Gianna Pascoal pulled on her helmet and lined up against the field, male and female alike, just as she does every race weekend in the Investchem MSA Formula 4 series. What happens after the chequered flag is what bothers her.
The 16-year-old from Bedfordview has beaten and been beaten by competitors of both genders throughout her career. Yet the results sheets, classifications, and awards that follow routinely split those same competitors into separate gender categories, producing a two-tier ranking system that she argues distorts the actual outcome of racing. A woman finishing second overall might simultaneously rank first in female-only standings, while a man who finished behind her occupies a different position depending on which classification anyone consults.
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“When I’m on the track, I’m competing against other drivers, and I win or lose whatever their gender,” Pascoal says. “When the helmet goes on, we’re all the same. It doesn’t make sense to then split us up once we step off the track. It can make people see male and female racers differently, even when that’s not the intention, and that affects how we’re treated.”
Her path to motorsport was not conventional. Pascoal only took up karting at 11, having previously channelled her competitive energy into springboard diving, where she won two South African championships. That late start shapes how she thinks about developing the next generation of female talent.
In early October, she will compete in a continental karting event in Angola, shortly after South Africa’s National Women’s Month, and a gathering of motorsport federation leaders from across Africa. Those leaders are discussing a proposed six-race championship spanning six African countries. Pascoal’s message to them is direct: female drivers must be integrated into the main competition from the beginning, not appended once the structure is already in place.
“I don’t want women to be added as an afterthought once everything has been put in place,” she states. “If Africa is building a stronger racing pathway, female drivers must be part of the main competition from the start. That means introducing more programmes that support new racing talent among young girls. And once they’re on the grid, they should be treated exactly the same way as the boys. That’s what real equality is.”
She is not dismissing development programmes outright. Pascoal herself was selected into the globally recognised More Than Equal Driver Development Programme, which provides promising female racers with structured technical, physical, and performance support. She knows the structural disadvantages are real: girls typically enter motorsport later than boys, accumulate less track time, and find it harder to secure the sustained financial backing needed to climb through competitive ranks.
What she insists on is their proper purpose.
“Female development programmes have to prepare women for the strongest competition available,” she says. “They should be a bridge to the main grid, not a permanent place where female drivers are expected to remain.”
By contrast, a programme that keeps women in a parallel structure indefinitely, however well-resourced, reinforces the very separation she is pushing back against. The distinction matters practically, not just philosophically, because it determines whether female drivers accumulate the race experience and visibility needed to progress.
The proposed African continental series is intended to give drivers from different countries meaningful competition closer to home, reducing the need to pursue development abroad and helping national federations identify talent within their own markets. Pascoal sees it as a rare chance to build something without importing the exclusions that have constrained women’s participation elsewhere.
“Africa has an opportunity to build something new without repeating the same exclusions that have held women back elsewhere,” she says. “We shouldn’t measure progress by how many separate spaces are created for female drivers. We should measure it by how many women are competing successfully in the main championships.”
Whether the federation leaders gathering in Angola will structure the proposed championship to reflect that standard remains the open question she is racing toward.