Why being an F1 promotional model is a good career for young women, says grid girl
I’ve got a degree in psychology and own a company. I have friends who are grid girls and yet are nurses, students, mothers. We are intelligent women and we’re making a choice. We are not having to do it. I have worked in Formula One for five years and been a grid girl in other race events too. It’s like a family. We’re not just there simply to stand and look pretty. We’re expected to know about motor sports and to talk to fans and sponsors. Television only shows us standing there on the grid for two minutes holding a board and clapping on the podium. It doesn’t show everything else that goes on behind the scenes. We’re very much part of the family and part of the team. Being a grid girl is certainly not demeaning to women. I have never been mistreated or experienced inappropriate behaviour from anyone I work with. I’ve never been groped and I’ve never heard of anyone else suffering either. The most we get is members of the public maybe wolf-whistling or cat-calling. It’s nothing more than any woman would receive on the street.
RACE-PRESS Rebecca dressed up to add glamour at the circuit
Because we all love the job – the girls we work with and the motor sports – that doesn’t bother us. I run a fireworks company, Optimum Fireworks. That is my main job and ‘grid girling’ is kind of a hobby. I know people who have used it to fund their studies and now they’re qualified in their profession but they still choose to spend their weekends doing this because they enjoy it. Some people on Twitter are saying: “These women are losing their jobs. They are going to be unemployed.” That’s not our standpoint. We are not going to be unemployed. The issue for us is that we are being stopped from doing something we enjoy. At the moment it is only Formula One that has banned it and there are a lot of other race series that still allow grid girls. Part of the reason we’re all trying to get our story out there is to prevent them all following suit.
GETTY A grid girl poses at the starting grid of Scuderia Ferrari's German driver Sebastian Vettel