Jamie Chadwick’s reign at the top of women’s auto racing continues, with the British driver winning the W Series championship on Sunday.

Chadwick dominated the weekend’s races, coming in first Saturday and Sunday at the Circuit of the Americas in Austin, Texas to fend off Alice Powell and defend her 2019 W Series title.

On Saturday, Chadwick beat Emma Kimilainen by 1.257 seconds to win the first race of the weekend. The 23-year-old then led every lap of Sunday’s race to finish on top once again.

Chadwick adds the trophy to an impressive haul this season. In 2021, the No. 1 driver in the W Series has reached the podium in all but one race and claimed four outright victories.

“I’ve been pushed all the way. To top it off the way we did, I’m so happy. It’s been an amazing year, just so happy to be finishing out on top,” Chadwick said. “I’ve got to say a massive congratulations to Alice (Powell) because she’s pushed me all the way this year.”

The top eight finishing drivers — Chadwick, Powell, Kimilainen, Nerea Martia, Sarah Moore, Fabienne Wohlwend, Abbi Pulling and Beitske Visser — automatically qualify for the 2022 W Series season.

The W Series took Manhattan by storm Monday, with the PUMA team arriving at the brand’s flagship store on 5th avenue in a tour bus emblazoned with the driver’s faces.

Marta Garcia, Gosia Rdest, Abbi Pulling, Caitlin Wood, and Naomi Schiff make up the Puma W Series team, an all-female racing championship established in 2019.

The drivers gathered at the New York storefront to celebrate the She Move US campaign, PUMA’s platform that supports women who progress sport and culture forward and inspire others to do the same. The W Series certainly fits that mission, pushing motorsport to be more inclusive through its format of a free-to-enter championship and mechanically-identical cars.

“W series started in 2019 and we didn’t have a team structure at the time, so the introduction of the teams has really been a great addition,” said Schiff, “and I think we are all really lucky to be a part of the Puma team because they really engage with us and help us to raise our profiles, so I’m extremely happy to be a part of this team.”

The PUMA drivers greeted fans who lined up to see the team on the third floor of the brand’s brick and mortar, signing autographs and snapping pictures next to the store’s racing suit display. The six-event racing championship has grown in popularity in its first two seasons, with brands like PUMA putting their women’s motorsport athletes front and center of their campaigns.

“It’s just really cool it’s giving us some more visibility as drivers,” said Garcia of the PUMA event. “I think it’s just really good, and I think it’s the best team to be actually in W Series.”

After meeting with the crowd gathered at the back of the PUMA store, it was time to take the driving simulators for a spin. The 5th Avenue flagship is outfitted with two F1 driving simulators, mounted on hydraulics ahead of a large screen projector, part of PUMA’s racing display. Garcia took the car for a drive first, with fans eventually able to scan their race ticket and race the W Series driver.

Formula One, the pinnacle of racing, is what most of the women in the W Series aspire to, including Garcia, who calls it her “ultimate goal.” The championship, however, has many barriers to entry, one being the necessity of hefty financial backings. The W Series hopes to make the path to F1 glory, and motorsport in general, more accessible, especially for women.

Jamie Chadwick, the reigning W Series Champion, is an example of that, signing with the F1 team Williams Racing as a Development Driver, a move Schiff cites as an exciting sign of progress for the new racing championship.

As for Schiff, she says she is at a bit of a crossroads, sitting on PUMA’s reserve roster but also presenting for the team this season.

“I think either way, being a part of W series in either role allows me to inspire younger generations and inspire girls so as much time as I can spend behind the screen, doing events like this, it helps us to inspire those generations,” said Schiff, “so that’s what I hope for the future, to be able to inspire more girls and to see more women entering the sport.”

The W Series heads to Austin on Friday for the Circuit of the Americas, with qualifying airing from 5:30-6:00 p.m. ET on beIN SPORTS, and the race broadcast on Saturday from 6:25-6:59 p.m. ET.

Wrapping up its second year on track (its 2020 season having been cancelled due to Covid-19), the W Series is headed to the Circuit of the Americas in Austin, Texas on October 23-24 for a double-header race event. Best of all, the two preseason favorites, Alice Powell and Jamie Chadwick, are tied in points for the championship. 

Below is a primer on the W Series, an overview on how it’s breaking ground for women in racing, and what to expect in this suspense-filled season finale.

Why the W Series?

Motorsport is one of the hardest sporting arenas to break into if one’s path isn’t well paved by family legacy and financial backing. It has been dubbed by critics as the “billionaires boy’s club,” which partially explains what has made Lewis Hamilton’s Formula 1 career so compelling. The irrefutable GOAT of F1, and the only Black F1 driver ever, Hamilton broke into the sport as an outsider while his father worked multiple jobs and provided the mechanical work to support his son’s natural gift for racing. 

The number of women who’ve successfully broken into the ranks is similarly few and far between. Out of 900+ Formula 1 drivers who’ve ever lined up on the grid for a Grand Prix event, only two of them have been women (Maria Teresa de Filippis in 1958 and Lella Lombardi in 1975 and 1976). For Catherine Bond Muir, a British lawyer and corporate financial advisor, those numbers were so bleak, she felt compelled to take matters into her own hands by founding the W Series, an international all-female driver racing league.

Some don’t like the idea of a segregated series for women and believe efforts should be focused on bringing more women up through the standard pathways of racing. Pippa Mann, a British IndyCar race driver, has argued, “We [women] grew up dreaming of winning races, and winning championships, against everyone—the same as every male racer does. We did not grow up dreaming of being segregated, and winning the girl’s only cup.”

For Bond Muir, the fact that the number of women in single-seater motor-racing series globally was on a downward trend convinced her that the existing pathways for women weren’t working. In a sport where individual sponsorship is fundamental, there is a dismal number of companies willing to spend big money on female drivers who are as yet unproven against male drivers on the biggest stage. And without preemptive funding, the opportunity to go out and prove themselves doesn’t exist for these drivers. 

This is where the W Series comes in. With a structure that covers all expenses for drivers, the financial barriers into the sport are made null and void, allowing the W Series to showcase the best female drivers from all over the globe, racing some of the fastest machines on the most iconic racetracks.

The W Series Structure

Unlike Formula 1, where a driver’s individual financial sponsorships are a major factor in being selected for one of the coveted 20 driver seats, the athletes in the W Series are selected solely on their racing ability. Applicants are put through rigorous on-track testing, simulator assessments, technical engineering and fitness evaluations, and then the top 18 make the cut. 

Another critical difference from F1 is that every driver in the W Series competes in an identical race car (the Tatuus T-318 Formula 3 car). In F1, there are certain parameters for the vehicles, but the ten teams are allowed to customize much of the car, which results in the wealthiest teams dominating for years on end as they pour money into either buying or creating the latest and greatest technology.

During this second season of the W series, even though they are in identical vehicles, the drivers are divided into nine teams sponsored by partner companies. A team championship based on overall points accumulated by each team’s two drivers will be debuted in 2022. Currently, there is a $1.5 million allotment for the individual driver championship. The overall winner will be awarded $500K with the remainder trickling down from second to eighteenth place. 

Another new aspect for this 2021 season is that all eight races are being held alongside Formula 1 Grand Prix events, giving these women the grandest of stages to showcase their abilities.  

The 2021 W Series Championship

With six of eight total races completed, the top two drivers, Alice Powell and Jamie Chadwick, are deadlocked in points at 109 apiece (a 1st place finish is worth 25 points, 2nd gets 18, 3rd gets 15, and so on). The two Brits have been neck and neck throughout the series, trading the top podium back and forth with only one other driver, Emma Kimilainen of Finland, snatching a single race win in between. 

Twenty-four-year-old Chadwick is the reigning W Series champion from 2019 and has been a steadily rising star, coming up through karting and junior racing programs in the UK and then moving on the Formula 3 series in both her home country and Asia. During the inaugural W Series season, she was also named a Williams development driver for the F1 team.

Powell’s path to competitive racing has been a bit more stop and go depending on when funding has been available. After several years competing in Formula Renault series in the UK and abroad, Powell (28) had been out of competitive racing since 2015 and was doing building renovation work for her father when the W Series opportunity arose. 

“Racing has been the sport of privileged billionaires for years and it’s hard for women to get sponsorship. Despite writing hundreds of letters to businesses and race teams my funding dried up in 2015,” she once vented. “Then W Series came along and changed the game. I had just been unblocking a urinal when I got the call.”

With three 1st-place finishes to Chadwick’s two, Powell currently has the upper hand to edge out Chadwick for the overall title if things remain equal after the final two races. With 50 first place points up for grabs between the final two races, Kimilainen is also still within striking distance of a come from behind victory. And in racing it doesn’t take much—a tire puncture, engine issue, rainy weather—to drastically change the fate of title contenders.

For Bond Muir, she couldn’t have hoped for more as her brainchild heads into a suspenseful finish of its sophomore season: back-to-back races at the Circuit of the Americas to determine who walks away the champion. 

“If you had told me then that we would stage two races on the same weekend at one of F1’s flagship events in just our second season, I would have pinched myself,” Bond Muir said. 

“It will be a fitting way to end our breathless and action-packed eight-race season and promises to be a very special weekend as we celebrate everything that W Series stands for and the giant strides we have made since launching three years ago.”