All I know is that I laughed out loud when I heard that the two women racing for the first time ever in NASCAR crashed…into each other! Terribly ironic.
If you’re asserting that a female body is inherently less able to tolerate the high and cyclical G-forces associated with racing, I’m gonna have to politely ask for a cite.
I suspect the basic answers are in the old filling-the-pipeline argument and the old having-to-put-up-with-too-much-bullshit argument. Those alone have not entirely prevented a few determined women from competing at the sport’s highest level.
No, no I’m not. As far as I understand G-force endurance is equal between the sexes or possibly even superior in women. It would be sheer muscle force that gives men a slight advantage. For instance; steering an F1 becomes increasingly heavy as speed increases, which is a necessity in order to maintain stability, otherwise it could technically speaking be resolved through an electric servo. This would mean that fewer women would be able to approach maximum possible speed through curves (or lose centimeters in turning radius) and hence wouldn’t be competing at equal terms. This obviously doesn’t mean that there aren’t women that could be equal or even better than most or all men, but the obvious fact that men on average have a higher muscle mass ratio would give that there would be statistically fewer women that would, which in combination with the non-gender specific qualities an F1 racer needs to have leads to very few women that could compete with the boys. Then again… If there was a female F1 circus these differences would be eliminated, and here I do think that it is social barriers and ingrown gender roles that stands in the way.
Maybe Sarah Kavanagh will prove Coulthard wrong. Looking at her site I doubt that she struggles to attract sponsors.
Seems to me Sarah Fisher just might be as good a race driver as Alex Yoong, whaddaya say?