In the 99-year history of the Indy 500, just nine women have started the legendary race. To put that in perspective, consider the numbers: Each year brings 33 open-wheeled indy cars to the track's front straight, and each race car holds one driver. That's thousands of starting slots. Racing has always been a male-heavy sport, and most of the 500's teams are dominated by men. Same for the media center, the administration buildings, everywhere but the grandstands.
Beth Paretta and Katherine Legge aim to change that. Last Friday, during qualifying rounds for this year's 500, the two announced the formation of Grace Autosport, an IndyCar team that will attempt to build its organization around females.
It's a pioneering effort---race engineering, aerodynamic development, marketing, and PR will all be chiefed by women, and the team hopes to include women in its over-the-wall pit crew. Sponsorship and a car are said to be lined up, and the group's first race will be the 100th running of the Indy 500, on May 29, 2016.
Both women bring significant experience to the table. Legge, a 34-year-old British driver, will be in the car. She has started the 500 twice, most recently in 2013, and spent several years driving full-time in Germany's prestigious DTM touring-car series. She was the first woman to win a developmental (read: ladder-series) open-wheel pro race in North America, in a Toyota-powered Atlantic, at Long Beach, in 2005. She currently drives in both the Tudor championship and the all-electric Formula E series. She's also an ambassador for the FIA's pioneering Women in Motorsports Commission.
Paretta, a respected industry veteran and the former director of SRT Motorsports (essentially Dodge's racing efforts, and a division of FiatChrysler), will be the team principal.
WIRED spoke with both women---Paretta at the Speedway, and Legge separately, by phone---following their announcement. They talked at length on racing, teaching kids to dream, and the real reason they're going to Indy in twelve months.
What prompted you to start all this?
__Beth Paretta:__Katherine is the STEM [Science, Technology, Engineering, Math] ambassador for Girl Scouts. The Scouts are such a wonderful organization, and they've been doing a lot of things to sort of captivate the imagination of young girls along different career paths.
Why racing?
__BP:__Automotive engineers are retiring at a faster rate than they're being hired. A lot of major companies are actively recruiting at the college level, sometimes in high school, to get people to go into engineering. It occurred to me that their work would be a lot easier if we started showing kids. Planting the seed earlier.
All of us have our story about how we got into racing, usually as a kid, watching a car at the track. Most engineers will say something similar. They might've seen a car on the road, and they were interested in pulling it apart. So it was having that lightbulb moment: I was captivated by this, and what are we doing to actively captivate other kids?
And girls in particular?
BP: Because there aren't many of us, right? I've been reading car magazines since I was about five. And I was just mesmerized. Whenever I'd flip through channels on TV, any kind of racing, I would just be mesmerized and watch it. I don't know why, but I was. I grew up near Lime Rock in Connecticut, and I would ask my dad to take me to the track. Just getting closer to it ... like anything else, you kind of get hooked. Knowing that, if we can excite kids and show them that engineering is part of racing? Maybe we can make future engineers.
The Indy 500 has had a handful of bright female lights. Why put a team like this here instead of in sports cars or NASCAR?
BP: Indy has already seen a lot of firsts. But the 500 is still the single biggest single-day sporting event in the world. It gets a lot of eyes, a lot of casual fans, like the Super Bowl. So on the race side, you get a wider audience. At the track, everyone's lovely and supportive, but you don't necessarily see that on TV. You don't see that there's a place for women. With Indy, since there have been a few women who have made waves there, we knew the sport would be welcoming.
And when you look at sports cars, because drivers share the car ... the focus tends to be on the car. It's the Porsche versus the Viper versus the BMW. NASCAR is a wonderful setting, but the team [rivalries] become the story, because some have been there for 30 years. IndyCar, there's one car, one driver, and it feels more laser-focused.
Katherine Legge: Indy is something you can't put your finger on. You know how some people have a special aura about them? This track has that. You fly over it, you get goosebumps. You drive past it, you get goosebumps.
I've done the 500 twice, but the first time I did it, I was so focused that I didn't let myself take it all in. You know, when you're standing on the grid and they do the flyover, and you get "Back Home Again in Indiana," and it's just like ... It's the Indy 500. It's indescribable. It's unlike anywhere you've ever driven before. But the atmosphere---once it gets under your skin, it's like an addiction. You want to do it and you want to win it, and it's just ... special. I don't think anybody can put how or why into words.
Beth, what drew you to Katherine?
BP: There are good women drivers out there, obviously. Katherine's strength is versatility. She's great on ovals, she's great on road courses. She's the kind of driver who can jump into a lot of cars and be very good very quickly, not fazed.
And she also has done a lot of her stuff on her own. She hasn't been part of a big marketing juggernaut, throughout her career, where she was put on a path. Racing's a fickle place. You can have talent, but you need some luck, you need to know the right people to get in the right situation. As much as the educational initiative is important to us, we also wanted to create a place where women would get a shot.
And this is going to sound funny: It's not getting a shot "because they're women." Because, OK, if I'm an [old-school] team owner, I'll put you in my extra car because I might get a few extra photos, more exposure. You're a part of that, you don't get coached or cultivated in the process. There are ladders for drivers, and it's just as important to have ladders for PR and marketing.
When you see the people that are winning at the 500, or teams winning championships, it's built on years of getting comfortable and working with each other. There's not been an initiative to really pull women into that.
Katherine, you began racing in Europe. How do gender attitudes in motorsport there differ from America? Are we pretty much at the same point in the curve?
KL: No, unfortunately not, which is why I'm here! (Laughs.)
The USA is leaps and bounds ahead of everywhere else. Europe is not so far behind, but I went back to Europe in 2008, 2009, and 2010 and raced for Audi. Changing attitudes, but still behind. As part of my role as a female-driver ambassador for the FIA, which is [motorsport's] governing body, we hear from every kind of country and region. And there are still countries where women aren't allowed to drive on the road. So we are very, very fortunate to be so far along in the evolution of things.
I've been going to races for as long as I can remember, but even here, the thing that always amazes me is just how male-heavy the sport appears to an outsider.
BP: It's changing, but slowly. Women tend to have the confidence and believe that we can do something only when we see another woman doing it.
That seems like a huge generalization.
BP: It's funny, because I read that quote in a book maybe a year ago. And it stopped me in my tracks because ... I did it to myself.
There's this woman who works for Chevrolet called Alba Colon. And she's amazing—she's the lead engineer for the NASCAR engine program. She gives a lot of talks for STEM to high school students and groups. The story she tells is, when she was a young girl in Puerto Rico, she wanted to be an astronaut because of Sally Ride. And she later decided, for whatever reason, that she didn't want that path. She saw an SAE race team and was exposed to racing for the first time and captivated by it. The point of her talk is, it's OK if your dream changes. If you have a dream, you go for it, maybe you change your mind. But it's OK if you do.
My takeaway was the part about Sally Ride. I mean, she could've wanted to be an astronaut by watching Buzz Aldrin. And then it happened to me. A bunch of years ago, I was working for Aston Martin and reading Automotive News, the trade magazine. There's always new stories about promotions, and there was one about a woman who was just appointed as an executive at a big company. My background fit the job, and it struck me that I might be better suited for it. I built my network for two years [with that in mind], and coincidentally or not, I was later recruited for a similar position, at FiatChrysler as a director of motorsport.
And then here it is, a year ago, and I read this quote about women only knowing when they see it. And I said, "Oh my god, I did this myself." I'd been reading that magazine for ten years, men's appointments to new roles, and I never once thought, I could do that?
So shame on me. We do it. We absolutely do it.
KL: When I was growing up, there was almost nobody female racing in Europe at that time, successfully anyway. So I never thought that it was really an option for me. I just was very fortunate and very determined and I ended up getting there.
Then when I came over here, I saw people like [Indy racer] Sarah Fisher---you kind of open your eyes to the possibilities. And that's been really showcased since the announcement. We've had a number of young girls say "How do I get involved? I really want to do this, I didn't know that it was possible."
We're not being feministic. We're just trying to showcase that there are enough really talented women to make a successful team.
There's so much baggage attached to gender in this business.
BP: It's subliminal. It's not like anyone's actively doing it or doesn't want it to change. It's just the way things have always been.
I told Jessica Rowe, our junior engineer, the Automotive News story last week. Then I asked her how she got into engineering. She said, "I grew up in Kansas, and my dad's an engineer, and he would take me to NASCAR races, and I loved it. When I was in school, Danica Patrick was on the front page. But I didn't want to be a racing driver---it just didn't appeal to me. Then, a couple of years ago, I read about Leena Gade, the lead engineer on Audi's prototype program." Gade has won the 24 Hours of Le Mans a couple of times. Jessica told me, "When I saw Lena Gade, I knew I could become a racing engineer."
One thing I've had to say to the ladies, we've had a few butterflies leading up to the announcement. We're---engineers and PR people---not used to drawing attention to gender. If anything, we'd minimize it. We all work very hard, and none of us have gotten any doors opened because we're women. So pointing that out is uncomfortable.
Even if you're not doing it for gain, someone's going to assume that.
BP: It's implied that you're doing it to get doors opened.
You appear to have the right reasons.
BP: Because of all the girls that are waiting to see Sally Ride and Leena Gade. Making sure that everybody knows that, if they want to be here, they can be here. We'd love to get more women into racing, but if their dream changes, and they want to design that passenger car, or go into space, then ... victory.
Interviews were not conducted simultaneously. Responses have been edited for length and clarity.
