Branson Wanted Female Driver at Virgin Racing

Yes, Sir Richard Branson announced the launch of his brand new Formula One team yesterday, namely Virgin Racing. And yes, he did confirm Timo Glock and Lucas di Grassi as official race drivers for the 2010 Formula One Championship. However, it seems that this is not something the Virgin Group owner had in mind in the first place.

According to his own statement, reported by the Mirror newspaper, the former Brawn GP investor planned to become the first team owner in Formula One's modern era to field a female driver in his official drivers' lineup. However, his dreams soon turned to dust once he realized there isn't a woman out there that can do the job properly.

“We'd love to have some women drivers, we did have a serious look around the world,” admitted Branson for the aforementioned publication. “F1 is an exhausting, physical, sport and it just seems there isn't a female driver out there, yet, that can do it,” added the Virgin Racing boss.

Obviously, when the term “female driver” comes to the discussion table, one can only (or firstly) think of IndyCar race winner Danica Patrick. While successful, the North American woman racer would also attract a great deal of sponsorship into the series, due to her great marketing image.

However, as argued by the team's CEO Alex Tai, IndyCar and Formula One are two different things, meaning Danica would have had a hard time adapting to the requests of racing inside the Great Circle.

“There's IndyCars' Danica Patrick – but that is a different kettle of fish and an F1 car is a much more difficult discipline,” said Tai.

Somehow, we suspect that's not really the reason why they failed to bring Patrick into F1 (the lack of a fruitful contract might have been it, if you'd ask us).