The Danica Effect: 21st Century Women In Motorsport

Has Europe found its version of Danica Patrick? Is that woman Natacha Gachnang?

While researching for a different article (which should appear later in the year) I stumbled across a picture. That picture is the photo atop this piece of writing.

The woman in the photo is 21–year–old Swiss racing driver Natacha Gachnang, currently the only woman on the entry lists for the resurrected Formula Two Championship.

In signing up for Formula Two Gachnang has jumped from an international unheard of, into the glare of the sports press. This makes her, at least on paper, Europe’s highest profile female racing driver—with the lack of the fairer sex in either GP2 of Formula 1.

In separate articles to this photo, it is described how F2 was hoping for a “Danica Effect” with Gachnang, tempting in new sponsors and wavering fans to a totally new series, with a list of drivers largely unheard of outside their home country, or the nation(s) where they’ve been competing.

Fresh from the “Danica Effect” mention, I was struck by just how Patrick-esque the picture was. Patrick has never been shy of trading off the fact that she is a woman.

She was pretty much headline news when she was included in last year’s SI swimsuit edition, a quick Google reveals the spoils of an FHM photoshoot, and America recently had to sit through two GoDaddy.com ads while a perfectly good football game was going on.

I have no doubt that this “Danica Effect” does exist.

If it doesn’t tempt in new fans to the sport, there must be sponsors who flock to Patrick when they wouldn’t have considered being connected with her male competitors.

However, does her success mean that every female racer of the future will find themselves forced down the same route, competing not just on the track, but on the pages of men’s magazines?

And perhaps more frighteningly, is it eventually going to force the more non-photogenic female drivers off the tracks?

I’ve got no more knowledge of most of the non-British competitors (and I suggest I’m not the only one) lined up for Formula Two. However, this is the only photo I’ve seen of any of them outside of a racing environment.

Is it any surprise that it’s of a woman? No.

Fair enough, the photo is not new. The full picture shows a firesuit with “Campos Racing” on it, the team she has run with in the Spanish F3 series previously.

However, only now does it seem to have appeared on an international site. And under no circumstances has Gachnang found her way to F2 simply because of her gender and looks.

Her CV is as strong, if not stronger, than a large number of the other competitors, and if her cousin is anything to go by, she has talent.

Her cousin? Sebastien Buemi.

However, while Gachnang’s photos are not new, they fall well within the time that Patrick has been in public eye.

This marketing approach is almost entirely contiguous with Patrick’s tenure in Indycar. There are no pictures of Lyn St. James posing in a bikini, because it simply wasn’t the standard thing when she was racing.

So did Patrick herself cause this change, by being the first female racer to be willing to market herself this way?

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