Cotswold girl Alice Powell could be realising her dream by driving a formula 1 car for the first time. Alice from Chipping Norton in the Cotswolds has had a little help from her grandfather who has offered to pay £35,000 for Alice to drive a Caterham Formula 1 car for one of the practice sessions in the last race of this season.
You maybe wondering why a Formula 1 team would let the 21 year old Cotswold girl drive their car?
Formula 1 is a very expensive sport and for the smaller teams on the grid it is often the case that they barely survive to be able to compete. Quite a funny situation considering the amount of money Formula 1 makes. I won’t go into the why and the this is silly reasons for this (if interested here is a link for the why) but over the last couple of weeks two Formula 1 teams have gone into administration.
Caterham is one of these teams, however they are trying something different, they have started a crowd-funding campaign to try and raise enough money to field their two cars for the last race of the season. Crafty Mr Powell came up with an idea to help try and get his granddaughter into the very difficult position of driving a Formula 1 car.
Each race weekend the teams have 3 practice sessions normally on Friday to set up their cars to run the best they can in the race. Due to a ban allowing testing of cars teams often use these practice sessions to allow young drivers to get experience driving these difficult to drive cars. This is where Mr Powell’s plan came about. He is offering the £35,000 to Caterham to let Alice drive for one of the 3 practice sessions. Not only would this be good for Alice, PR for Caterham, money for Caterham BUT also very good for Formula 1 as it is very rare to see a female driver in the sport.
It is a long shot and she has a lot of bridges to cross but fingers crossed for our local girl!
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