50 years since a woman scored (half) an F1 point, why aren't we closer to another?

Today marks 50 years — a full half century — since a woman finished in the points in a world championship grand prix.

Lella Lombardi’s sixth-place for March at Montjuïch Park isn’t just the last points finish for a woman; it’s the only one in history.

Since then, the bizarre absence of women in motor sport — especially as drivers — has been examined time and time again. The same questions come up over and over: ‘Do women have the physical strength to be in F1?’ (yes!), or ‘What can be done to increase female participation at the grassroots level?’

But despite the endless conversations and the introduction of high-profile women-only racing series, it still feels like we’re no closer to having a woman on the Formula 1 grid.

A quick glance across other motorsport paddocks shows this is not the norm. Only earlier this month we had three-time W Series champion Jamie Chadwick winning at the 4 Hours of Barcelona: a victory in the LMP2 class of the 2025 European Le Mans Series (ELMS) on her prototype racing debut. At the same event, the three women in the Iron Dames team secured a dominant win in the LMGT3 category, while sisters Hamda and Amna Al Qubaisi picked up a podium at their first endurance race in the support series.

Yes, ELMS and endurance racing are very different to the challenges you face in single-seaters, but it shows there’s no lack of talented women who are ready to get behind the wheel.

And yet, as the F1 world championship celebrates its 75th anniversary, Lombardi remains the only woman on the score-sheet, with half a point — the result of the harrowing 1975 Spanish Grand Prix being stopped early when the rear wing on Rolf Stommelen’s Hill GH1 failed, sending it into the barriers, killing four people.

A year later, at the 1976 Austrian Grand Prix Lombardi raced to 12th place. Since then, no woman has started a world championship race.

The trailblazing Maria Teresa de Filippis had been the first woman to take part in the world championship in 1958 when she started three grands prix with Maserati.

After Lombardi, Divina Galica, Desiré Wilson and Giovanna Amati also entered races, but failed to start them with the most recent being in 1992 – 33 years ago.

There was a small glimmer of hope that this statistic would change when Susie Wolff was handed the metaphorical keys to a Williams in 2014, taking part in free practice for the British Grand Prix as the team’s test and development driver. The opportunity meant Wolff became the first woman to take part in a grand prix weekend in over two decades, but her chance to impress was abruptly cut short after just four laps due to an engine failure.

She was given another go at the German Grand Prix, setting a time two-tenths off the experienced Felipe Massa – an 11-time F1 race winner – to finish the session in 15th. Another two practice sessions followed in 2015, before Wolff announced her retirement from racing.

Wolff is now Managing Director of the F1 Academy, a women-only support series to Formula 1 that’s in its third year. It has attracted the attention of big sponsors such as TAG Heuer, American Express and global make-up brand Charlotte Tilbury, as well as all 10 F1 teams each lend their support and branding to one of the cars.

It’s a high-profile, well-funded and highly professional initiative that’s a welcome stepping stone for talented women, but a stepping stone is all that the Formula 4-based series is at the moment, sitting below the Formula 2 and Formula 3 series that lead to Formula 1.

While it does offer superlicence points — the champion receives 10 of the 40 needed to race in F1 — they expire after three years, which is likely to be before any graduate makes it to the fringes of grand prix racing.

The most recent F1 Academy champion is 21-year-old Abbi Pulling, who also became the first woman to win a British F4 race last year.

Pulling finished on the podium at every F1 Academy round last season, driving for the Alpine-supported Rodin team, and had been part of Alpine’s junior programme for three years. But despite her success, she didn’t renew her contract after “lengthy discussions” and is now competing in GB3, again with Rodin.

Despite the series’ name and its place on F1 race weekends, the links between drivers and the F1 teams that they represent are limited: they have access to facilities and mentorship and associated with development programmes — which have their value — but their responsibilities are slim: at this stage of their careers, none have a simulator or development role within F1.