F1 Academy, the Golden Cage
There’s nothing more insulting than being gifted something you’d already earned.
In 1975, Lella Lombardi scored points in a Formula 1 Grand Prix. Not in a women’s category. Not in a parallel championship. In the same Spanish Grand Prix where men risked their lives every Sunday. Sixth place. Half a point. The only one ever scored by a woman in F1 history.
In 1982, Michèle Mouton finished runner-up in the World Rally Championship. Four outright victories against the best drivers on the planet, behind the wheel of a fire-breathing Audi Quattro. Nobody gave her a separate championship. Nobody detuned her car. Nobody slapped a cosmetics sponsor on her nose cone to make the product look good on Instagram.
In 2012, María de Villota climbed into a Marussia Formula 1 car as a test driver. She didn’t ask permission. She didn’t wait for the FIA to manufacture a category with a friendly name. She went, sat in the car, and drove.
And now, in 2026, the FIA and Formula 1 have decided that women need help. That they need a separate championship. That they need slower cars, beauty sponsors, a Netflix docuseries, and a Hello Kitty logo on the grandstand.
Welcome to the fifth chapter of The FIA Mafia. Today we talk about F1 Academy. The prettiest cage ever built.
174 Horsepower: The Mechanical Joke
Let’s start with what matters in a motor sport: the motor.
The F1 Academy car is a Tatuus F4-T421. The same chassis used in Formula 4 championships worldwide. A turbocharged 4-cylinder, 1.4-litre engine built by Autotecnica Motori. Output: 130 kW. In numbers any mechanic understands: 174 hp at 5,500 rpm. Top speed: 240 km/h. 0 to 200 km/h: 12.5 seconds.
Let’s put that in perspective.
A Formula 3 car — the immediately higher category — runs a 3.4-litre naturally aspirated V6 producing around 380 hp. Nearly double the power. A Formula 2 car steps up to a 3.4-litre turbocharged V6 with 620 hp. More than three and a half times what an F1 Academy driver has under the bonnet. And a current F1 car exceeds 1,000 hp between its hybrid power unit and electric motor.
At Silverstone, an F1 car laps under 1:25. An F2 runs around 1:38. An F3 approaches 1:44. An F4 — the F1 Academy car — goes beyond 1:50. That’s more than 25 seconds between what F1 Academy drivers are racing and what male F1 aspirants in F2 are driving on the same weekend, at the same circuit.
25 seconds. In a sport where hundredths of a second separate glory from irrelevance.
And here’s the part nobody says out loud: the 16-year-old boys coming out of karting and entering Formula 4 compete in exactly the same car. The Tatuus F4-T421. Same power. Same performance. The difference is they race against other drivers — men and women, if there were any — in mixed F4 national grids. The girls entering F1 Academy compete only against each other. Same car. No men on the grid.
The result? They don’t race against the best. They don’t learn to defend against the best. They don’t develop the killer instinct forged in wheel-to-wheel battle against someone who won’t let you through regardless of who you are. And when they exit F1 Academy after their permitted two seasons, they face a brutal step up to F3 where nobody’s waiting, nobody knows their real performance level, and they’re several years older than the lads who’ve spent two seasons in mixed grids.
The FIA hasn’t given them a ladder. It’s given them a treadmill.
The Age Trap
F1 Academy regulations state drivers must be between 16 and 25 years old and cannot compete for more than two seasons. From 2027, exemptions for a third season may be granted in special cases — which already tells you plenty about the programme’s effectiveness.
Two seasons. Sounds reasonable. But look at what happens in practice.
The W Series, the previous women’s championship that went bankrupt in 2022, had an average grid age of 24.2 years in its inaugural 2019 season. For comparison, the Formula Regional European Championship — a comparable category in technical level — had an average age of 17.9. More than six years’ difference. Six years in a sport where teams look for long-term investment, where every season counts, where a 24-year-old racing in F4-level cars isn’t a prospect — she’s an anomaly.
F1 Academy has tried to lower that age. The 2026 grid has eight drivers aged 18 or under among the fifteen full-timers. But the structural problem remains: when a driver exits F1 Academy at 19 or 20, the boys of her generation are already in F3 or even F2. They have two or three more seasons of mixed-grid experience, in progressively more powerful cars, under the real pressure of the ladder that leads to F1.
Constructors — those who pay, decide, and allocate seats — look at raw talent, age, and projection. A 17-year-old boy in F3 with two seasons of mixed F4 behind him is an investment. A 20-year-old girl leaving F1 Academy with two seasons against only other women is a question mark. And in a sport where an F2 seat costs over one million euros per season, nobody bets on question marks.
The Pipeline That Doesn’t Exist
If F1 Academy were a real pathway to Formula 1, its graduates would be climbing the ladder. F3. F2. F1 tests. Super licence. But the data tells a different story.
Marta García won the inaugural championship in 2023. She got a test with Sauber — one day, a one-off event — and moved to endurance racing with Iron Dames. She didn’t step up to F3.
Abbi Pulling won in 2024. She moved to the GB3 Championship — a British regional category — on a funded seat. She achieved a historic podium as the first woman to do so in that series. She’s still in GB3 in 2026. She hasn’t moved up to F3.
Doriane Pin won in 2025. Mercedes named her a development driver. She races in the European Le Mans Series in LMP2. She competed at the Le Mans 24 Hours. She didn’t move up to F3.
Maya Weug, 2025 runner-up, received a GT test with AF Corse in a Ferrari 296 GT3. She didn’t move up to F3.
See the pattern? The best F1 Academy drivers — the champions, the ones who dominated their category — don’t climb the single-seater ladder towards F1. They go to GT. They go to endurance. They go to regional championships. They go anywhere except Formula 3, which is the next real step on the road to Formula 1.
F1 Academy itself boasts that the championship awards super licence points: 10 for the champion, 7 for the runner-up, 5 for third. But those points are irrelevant if no graduate reaches a position where she can accumulate the 40 needed for an F1 super licence. You’d need to win four F1 Academy championships to reach 40 points. And you can only race for two seasons.
The maths don’t lie. The pipeline doesn’t work. It isn’t designed to work.
Those Who Needed No Cage
Before the FIA decided women needed protection, there were women competing against men. And winning.
Lella Lombardi competed in 17 F1 Grand Prix between 1974 and 1976. There was no women’s category. No subsidised seats. She got on the grid, raced against Lauda, Hunt, Fittipaldi, and scored. Half a point at the 1975 Spanish Grand Prix. Still the only point scored by a woman in F1 history, 51 years later.
Michèle Mouton climbed into a Group B Audi Quattro and won four World Championship rallies in 1981 and 1982. World championship runner-up. She raced against Walter Röhrl and Hannu Mikkola. Mouton didn’t want to be the best woman. She wanted to be at the level of the best, full stop. And she was.
Today, Mouton chairs the FIA’s Women in Motorsport Commission. Her position is crystal clear. In an interview with Le Figaro, Mouton stated that motorsport is one of the few sports where men and women can compete without distinction, alongside equestrianism and sailing. That there are no barriers to women’s progression in the sport. That limiting women to racing only against each other is discriminatory. That if these women-only championships don’t serve as a detection channel for drivers to move up to mixed categories, they remain something limited and discriminatory.
The person who knows most about women in motorsport within the FIA itself is saying the model is discriminatory. And the FIA presses on regardless.
Désiré Wilson won a race in the British Formula 1 Championship at Brands Hatch in 1980. The only woman to win an F1 race in any format. She raced at Le Mans three times. She didn’t ask for a separate category.
María de Villota was a Marussia test driver in F1 in 2012. She competed in endurance racing and the Superleague Formula against men. Her story is known to NEC readers. She didn’t wait for anyone to build her a bubble.
Sabine Schmitz broke records at the Nordschleife and competed for decades at the Nürburgring 24 Hours against mixed fields. She was one of the fastest drivers on the planet at that circuit, regardless of gender.
Katherine Legge, currently racing in the NASCAR Cup Series — one of the most brutal categories in American motorsport — has been one of the most outspoken critics of F1 Academy. Legge stated that if you don’t race against the best, you’ll never be the best. She said there’s absolutely no reason for a girls’ series when they’re perfectly capable of racing against the guys. Legge grew up karting alongside Susie Wolff, F1 Academy’s Managing Director. They raced together against men. And now Wolff runs a series that separates them.
There’s something deeply ironic about a woman who raced against men her entire life now running a championship that prevents women from doing the same.
The Business Behind Inclusion
Let’s talk money. Because when the narrative doesn’t add up, follow the money.
F1 Academy’s partners include Charlotte Tilbury, TAG Heuer, Tommy Hilfiger, Sephora (LVMH), Puma, and Hello Kitty. It has a Netflix docuseries produced by Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine. According to the 2025 Global F1 Fan Survey, F1 Academy is already the second most-followed series behind Formula 1 itself.
Read that again. A category with 174 hp cars, 18-car grids, and drivers no F1 team has signed is the second most-followed series. Why? Because it’s not a sporting programme. It’s a media product.
F1’s female audience grew from 8% in 2017 to over 42% in 2025, largely driven by Drive to Survive. F1 Academy captures that segment. It gives that audience a narrative to identify with. It sells them merchandise. It sells them beauty and fashion brands associated with the glamour of F1 circuits.
Only 10% of motorsport drivers are women. Female participation stands at 13% in karting and drops to 7% in higher categories. Those numbers don’t change by putting 18 women in F4 cars separated from men. They change by investing in mixed karting programmes, funding seats in mixed F4, F3, and F2 for the best female drivers, and proving that a woman can compete at the same level. Exactly what Lombardi, Mouton, de Villota, and Schmitz did without anyone subsidising an exclusive category for them.
But that doesn’t sell cosmetics. That doesn’t air on Netflix. That doesn’t generate the second most-followed series in the world.
F1 Academy isn’t a programme to put a woman in Formula 1. It’s a programme to sell the idea that they’re trying to put a woman in Formula 1.
What the FIA Should Actually Do
If you genuinely want a woman racing in Formula 1, the path is clear. It’s not a secret. It doesn’t require innovation. It requires money and commitment.
First, invest in mixed karting from the grassroots. Not karting championships for girls. Championships where boys and girls compete together, as already happens naturally. F1 Academy’s own Champions of the Future Academy Program supports 27 drivers in mixed karting in 2026, and the results already show: participants in the initiative claimed 25% of podium finishes in the OK-N Senior category last season. That works. Because they compete against everyone.
Second, fund mixed F4 seats for the best female karting graduates. Same car. Same grid. Same rivals. The €150,000 that F1 subsidises per F1 Academy car could fund competitive seats in national F4 championships where drivers would race against the real field.
Third, create a scholarship programme for F3 and F2 tied to performance in mixed grids, not segregated categories. If a driver proves in mixed F4 that she has the level, give her the F3 seat. If she delivers in F3, give her the step to F2. Mercedes has partially done this by naming Pin a development driver. But Pin will never reach F1 through the single-seater pathway because her post-F1 Academy trajectory has led to endurance, not F3.
Fourth, require F1 teams to channel their F1 Academy budgets into the real ladder. Ten of the eleven F1 teams sponsor cars in F1 Academy in their colours. That money, those places, those resources could fund female drivers in mixed F4, F3, or F2. They’d be racing against future F1 drivers, building a real track record, generating comparable data. Not circulating at 240 km/h in a bubble.
The Golden Cage
F1 Academy isn’t the FIA’s most serious problem. It isn’t direct financial corruption. It isn’t a results manipulation scandal. It’s something more subtle and, therefore, harder to fight: institutional paternalism disguised as progress.
The FIA has built a product that tells women: “You’re not ready to compete against men. We’ll give you your own space. Your sponsors. Your Netflix series. Your 174 horsepower. And when you’re ready, you can step up.”
But they’re never ready. Because the system isn’t designed for them to be. It’s designed for them to circulate. To generate content. To sell tickets. For Charlotte Tilbury to get its logo on a single-seater and Sephora to associate its brand with female empowerment.
Meanwhile, in the real world, Katherine Legge races in the NASCAR Cup Series against men and nobody asks if she needs a separate category. Michèle Mouton won World Championship rallies against the best drivers on the planet 44 years ago and today says that segregating women limits them. And Lella Lombardi scored in a Formula 1 Grand Prix in 1975 without anyone building her a golden cage.
174 horsepower. 240 km/h. Cosmetics sponsors. A Netflix docuseries. And zero drivers in Formula 3, Formula 2, or Formula 1.
The numbers speak. The data doesn’t lie. And the women who actually raced against men — those who earned it — are saying exactly the same thing: this isn’t equality. This is a cage.
A very pretty cage. Very well lit. Very well produced. But a cage.
Check you’re still alive.
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