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At just 14 years old, Luna Fluxa Cross is no stranger to break through barriers. In fact, she has already made history twice. The Spanish racing genius first changed her head at the age of 11, becoming the first girl to win the title of one of Kurt’s most competitive championships, the IAME Euro series.
Last year she did it again when she won the Champions Senior category in the Future Academy (COTFA) program. Fédération Internationale de L’Automobile (FIA) became the second female driver to win an international cart title from F1’s Governing Body.
Mercedes-AMG junior driver Fruxa Cross leads a new generation of young women at Motorsport, focused and fearlessly. She says that when she first started racing with male rivals it was “very tough,” but more female drivers are “going better” as they enter the sport.
“When I put on my helmet, I’m thinking about going out and doing everything I can, and I’m not thinking about different genders,” she says. Her resilience paid off as she dominated winning the 2024 COTFA title. “I just want to go out and beat everyone.”
Since its launch in 2020, the wider Champions of the Future (COF) International Series, hosting several other karting competitions, has established itself as a pipeline of success in Formula 4, the first step for young drivers moving from culting to single-seater racing.
Less than a third of the drivers participating in COF are women. Last year, we partnered with the F1 Academy Women-only series in an effort to increase that percentage. This includes part-funding at nine Cotfa locations that are booked annually for girls aged 8 to 15.
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According to COF, the collaboration has already dramatically boosted the proportion of female drivers in 2024, from 5% in 2023 to 5% in 2024.
The broader programme also aims to break down the barriers to motorsport wealth and broaden the range of cartoning beyond traditional European hubs. Its “arrival and drive” concept reduces the entry cost to Cotfa from over 100,000 euros to over 29,950 euros by providing all drivers with a basic model cart with the same engine and wheels. Each driver must provide their own engineer.
“If the costs are today, I don’t think my family could afford it when we started racing 30 years ago,” says James Geidel, president of Motorsports Events Group RGMMC, which organizes COF.
“Because today’s costs are astronomical, we wanted to open up the market so that people around the world can come and compete at a more cost-effective price,” he adds. “Every time a tire touches asphalt, you think it’s a world championship.”
Geidel has been praised for the F1 Academy, founded in 2023 by former F1 test driver Susie Wolff, as the main reason for supporting women’s participation. For example, last year, he says that the gender division for applicants in the senior COTFA category between the ages of 14 and 17 was 50:50, but in the end, only 30% of their intake were women.
The talent is there, he adds, now it’s the “numbers game” that we see the next generation of girls progress. “Was there ever a woman in Formula 1?
The growth of opportunities for young women is not limited to the driving aspect of sports. The education initiative run by Electric World Championship Formula E has taken over 4,500 women into sports since 2019, according to FIA data.
The FIA woman from Motorsport Project coordinator Susanna Coletta says it’s important to provide these experiences to explore how young women work, from the fan zone around the paddock to the behind the scenes of race control. All program events are free to attend. “We don’t want to make money from the girls’ experience. We just want to give them the opportunity to come to the truck.”
Burcuçetinkaya, a female and former rally driver on the Motorsport Commission Committee, says these kinds of opportunities were rarely available when she started. She advises girls who want to succeed in motorsports to develop long-term professional relationships at the start of their careers. She welcomes the fact that the industry is more inclusive than her time, but she is not sure that all the barriers women face in sports will break. “The challenges are always there. I don’t think this will ever be easy.”
Gwenraggle, who leads Mercedes AMG’s driver development program and counts George Russell and Andrea Kimi Antonelli, is optimistic in his mentees about addressing the gender gap in sports.
Cotfa “gives you the opportunity to see talent that you probably wouldn’t have seen in another context,” he says. “I don’t just have a female driver trying to make it on the grid.
