The F1 president spoke about Liberty Media’s decision to replace grid girls with grid kids.
It has been one of the decisions that has raised most controversy since Liberty Media took control of F1. With detractors and people in favour, next year we will not see the girls on the grid.
Precisely, one of the leaders who has pushed forward this decision has been Chase Carey, president of F1. The boss of the competition has spoken and opined on the decision, and although he says “he likes the grid girls”, he understands that it is a decision which the entire Liberty group takes to satisfy the fan.
In fact, this is the main reason, the fans os F1. According to Carey, there was a large part of the fans who said that having women in the grids was “outdated” and that it no longer “belonged to today’s sport”: “If it depended on me, personally, I like the grid girls, but it’s not a decision for me, it’s for the fans, and I think what we found is that a big number of people saw it … I do not know if saying offensive is very strong, but they found it explotative or did not see it appropriate for the world we live in today”, commented Carey.
Carey was already expecting the reaction of the fans: “I think the reaction was the one we expected, there are people who have been positive and others have worried”, said the F1 president who added:“I recognize that many of the girls were proud of doing it and I think that’s great and I insist, if it were up to me, I liked them, but I think that when you have so many people who really felt that you were outdated and that they did not think you belong to today’s sport, you have to be aware of it, the number of people on the other side of the debate was much smaller”.
Despite the replacement of the girls by the children, Carey affirms that F1 will continue to have “beautiful girls”: “We will keep the glamour, we will continue to have pretty girls in the races, I think it is part of life and part of what makes our category special, we must continue to evolve and respect the vision of the people, if a significant number of people do not agree with something, we must respect it, but we will continue to be a category with glamor, with emotion and with pretty girls”, concluded Chase Carey.
