F1 Banned an Entire Job, and the Women Who Held It Weren’t Consulted

For decades, Formula 1 grid girls stood on the starting grid before every race, holding driver name boards, carrying sponsor branding, and taking part in ceremonial duties that had become as familiar a part of race weekend as the anthem or the podium. In January 2018, F1’s new ownership under Liberty Media ended the practice entirely, effective immediately for that season.

The decision split opinion sharply, and one of the loudest groups pushing back wasn’t traditionalist fans defending an old tradition. It was many of the women who’d actually done the job.

The reasoning behind the ban

F1’s official statement was direct about its motivation: “While the practice of employing grid girls has been a staple of Formula 1 Grand Prix for decades, we feel this custom does not resonate with our brand values and clearly is at odds with modern day societal norms.”

The decision came a few years into Liberty Media’s ownership of the sport, part of a broader effort to modernize F1’s image and reposition it as more inclusive for a changing global audience. Within a week of the announcement, F1 introduced a replacement program called Grid Kids, inviting young karting and junior single-seater competitors from national motorsport clubs to take those pre-race grid positions instead.

The pushback nobody quite expected

Within a day of the ban, many former grid girls began posting on social media under the hashtag SaveTheWalkOnGirls, disputing the framing that their work had been exploitative or purely about objectification. One woman who’d worked as a grid girl for five years posted photos of what she described as demure, professional outfits she’d worn on the job, directly contesting media characterizations of the role as skimpy or degrading.

Their argument centered on agency and economic reality. The job offered legitimate event experience, networking opportunities, and travel that some of the women valued genuinely, regardless of how outsiders characterized the position’s optics. Losing it wasn’t experienced by everyone involved as liberation. For some, it was simply the loss of a job they’d chosen and, in some cases, actively enjoyed.

A decision made without the people it affected

What makes this a more complicated story than a simple progress-versus-tradition narrative is who actually made the call. The decision came entirely from F1’s new corporate management, responding to broader cultural pressure and brand positioning concerns, not from a consultation process involving the women employed in the role. Their genuine feelings about the change, whatever they turned out to be, didn’t drive the decision either way.

That’s a familiar pattern in workplace changes framed around progress: the people most directly affected by a decision often have the least influence over whether or how it happens, regardless of which direction the change points. Darts had already banned its own walk-on girls just days before F1 followed suit, and MotoGP notably declined to make the same move at the time, drawing its own separate criticism from people on both sides of the debate.

The unresolved tension

Nobody seriously disputes that F1’s pre-2018 presentation of grid girls, uniforms, branding, and all, existed within a broader culture of treating women primarily as visual decoration at a male-dominated sporting event. But treating the ban itself as an uncomplicated win skips over the real people whose actual jobs and stated preferences got overridden by a decision made entirely above them.

When a workplace practice gets eliminated in the name of progress, how much weight should the stated preferences of the people actually doing that job carry in the final decision?