What made you become a team principal? Don Riddell, Mercedes Formula 1’s Toto Wolff, remembers when she was a baby

“Our ambition to deliver and build opportunities and pathways for women to get to the very top level inside motorsports,” Pollock tells CNN Sport’s Don Riddell in an exclusive interview.

“I will never forget when I was announced as team principal,” she said. I was with 16 journalists, and the first question was: What qualifies you for this job? The second question was, ‘Did your husband get you this job?’ One of the questions is “How can you manage the travel since you just had a baby?” Wolff is married to Toto Wolff, the longstanding team principal of the Mercedes Formula 1 team.

By the end of her tenure, spending one year as chief executive, she had silenced the critics by bringing Venturi from nearly last place in the constructors standings to a championship contender. She is hoping that women who assume roles in racing in the future will not have to deal with the same scrutiny that she did.

Wolff said being the only female did not matter because she was successful.

Formula Equal: a mixed-gender motorsports team in the Saudi Arabian tire of Jeddah and the challenge of human rights in Saudi Arabia

Pollock is hoping to make a statement by launching the first Formula 1 team that is truly outside of Europe, and is thousands of miles from the heartland of the sport in the south of England.

His latest project, Formula Equal, would be the first team in the sport that’s 50% men and 50% women, he says, with that equal split applying across the whole organization – from the cockpit to the engineers to the boardroom.

As part of the selection process, the FIA will assess, among other things, a detailed business plan, the team’s experience, technical ability and resources, and the potential to raise and maintain sufficient funding.

Pollock was the manager for one-time F1 champion Jacques Villeneuve and is well aware of how much money is needed to get a team off the ground.

I don’t want to open myself up and talk about that at the moment but that will come out in the future. And I just hope it’s going to work because … it does take a lot of money.”

Speculation about Pollock’s backers is rife because of the bold ambitions of Saudi Arabia, which hosted a grand prix in 2021.

Lewis Hamilton and a lot of human rights groups are uneasy about Saudi Arabia because of its human rights record, but the race went ahead in Jeddah last year despite an attack on an oil storage facility near the track.

Hamilton said that the sport was obliged to raise awareness and leave a positive impact when going to places with human rights issues. I feel like it needs to do more.

Additionally, having a mixed-gender motorsports team in Saudi Arabia would be significant considering the country barred Saudi women from driving until 2018.

F1 has responded to questions about sportswashing – the practice of using a sport to project favorable images of a country around the world – by saying it has worked hard to be a “positive force everywhere it races, including economic, social, and cultural benefits.”

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/28/motorsport/formula-equal-f1-motorsport-spt-intl/index.html

The Case for a Turnkey Deep-Inelastic Nuclear Collision Repair Project in the Gulf of the Aztec Gulf: A Long-Range Approach

“In reality, it’s them having come to us because we have a turnkey operation with the business plan, with all the costings, with everything ready to go.”

“This has to be built from the bottom up in a Gulf state and this is what we are aiming to do,” he adds. This is a long-term project, not a short-term project.