Danica Patrick Really Isn't Helping Women Get Into Motorsport

This past weekend’s Hungarian Grand Prix brought with it a new experiment from Formula 1: A specific, kid-friendly broadcast designed for younger audiences. Offering guidance to a broadcast crew composed of teenagers was Danica Patrick, a former NASCAR and IndyCar driver turned occasional Sky Sports F1 commentator. There was just one problem: Patrick was actively discouraging about the mere prospect of women being one day capable of racing in F1 thanks to their “feminine mind.”

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During the race broadcast, a young commentator named Scarlett asked Patrick when we could see a woman racing in F1. Patrick’s answer started out fairly reasonably, as transcribed by Alanis King and confirmed myself:

As I’ve always said in my whole career, it takes 100 guys to come through to find a good one, and then it takes 100 girls. That takes a long time to find a good one, right? It just, the odds are not in favor of there always being one or being many of them.

In this context, Patrick is absolutely correct. With fewer women in the racing ranks, finding someone of F1-level ability can be more difficult when compared to the slew of men who take up racing each year. We’ll struggle to find that really talented woman out of 100 women racers specifically because it will take longer for those 100 women to get into motorsport.

But then Patrick continued:

And at the end of thee day, I think that the nature of the sport is masculine. It’s aggressive. You have to, you know, handle the car — not only just the car, because that’s a skill, but the mindset that it takes to be really good is something that’s not normal in a feminine mind, in a female mind.

You have to be, like, for me, I know if somebody tries to bow up or make it difficult on me, I would go into like an aggressive kill mode, right? You just want to go after them, and that’s just not a natural feminine thought. I say that because I’ve asked my friends about it, and they’re like, “Yeah, that’s not how I think.”

Patrick is undoubtedly the most successful woman driver of her era, and it’s certainly worth hearing out her thoughts on the subject — but we don’t necessarily have to wholeheartedly accept them for what they are. Patrick has, after all, recently made headlines for her podcast, where she hosted a discussion on the possibility of aliens editing human DNA to limit lifespans. And if you’ve been following Patrick for a while, you’ll likely know that her controversial opinions on health, wellness, and sociological concerns span back several years.

Yes, we should hear Patrick out. We should also understand that it’s entirely possible she holds limiting beliefs about women generally, or that what she understands as a “masculine” mindset could instead be more accurately called a “competitive” mindset.

More than anything else, though, it’s important to note that a sporting broadcast designed for young children is perhaps not the ideal venue to share a deeply discouraging message to a large subset of young viewers.