The owners of Formula One decided today that they would officially shelve the longstanding tradition of using grid girls, which has been done for decades. The tradition no longer fit into the social norms according to Liberty Media, but I don’t think that the grid girls in Formula One were really that bad.
While I can certainly see the whole argument about how the use of grid girls objectifies women, I think that the outfits worn by the Formula One grid girls were quite tame compared to some of the outfits worn by the grid girls in other motorsport series.
If you look back at the grid girls from every Formula One event in 2017, as well as some other events from other years, there is not a single outfit that looks too revealing or perhaps too inappropriate. The grid girl outfits look well thought out and often represented the country in which the race was taking place.
The grid girls in Formula One were more than just pretty girls in skin tight spandex that featured the logo of some sponsor company. They weren’t wearing outfits that were more skin than clothing. These are the types of grid girls that we see in other motorsport disciplines (the 2011 24 Hours of Le Mans photo, for example), but I think that Formula One handled the whole grid girl situation with a little more class.
At the end of the day, the grid girls are gone and it doesn’t really make a big difference to the sport. Formula One is a sport and the whole prerace and postrace circus that surrounds the sport is all just extra. I don’t think I know a single person that would stop watching Formula One just because the grid girls are gone. I just think that to compare Formula One grid girls to the grid girls in other motorsport is unjust and not a very fair comparison.
And I think that the far better option would have been to have a mixture of grid girls and grid boys scattered among the grid.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any other agency, organization, employer or company. Assumptions made in any analysis contained within this article are not reflective of the position of any entity other than the author.
