There are many reasons why Katherine Legge is the only female driver starting in this year’s Indianapolis 500. The women’s movement that once promised to bring many more into racing appears to have stalled.
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Instead, Legge is the only female driver who will start “The Greatest Spectacle in Racing” on Sunday.The women’s movement that began when Janet Guthrie qualified for the first time in 1977, gained traction with Lyn St. James in the 1980s and hit its stride with the arrival of Patrick in the early 2000s has stalled out. By 2020, not only was there no female driver in the field for the first time since 1999, but none even tried for the first time since 1991.
Jamie Chadwick is the only woman this season in Indy NXT, the top rung in IndyCar’s feeder system, and she’s struggled for Andretti Autosport after arriving from the now-inactive, all-woman W Series, which had aimed to provide female drivers more racing opportunities. Lindsay Brewer is likewise alone a step down at the USF Pro 2000 level, and few young women occupy the highest levels of European karting, which is often the first step for drivers with Formula One aspirations.
“The desire has to be so high to go through all the hardships that you have to go through to do it,” she said, “that I think a lot of them, it’s just too much. But the ones who do make it through, I think that lesson helps them down the line in racing.”At the highest levels, drivers often must secure their own sponsorship to help offset the immense funding required of an IndyCar program. That can be difficult for women in the male-dominated sport.
Andretti acknowledged that it’s harder for them to succeed, though, and brings up an entirely different reason. The car itself these days is physically demanding to drive, and young women in particular sometimes struggle to muscle it around the track.“My time in IndyCar felt like I got a really great shake at it, and I drove for a lot of great teams. But it’s kind of like a stock market: It goes up, it goes down, it goes up, it goes down,” Patrick said.
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