winners (simply reducing the shortlist to more representative odds would merely have robbed competitors of a good opportunity to show their skills and gain confidence).
The winner will get three paid races and a test in the KF3 category, with the additional promise that things not included in the prize (accident damage, fuel, service team and testing tyres) will be cheap. This has got to be helpful, but one cannot build a season around three races. Presumably this is aimed at people who have already managed to get into the "bottleneck zone" without losing the funding, support or motivation needed to continue. Those who have encountered the start of the "bottleneck" prior to turning 13 will not be able to "save" their participation through this scheme, no matter how talented they are.
It's a good first step. The problem of low female participation driving racing cars may be largely cultural, but the surrounding culture is more likely to alter if people can see women succeeding - if not in getting all the way to F1, at least in breaking the bottleneck between the 14-year-old karters and the 16-year-old junior formula racers.
Script Frenzy Update: I've started a script for Script Frenzy this year. I got off to a great start and have managed 16 pages of prose. I estimate this will equal 32 pages of script. Just as well because I'm unlikely to get much done tomorrow due to a swimming gala.