OPEN ROAD

F1 ACADEMY, THE ALL-WOMEN RACING LEAGUE LAUNCHED IN 2023, IS AIMING ITS DRIVERS AT THE SPORT'S HIGHEST ECHELON

- DAN ADLER

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.