Seven years ago, just before commissioning the Netflix series that would make names such as Max Verstappen and Yuki Tsunoda at least vaguely familiar to much of Mr. and Mrs. America, the bigwigs at Formula One decided to strike a blow for women’s equality — by firing a few dozen girls. Grid girls, specifically.
Also known as “umbrella girls,” grid girls have been a fixture in Formula One and other race series since the mid-’70s. Don’t be fooled by the term itself, which has always undersold what a grid girl or umbrella girl is charged with doing at an event. The core job was traditionally to hold an umbrella over the open cockpits of formula and prototype race cars on the starting grid before the race, thus preventing the drivers from overheating in their triple-layer fire suits and helmets before the green flag drops. It’s an essential task — when I race my open-cockpit cars in the Sports Car Club of Merica, my daughter is my umbrella girl, and when she is in her open-cockpit race car, I am hers.
The umbrella-holding was just half an hour of the grid girl’s day, however. The rest of the time, she talked to race fans, did sponsor relations, posed for photos with children both young and old, etc. Melissa James, one of the last grid girls to work in F1, told CNN, “We’re saleswomen at the end of the day. We need to learn how to talk to people and get people on board with the product.” Rarely were their costumes particularly prurient or revealing, more often hewing to traditional outfits of the country hosting the day’s event.
For decades, everyone in Formula One liked this arrangement, but as the neo-Puritanism of the woke era tightened its grip in Europe and America, it was clear that something must be done. A statement was released that “we feel this custom … clearly is at odds with modern day societal norms.” To its considerable discredit, F1 has long been overly fond of ridiculous and entirely performative nods to the “societal norms,” with perhaps the most cringe-worthy being the “END RACISM” shirts worn by the majority of the drivers during 2020 as they knelt to protest — well, it’s still not exactly clear what they were protesting. Nor does it appear that racism, as a phenomenon, was ended to any significant extent by the wearing of those T-shirts.
No doubt the F1 rights holders hoped that this obvious eagerness to surf the wave of The Current Thing would distract a bit from the Brobdingnagian energy consumption of a sport in which jumbo jets are constantly used to fly cars that get about 5 miles per gallon between tracks in human-rights bright spots such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, China, and Azerbaijan. How can you worry about the carbon footprint or dictator-pandering aspects of F1 when they are clearly working so hard to end not just racism, but sexism? And if “doing the work” meant that the charming grid girls were replaced by dour male engineers who did exactly the same thing, wasn’t that a victory for women everywhere? Who would dare to contradict the ceaseless and self-righteously prissy drone of the “feminist ally” media?
In 2025, apparently, the answer to that question is “the American voter, followed at a cautious but attentive distance by the American corporation.” The only thing dropping faster than the testicle count in women’s sports is the tampon count in men’s bathrooms. Having engaged in a decade-plus bender of increasingly insane attempts to say that two plus two equals five, Joe Average and Jane Business have stumbled blinking into the cruel morning daylight of plain reality. It’s time to clean up, shape up, and acknowledge a few basic facts about men and women and how they relate to each other.
One of those facts: There’s nothing wrong with hiring an attractive woman to hold an umbrella over a handsome race driver. Certainly, Drive To Survive’s distaff fans have been far from shy on social media while expressing their occasionally quite prurient interest in drivers such as Lando Norris, George Russell, and Charles Leclerc. If there’s nothing degrading about asking WNBA player Angel Reese to feign affection for McDonald’s bacon cheeseburgers in exchange for a paycheck, surely it’s quite fine to have various models and spokespeople don a cowboy outfit or Austrian dirndl while answering questions from race fans.
If the driver next to that grid girl turns out to be female — there is a mighty effort underway, perhaps doomed to fail on physiological grounds, to short-rope an even vaguely qualified woman into an F1 seat, and the sooner the better — then there could be a “grid guy.” Or if a male driver would rather have a man holding the umbrella, that’s fine too. A foolish grid-person consistency is the hobgoblin of the little minds who, until recently, have held absolute and dictatorial sway over the American discourse.
There’s plenty of precedent for this “vibe shift” already. Did we not just have a Super Bowl halftime show with more American flag imagery than the last 10 or 15 combined? Carl’s Jr., the hamburger chain that once put Paris Hilton in a bikini before retreating from the brink and refocusing on generic montages of studio-prepared food that in no way resembled anything one might possibly get from the drive-thru window at an actual Carl’s Jr., brought back the skimpy outfits for their Super Bowl advertising.
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It’s not just America that is changing. When the grid girls were banned in 2018, F1’s new ownership, US-based Liberty Media, was just getting its feet wet in a sport that had largely disappeared from public awareness in its own home country. That was before Drive To Survive and a tsunami of stateside F1 mania that now has three of the 25 races right here in America, plus one in Canada and one in Mexico. Europe, the historical home of F1, has nine.
So F1 is now about as American as pizza, quick-service sushi, or the Buick Envision. Scratch that — the Envision is made in China, but you get the point. It’s time to bring the grid girls back. We want to see them, and they want to be seen. Any notions to the contrary are now nearly as antiquated as making women cover their hair in public. Ladies, start your engines.
Jack Baruth was born in Brooklyn, New York, and lives in Ohio. He is a pro-am race car driver and a former columnist for Road and Track and Hagerty magazines who writes the Avoidable Contact Forever newsletter.
