Courtney Crone has been on wheels since she was just a few years old. Her father had been a competitive driver, but success in motorsports is highly correlated with money. When his funds ran low, he started maintaining vintage cars for a living. Eventually, he passed the bug to his only child, a daughter, which allowed him to poke at the traditional expectations for such passions’ heirs.
“He likes to joke,” Crone recalls, “and say I was this little boy and he put me on a motorcycle and it all took off from there.”
Now 24, Crone belongs to a class of young women drivers at the elite tier of a steep hierarchy. Beginning this year she will compete in F1 Academy, a female-only racing series founded by Formula 1 in 2023 with an eye toward preparing its drivers to aim higher still—ideally, all the way up to F1 itself, long an all-male competition.
Racing at these levels is intensely niche and intrinsically neurotic. Crone fits a recognizable pattern: bred nearly from birth and, by her own account, engaged in a lifelong mental tactical battle against herself. When we spoke she was at the Thermal Club near Palm Springs, California, a country club with a racetrack where she coaches. “Every driver’s individual in what makes them tick,” she says, including, in some instances, “just pure chaos, angry behind the wheel.”
That struggle makes for great reality TV, as it turns out. The Netflix docuseries Formula 1: Drive to Survive, which premiered in 2019, put a Real Housewives sheen on the sport’s psychological aspects, ratcheting up its anxieties and rivalries. The show made F1, in all its European trappings, a genuine pop culture phenomenon in America, with new races in Las Vegas and Miami, and created a fresh global fan base primed to understand athletes as celebrities above all else.
F1 Academy managing director Susie Wolff, a former pro driver and a Drive to Survive star in her own right—she is married to Mercedes’s billionaire team principal, Toto Wolff—saw an opportunity in the surge. Like many leading players in the sport, she lives in Monaco, but was in her London office when she reflected on her own path. “I didn’t have any outstanding female role models,” she says.
Her parents encouraged her to “achieve anything that my brother could achieve,” she continues, “but I do think in this day and age I would’ve benefited hugely from having a role model that had done what I would want to achieve.”
This year, as it gears up for its third go-around, F1 Academy will attempt to tap into the entertainment space that Drive to Survive carved out. Reese Witherspoon’s production company, Hello Sunshine, trailed the competitors during the second season, and a docuseries will premiere on Netflix later this year.
Wolff emphasizes that she wouldn’t have wanted to be involved in the academy if she felt that it was “a diversity box-ticking exercise.” While F1 is the rare sport in which gender does not amount to a physical edge, it is rooted in long-running traditions and entrenched pipelines, especially at its upper rungs. But the profile of what makes for a successful F1 driver has begun to shift—or at least, the Netflix-viewing public has begun to acquire a different view of it.
“One of the things that every driver goes through,” Chloe Chambers tells me, “is having the off-track stuff be more work than the on-track.”
Chambers, 20, was born in China and raised in New York’s Hudson Valley, where her British-born adoptive father was an F1 enthusiast. When she was still in grade school, they found a track near their house and she got started.
Ambitious as she was, the public-facing side of the job didn’t come naturally. “I definitely was way more on the quiet, shy side than I am now,” Chambers says. “As I’ve grown up, I’ve gained that confidence to go out and speak to people and be able to turn on my social mode.” Last season she went with Amna and Hamda Al Qubaisi, Emirati-born F1 Academy drivers and sisters, to their grandmother’s house, where she spent time with birds, deer, turtles, dogs, and goats. The Witherspoon-backed cameras were rolling.
“Before, I’d say, ‘Oh yeah, I’m going to go race at whatever F1 race,’ ” Chambers says, remembering interactions with classmates, “and they’d be like, ‘Oh, that’s cool, but we don’t get it.’ ”
“But now I post on social media,” she goes on, “and I get a bunch of messages from people that I went to high school with.”
Since its premiere, Drive to Survive has spawned a crowd of imitators. The show did not invent the behind-the scenes confessional style of sports documentary, but its runaway success in popularizing F1 has hardened the format into a distinctly modern genre, particularly in more esoteric competitive corners. There are now similarly conceived shows about professional surfing, rugby, golf, NASCAR, and tennis. Wolff’s favorite, she tells me, is Tour de France: Unchained, another Netflix production that follows professional cyclists.
“That’s one of the challenges,” she says. “There’s so much content out there, there’s so much different sports. How do we break through and actually create our own fan base that people are tuning in to watch F1 Academy, that they’re educated as to what we are and why we exist?”
The sport’s up-and-coming athletes, who grew up on social media, are increasingly aware that their results on the track will only account for a portion of their overall performance. In May 2020 the late rally driver Ken Block had his 13-year-old daughter, Lia, riding shotgun. The goal was to teach her to do doughnuts. He explained the technique and demonstrated. When Lia got behind the wheel, the camera caught bits of apprehension—but mostly enthusiasm. “That’s it,” Ken said near the end of his YouTube video about the exercise. “She struggled a bit but she did it, and I’m really stoked.”
“My dad, most of his career was built around social media,” Lia Block tells me from her home in Park City, Utah. Ken, who also cofounded DC Shoes, found his most devout audience on YouTube. “It’s the thing to get sponsorship and get funding because motorsport, especially the F1 world, is very expensive,” Lia says. “That’s the reason why it’s so elite and not everybody can do it.”
She has a composed and easy manner, a counterpoint to her self-identification as an “adrenaline junkie.” Block, who turned 18 in October and was competing in rally races by 15, was in some sense anointed. After her father’s death in a 2023 snowmobile accident, his friend and X Games star Travis Pastrana described her as a natural heir. The legacy didn’t seem to weigh on her.
“You have to have some sort of fearlessness with some things,” she says, almost offhandedly. “But you also have to be dedicated. It has to be something that you want so bad that you will do anything to get it.”
In this new era of F1—of most sports with commercial designs—it is a necessary attribute but perhaps not a sufficient one. The competition is the other drivers, but it is also the other Netflix series and online personalities. Still, Block thinks her prospects and those of the young women around her will ultimately hinge on a more timeless matter.
“It’s such a big game playing chicken back and forth with yourself in the car,” she says. “You’re having to push those limits that usually aren’t pushed.”
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