F1®: The Movie, women, and the collective sigh of disappointment

With F1®: The Movie plastered across every billboard in the world, fans everywhere have been anticipating this fast-paced take on the pinnacle of motorsport. Female fans held their breath to see how we would be portrayed, and spoiler alert, it’s not great. Like, really not great.

As soon as the F1®: The Movie was announced, there were murmurs of concern. 

For starters, we were all wondering why Brad Pitt was cast, the oldest F1 driver in history.    Then, we had the fear that Hollywood would be swooping in and sensationalising an already sensational sport, that cars would be flying through the air at every given opportunity and every other scene would be over dramatisations of some of the most bizarre incidents motorsport has ever seen. The biggest concern for us female fans was the most daunting: how are you going to portray us? 

To summarise, the only answer I can give you is: not well. The film is drenched in outdated cliches, the female characters seem to fumble in the dark until a man shows them how to do their job, and the diversity is astoundingly lacking where the women are concerned. 

Now, it’s really not all bad. Iconic strategists Bernie Collins and Ruth Buscombe were commissioned to consult on strategy and keep this element as realistic as possible. This translates well - the racing really isn’t the issue at all. In fact, that part is fascinating… for good reasons. 

APXGP F1 Team's car on track. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

First looks at the movie showed a woman in the eye of the storm. Kerry Condon who plays Kate, the first female technical director in F1 history, was promising, right? Whilst Condon’s character shines as the only real person amidst a swathe of macho caricatures, she is ultimately destined to be Pitt’s love interest, a woman who hasn’t been able to build a capable race car until Sonny Hayes - retired for 30 years, and going off a manual he skimmed through the night before, mind you - comes along and takes charge. In fact, it’s dubbed a ‘shit box’ until Pitt’s character overhauls it. And then, just like that, it works! Hooray!

To make matters worse, the inner workings at APXGP F1 Team tell an infuriating tale. The only woman in the pit crew can’t seem to fathom what a tyre is and the PR officer doesn’t appear to know what PR stands for. A more in depth look leads us to Joshua Pearce - Pitt’s ruthless rookie team-mate played by Idris - and his family life. Pearce’s mother, Bernadette, is the only woman of colour and they make it blatantly apparent for all the wrong reasons. Bernadette is a walking stereotype of the typical mother, existing solely to cook and clean for her successful son. It's upsetting to see a woman of colour portrayed this way, revolving around her son and reinforcing some severely outdated stereotypes on the big screen. As a woman from a minority background myself, it’s so demeaning to see representation twisted this way. 

Don’t even get me started on Simone Ashley. The Bridgerton actress filmed for a year only to be completely cut from the film. Poof! Gone without a trace. She was set to play Idris’s love interest, collective sigh, but at least she would have been on the screen. 

Damson Idris and Simone Ashley on set. Credit: Digital Spy via Warner Bros

The whole thing reeks of Rely to Survive, with women needing men to thrive, something that is so misguided in today’s sporting landscape. Successful women line the grid as engineers, media officers, stewards, strategists, presenters and drivers in feeder series’, so seeing them portrayed as aimless spare parts until the super cool, super important men toddle along is genuinely devastating. The plot feels like an endless line of cliches crammed into the space of three hours, what with the widely inappropriate forbidden love story and the whole ‘just make the car fast’ thing that’s going on.  

A glimmer of hope comes in the form of getting to see the incredible female actresses at work, with film critics across the board commending Kerry Condon for her stellar performance. Some even promote her as the only good thing about the film, which, in my opinion, speaks volumes about the state of things. On that note, a particular zinger from the film comes when a young female fan in a nightclub asks rookie Pearce if he can introduce her to Carlos Sainz Jr. While this moment is hailed as a line that gets all the laughs in the cinema, I find it cheapens the whole thing. Female fans are constantly hounded for only enjoying the sport for the ‘attractive’ drivers, with fans in Austria this past weekend claiming that male fans were taunting them by asking who Lewis Hamilton even drives for, and throwing water at them. Throwaway lines like this one would be okay, if the film actually did some work to present women as capable and brilliant in other aspects, but on its own, it leaves a bitter taste when the laughter stops. 

Credit where it’s due, the F1 ®: The Movie is a visual masterpiece and the camera work really does present the rush of adrenaline from behind the wheel, as well as the buzz you experience as a viewer. It's a shame that it is marred by a dark cloud of loosely veiled misogyny and the two-dimensional characterisation of women that could have been much stronger role models. Yes, it’s Hollywood, and yes, relationships can develop in the paddock, but once you’ve chosen to make the technical director a woman, it’s careless to diminish her to an engineer that can only succeed when the conventionally attractive heartthrob swaggers into the garage. 

I’m disappointed. I dedicate my weekends to this sport, cheering and screaming and loving every second. I can’t help but feel let down, as many women do, by the sheer audacity to present us this way. The value of a woman - her intelligence, confidence, capability - should never be measured this way. But what do I know? According to the sentiment of the film, the answer is: not much.