Matt Bishop: Maria Teresa de Filippis blazed trail for women in lethal F1 but 'just wanted to race'

Two more world championship-status F1 grand prix appearances would follow later on in the 1958 season. At Boavista, the brutal Porto street circuit, she qualified 15th and was running steadily before her Maserati succumbed to engine failure. At Monza, the temple of speed and testosterone, she qualified 21st – and, again, in the race, her 250F’s engine let her down 13 laps from the end.

She had also raced her Maserati in that season’s Syracuse Grand Prix, in Sicily, for which non-championship F1 event her paramour Musso had been Ferrari’s sole entrant. In practice he drove a few laps at reduced pace, instructing her to follow in his wheel tracks so that she could learn the lines and braking points. That she did, qualifying eighth and finishing fifth. Musso bagged the pole and won the race, carving fastest lap en route. One imagines that their celebrations may have involved a particularly spirited bout of lovemaking that Sunday night, but I admit that I have no evidence for that other than romantic supposition.

The following year, 1959, she entered another non-championship F1 race, the International Trophy at Silverstone, in her by then ageing Maserati. She qualified it 23rd and last, then she ran at the back until transmission failure intervened 10 laps from the flag. A week later she was back at Monaco, this time in a Behra-Porsche resplendent in the bleu de France of its eponymous progenitor, but she failed to qualify. And that, as far as F1 was concerned, was that. She never tried again.

“I realised then that racing would no longer give me happiness”

Her F1 results had been modest, but in her case presence mattered as much as position, and every lap she completed chipped away at a chauvinistic assumption that had been calcifying over decades. Besides, she stopped racing not because she was embarrassing herself – she was not – but because the tide of her life was turning. Musso had been killed at Reims in 1958, then Behra died at Avus in 1959, both of them losing their lives in the throes of the glorious exertion that had originally bound them to de Filippis. The cumulative effect of those losses was profound. Racing had always been dangerous, but now danger had assumed the names and faces of men she had loved. She later spoke of the emptiness that followed, of the sense that the joy had gone. “I realised then that racing would no longer give me happiness,” she said, a simple sentence that carried the weight of irreversible decision. And so, at just 33, she stepped away from top-level motor sport, closing a chapter that had been brief but seismic.

For many years she lived outside the world’s pitlanes and paddocks – marrying, raising a family, and watching from a distance as F1 professionalised and expanded. Yet she was never entirely absent. In 1979 she became involved with the Club Internationale des Anciens Pilotes de Grand Prix de Formula 1, which had been formed in 1962 at the Roc d’Orsay restaurant in Villars, Switzerland, by Louis Chiron, Emmanuel de Graffenried, and Juan Manuel Fangio. In 1997 she became its vice president, and in that role until she finally stepped down in 2011 she acted as a bridge between generations. She attended the odd F1 grand prix, typically Monaco and Monza, and she often used to breakfast in the McLaren paddock hospitality unit when I was the team’s communications and PR director. Few recognised her. When I once asked her about being a pioneer of women’s sport, she deflected the label with characteristic modesty, insisting that she had never set out to make a statement. “No,” she said, “I simply wanted to race.”

History, however, had other plans for her, as surely does posterity, and it is impossible to consider her legacy without confronting the stark arithmetic that surrounds it. Since de Filippis made her last attempt to qualify for a world championship-status F1 grand prix, at Monaco in 1959, only four other women have done the same thing: Lella Lombardi, Divina Galica, Desiré Wilson, and Giovanna Amati. Of those, only Lombardi succeeded, starting 10 F1 grands prix in 1975 and two in 1976, scoring half a point for sixth place in the 1975 Spanish Grand Prix, which had been aborted owing to a horrendous accident after just 29 of its scheduled 75 laps. So, yes, in three-quarters of a century of world championship-status F1 racing, only two women have ever taken the start of a pukka F1 grand prix. Just two. And 779 men.

De Filippis believed that the barriers to female participation were not necessarily physical, nor even financial, but cultural. She spoke of the loneliness of being the only woman in the F1 pitlanes and paddocks, of the scepticism she had to battle, and of the way that curiosity sometimes curdled into condescension or even hostility. Yet she also spoke of kindness, of mechanics who respected her feel for a race car, and of rivals who judged her by her achievements rather than by her gender. Her story is not a simple morality play but a textured human drama, full of struggle and grit, set in an era when the consequences of failure could be terminal.

To admire her is not therefore to indulge in nostalgia but to recognise lineage. Every woman who has since climbed into a single-seater, from Lombardi to the present generation, did so and still does so in a landscape that de Filippis helped clear. That the clearing has not yet widened enough is not her fault. Indeed, her example throws into sharper relief our sport’s sluggish progress in that regard. F1 has changed almost beyond recognition since 1958, but in terms of encouraging with more than lip service what we now refer to as diversity, equity, and inclusion it remains stubbornly static, as though the lesson written by a countess in a Maserati nearly 70 years ago is still yet to be read, let alone learned.

So, on the 10th anniversary of her passing, it seems right to remember Maria Teresa de Filippis not as an anomaly but as a trailblazer, albeit one whose trail has not yet been properly blazed. She did not shout, and she did not sermonise; she simply turned up, she pulled on her helmet, and she raced. Yet in so doing she expanded the possible. And, somewhere, a young girl is watching F1 now and imagining herself on that grid, undeterred by history, and inspired, knowingly or not, by a woman who once threaded a Maserati through Eau Rouge and into the record books. When that young girl breaks through to F1, as surely one day she will, the echo will resolve at last into fulfilment, and Maria Teresa de Filippis’s brave, brief journey will have been rewarded by its long awaited sequel.