Nether Heyford mother joins race to find next female motor racing champion

Christina Clucas hopes to follow in the footsteps of her racing driver husband Ben with the forthcoming worldwide Formula Woman competition.

"It's a female only competition to be a racing driver for women with little or no racing experience before," said Christina.

"The prize is a season competing in the GT Cup race series next year."

Christina, mum to Eva, four and ten-month-old Finn, wanted something exciting to focus on after the coronavirus pandemic.

She added: "Ben saw that the Formula Woman competition was making a comeback this year, so I thought, after the year we have all had with Covid, it was something exciting to focus on.

"I always really enjoyed it when we would go karting together for fun before having kids, and I have been around race tracks a lot in the past 15 years watching my husband race, so I thought 'why not give it a go?'"

She was even more determined to get behind the wheel when her daughter made an innocent observation.

"Ben's tried to get my daughter into motorsport and cars at every possibility," Christina said.

"She said one day, 'karting is for boys mummy', so this was another big reason for joining the competition - to show her girls can do anything, and hopefully inspire her to be involved in motorsport one day. "

Christina said it's clear motorsport is a predominantly male sport.

She said: "I have never personally come across any negativity, but it’s fairly clear from the race meetings I have attended over the last 15 years, as well as when you watch a lot of the motorsport on television, that it is certainly a male dominated sport.

"A couple of years ago the W Series was created (an all female race series), so it has definitely been so great to see females represented in motorsport more prominently."

The competition has on track assessment days taking place from September 2021 at selected venues around the UK as well as overseas.

The 16 finalists will be selected during the Winter of 2021/2022 for the final ‘shoot out’ and the six winners of the competition will be trained and coached between February and April 2022 in fully sponsored Formula Woman McLaren GT4 race cars.

Christina said: "My assessment day is at Anglesey Circuit in Wales on September 19.

"My daughter has been excited so far to see me donning a race suit and helmet on my practice days. She actually said 'I didn’t realise mummy was faster than you daddy”. I'm not there yet, but soon that gap will be closer."