F1 Academy grad Lia Block is going rallying with Hyundai

People still hate on F1 Academy, but I understand their reasons less and less every day. People complain that it’s not a real “path” to Formula 1 for these women, which I guess it does seem like it promises to be, but if you talk to Susie Wolff about it, the objectives are so much broader than that, and it’s smashing them. They decided that the most important move to address gender disparities in motor racing is to make young, aspiring female drivers very visible in the world, and putting them in F1-looking cars at F1 races is obviously the way to do that. Wolff and her team often cite FIA karting statistics that show enormous leaps in registrations from girls following the launch of F1 Academy, and I don’t see how you could argue with those results.

But the next layer of the objection always seems to be that this is about marketing rather than racing, and usually they cite as evidence the fact that Formula 4 cars are not the best or most challenging race cars in the world. Well, I would like to invite such critics to race one against these women. Now that we’re enough years in for F1 Academy graduates to start forging grown-up racing careers, one after another is revealing that she is not aspiring to be an Instagram influencer but rather a racing driver.

This is the greatest such story yet, to my eye. Lia Block is doing a full American Rally Association season in a Hyundai i20 N Rally2 car, and she’s making quite clear that her ambition is to contest the FIA World Rally Championship. Her father, of course, was Ken Block, so it runs in the family. To lose your father in an off-road vehicle crash and stay on your path towards being a professional driver is no small or simple thing. She knows exactly what she’s getting into, and she intends to do it at the highest level.