Maria Teresa de Filippis made history as the first female in 1958 when she took part in the Belgium Grand Prix, finishing 10th.<\/p>\n
It took 15 years to see the next woman in an F1 car. The legendary Lella Lombardi took part in a record 17 grands prix, including the Spanish GP in 1975, where she finished sixth, becoming the first and so far only woman to score points. <\/p>\n
In 2014, Susie Wolff made the first female appearance in an official F1 session for more than two decades, when she drove a Williams car at the British Grand Prix.<\/p>\n
Wolff, who is now the managing director of the all-female series F1 Academy, has been instrumental in helping more females get into the sport and was one of the “inspirations” behind Chadwick wanting to drive an F1 car. <\/p>\n
Chadwick is not the only woman to have driven an F1 car this year. Doriane Pin, who won the F1 Academy title in 2025, became the first female to drive a Mercedes in April. <\/p>\n
But despite the progress, no woman has started an F1 race since Lombardi, 50 years ago. <\/p>\n
Chadwick believed that women are “capable of competing in Formula 1”, but that there “shouldn’t be a timeline on it”.<\/p>\n
“I definitely believe the talent is out there,” she said, adding: “And I’m excited.<\/p>\n
“Me doing this test and Williams giving opportunities to female drivers for example, will hopefully lead to a race seat one day.”<\/p>\n
But with only 22 seats in F1, it is extremely tough for any driver to break into. <\/p>\n
Chadwick said: “You’re looking at F2, F3 champions not getting seats and you realise that there’s more talent than there are seats often available. Then you narrow it down to a female driver and it’s even tougher and an even smaller talent pool.<\/p>\n
“But I genuinely believe with everything that we’re doing now to support female talent it’s only going to lead in a positive direction.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Maria Teresa de Filippis made history as the first female in 1958 when she took part in the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":612307,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[111,139,69,213],"class_list":["post-612306","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/612306","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=612306"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/612306\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/612307"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=612306"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=612306"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=612306"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}