Bernie Collins says there is every chance a female driver will make it to F1 – but it will require a far greater influx of young girls into karting.

F1 Academy, the primary female-only racing championship won last year by British star Abbi Pulling, begins its third season this weekend in Shanghai alongside round two of F1.

Finding F1’s next female driver: Karting the key?

The cream of female motorsport compete in two races, on Saturday and Sunday, at the start of an eight-month schedule which also takes in Jeddah, Miami, Montreal, Zandvoort, Singapore and Las Vegas.

They do so in the wake of Danica Patrick, the former IndyCar and NASCAR driver, opining that the nature of F1 is “masculine” and the “female mind” is not best suited to it.

Those comments are more than a year old but resurfaced recently to the annoyance of, amongst others, More Than Equal co-founder David Coulthard.

Collins, former F1 strategy engineer for Aston Martin, countered: “I believe it’s 100 per cent possible we will get a female F1 driver.

“I’ve never driven anything like a Formula One car, let’s be clear, so my knowledge base is not one to comment on the physical strengths required.

“But F1 cars now have power steering so it’s about getting the right seat set-up, the right set-up of the car to make that happen.”

Collins, Sky F1’s strategy analyst, continued: “Obviously some tracks are more physical than others but the problem that I see is something very different.

“It’s that only one per cent, or so, of junior karters are female. You’re not going to get one of the best 20 F1 drivers from that one per cent. The numbers just aren’t there.

“What we need to do as broadcasters, as people in the sport, is actually encourage parents to put their little girls in karts at ages six, seven, eight and nine and get that karting percentage up.

“Because if we do increase that number, I really don’t see any reason we can’t achieve it.”

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In an exclusive interview with Planet F1 three months ago, Coulthard admitted he could not answer when F1 would have its first female world champion.

“But it will be sooner,” he said, “due to initiatives like More Than Equal and F1 Academy than it would have otherwise have been.”

Up until recently one of the major roadblocks was sponsorship. Drive To Survive has significantly helped to change that.

Since the advent of the Netflix fly-on-the-wall doc, the percentage of female F1 fans has risen from eight to 40. That has not gone unnoticed among big firms looking to align their brand with motorsport.

“That 40% viewership means the market is changing fast,” said Collins. “We’ve got Charlotte Tilbury sponsoring F1 Academy, which is massive. We’ve got Elemis sponsoring Aston Martin. That tells us female sponsorship is there.

“Imagine the hit it would be if Charlotte Tilbury sponsored the next F1 female driver. Imagine the marketing campaign. So while there used not to be money there, I think there is now.

“The question is, can we significantly raise the female proportion of karting, because you don’t want to put anyone in a car that’s not good enough. Get it to 10% and you’ve got the chance to get the one that’s good enough to make it to F1.”

Collins, trackside in China this weekend, has been in and around F1 since leaving university in 2009 and securing a place on the graduate trainee programme with McLaren. She has worked closely with Jenson Button and Nico Hulkenberg, Force India and Aston Martin.

“From a landscape perspective there obviously are more women with much more involvement in the sport now than when I started,” she said.

“We’ve talked about the 40% female fan base and I think, internally in the teams, the ratio of mechanics and engineers will hopefully start to shift more in line with the fan base.

“If 40% of your young engineers are female, which I think is nowhere near that in an engineering class, you should start to see more coming into F1. I think there’s definitely scope for that to happen.”

Asked if she finds the F1 paddock and surrounds a welcoming place for females, Collins nodded.

“My personal story is not everyone’s personal story,” she added. “Of course people have had different experiences. I joined McLaren in ’09. I think I was the only designer in the mechanical design office that was female.

“But the numbers are so limited in F1 and the job so vast that people really worked hard in that design office to make sure I was working to the best of my ability. There was nobody going to allow me to sit in the corner and fade away.

“I’ve spoken to some people outside of F1 in engineering who have gone to much bigger corporations, and actually there they have been allowed to sink a little bit because there are so many people and they don’t really need to be working that hard.

“In F1 everyone needs to be on their game. There was never enough resource for me to sit on the pit wall as a token female, just to make the numbers up.

“You had to be absolutely the best person they could put in that position. I felt there was a lot of support to make sure you were getting the best out of every young engineer that joins.

“Of course there can be challenges. When you’re in the pit lane there’s a lot of banter, it’s long hours, you’re tired, you’re grumpy, all these things. It is a tough environment at times.

“I always would take the emotional baggage of a bad call with me a bit further and it took me years to get round that.

“But once you get over those things I found there was good support to try to get every young engineer working to the best of their ability. And I really benefited from that.”

Sky Sports is the exclusive home of Formula 1 in the UK & Ireland.

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