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Former British American Racing (BAR) founder Craig Pollock has confirmed he is looking to enter Formula One with a 50 percent male, 50 percent female team called Formula Equal.
Pollock has submitted an expression of interest to racing’s governing body, the FIA, who opened up the process for finding an 11th F1 team earlier this year.
“Our ambition to deliver and build opportunities and pathways for women to get to the very top level inside motorsports,” Pollock told CNN Sport. “The concept and the idea was to try and build a Formula 1 team, 50 percent male, 50 percent female, which is extremely hard to do if you have an existing Formula One team; it’s a lot easier with a clean sheet of paper.”
Pollock’s BAR team raced in F1 between 1999 and 2005, before being purchased by Honda, which became the famous Brawn GP team in 2009 and then Mercedes from 2010 onwards.
Pollock hopes to include a female driver in the line-up of his new venture, although he admits there are issues with doing that in the next few years.
“We know that we are going to have to go through our academy systems. We know we’re going to have to build it up because there are not enough women at the moment who are trained up to the level of Formula One and they’ve got to earn a place in there at the same time”.
This year Formula One will launch its F1 Academy, a championship series primarily for teenage girls looking to start their journey up the pyramid. The series will be closely affiliated with teams who make up the grid of the Formula 3 and Formula 2 feeder series, which F1 hopes will provide a clearer pathway to the top.
Formula Equal hopes to be “the first Formula One team that is truly outside of Europe”, with Pollock revealing that funding discussions have taken place with a Gulf state.
Saudi Arabia Motorsport Company chairman HRH Prince Khalid bin Sultan Al-Abdullah Al-Faisal said during the recent Saudi Arabian Grand Prix that the nation hopes to have its own race team in the future.
There have been a few notable expressions of interest about 2026. The bid which gained the most media coverage was the joint Andretti-Cadillac bid, although that was met with a lukewarm response from F1’s existing 10 teams, who would still need to sign off any prospective 11th entry.
There are lingering concerns over adding a new team into the mix and diluting the prize fund for the teams at a time when F1 is enjoying an unprecedented popularity boom.