Formula 1 is a closed system.
Ten teams.
Twenty drivers.
Seats are limited, and access is expensive.
For a long time, the mostly male audience reflected that.
Now that's changing.
The Shift
F1 is growing fast.And the new fans are mostly women.
According to Formula 1's own data, women now make up 42% of the global fanbase — up from just 8% in 2017.
That is a fivefold increase in less than a decade.
Female fans account for three out of every four new followers, and in 2025 alone, 48% of new fans were women.
Here is the contradiction the sport refuses to solve:
F1 is not gender-segregated, so any woman can theoretically race.
But as More Than Equal points out, no woman has started a Grand Prix since Lella Lombardi in 1976.
That is not a pipeline problem.
That is a half-century of the same outcome.
The fans changed.
The grid did not.
Canada First
Canada is ground zero for this shift.
The Canadian Grand Prix drew a record 352,000 spectators in 2025, and the 2024 race became the most-watched F1 event ever in Canada with 1.4 million viewers.
Nielsen data shows Canada had the second-largest growth in F1 fandom globally — a 31.5% increase in a single year.
Young women are driving that growth.
Women aged 16 to 24 are now the fastest-growing demographic in the sport.
At the track, the shift is visible — more women, more younger fans, more participation.
The shift is not just on screen. It is in the stands.
And if you are thinking about doing the Montreal Grand Prix weekend with some friends, this is the year to do it.
Brands are starting to follow.
Sephora.
LEGO.
Gatorade.
Charlotte Tilbury.
All now partner with F1 Academy.
The fans are here, and the money is starting to move.
Yet, the system is still catching up.
Inside the Helmet
Nicole Havrda is a Vancouver-born 20-year-old race car driver. For the 2025 F1 Academy season, she was a driver for an American Express-owned team.
She is Canada’s clearest prospect in a generation.
She didn’t grow up inside motorsport.
In a conversation on The Honest Talk, she described being pulled into the sport by her father. She didn’t even want to go at first. Then she walked by the track, the cars went past, and something clicked.
That moment was enough.
Now she’s building a career inside one of the most expensive systems in sport.
But like many drivers at her level, her development isn’t linear. She trains heavily on simulators because real track time is limited.
In Montreal, the structure made that clear: one practice session, then qualifying, then the race.
There isn’t much room to build.
It’s exposure more than development.
Visibility ≠ Development
F1 Academy is different from past attempts at a female series.
It runs on the same weekend as the main F1 race, in front of the same crowd.
That matters.
Visibility isn’t a bonus layer. It’s a structural decision.
Canada has committed to hosting the series in Montreal through 2028.
That’s a bet on visibility.
But the tension is still there:
The audience is ready, and the system is not.
Girls still enter karting later than boys, on average.
That’s not a talent gap. It’s access.
And access is solved with capital, not encouragement.
The Funding Gap
Motorsport is expensive.
Karting, F4, F3 — the ladder costs millions.
Progression depends on funding.
Women face a sponsorship gap, not because of performance, but because capital is still allocated defensively.
“Will she win?”
Instead of:
“Should she be backed?”
The money is following the new audience — that part is real.
But it’s landing in media, sponsorship activations, and brand partnerships.
Not in early-stage drivers.
Not in track time.
That’s the gap.
The BFT Take
Canada has the audience.
It has the driver.
It has the platform.
What it doesn’t have is alignment.
Why, after 50 years, is a woman on the grid still treated like a miracle — not a metric?
The next Canadian woman in Formula 1 won’t arrive because she believed in herself.
She’ll arrive because:
Someone funds her karting seat at age eight.
She gets real track time.
The system stops asking her to prove she belongs before giving her the car.
Until then:
The boom is female. The investment is not.
That’s not a pipeline problem.
It’s a priority problem.
Built For This.
The business of womanhood.
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