So, this happened.

In case you’ve been on the other side of the moon these past few months, the media’s much-touted Arab Spring had an interesting tangent via a discussion in the Saudi Council on whether women in Saudi Arabia should be allowed the vote. They eventually decided that yes, they probably should… eventually. We wouldn’t want to rush these things. They won’t be able to contest the elections, of course, but least – if King Abdullah considers the recommendations – they may be able to cast a vote in the municipal elections.

Except that this small pittance of representation didn’t seem to be satisfactory for women in Saudi Arabia. So… well, see for yourselves. Here is Manal al-Sharif driving in Saudi Arabia, and discussing what it means for her to do so.

She was arrested and imprisoned for 10 days for daring to drive.

She’s not the only one. There’s an entire site of these vids (in fact, more than one): women driving in Saudi Arabia, in protest at… well, mostly not being allowed to drive. Here’s a twitter feed of them doing it in style. In fact, June 17 saw 30 or 40 women behind the wheel, following weeks of an online campaign that saw women taping or photographing themselves driving. (If you’re wondering whether 30-40 people is a lot, consider what happened the last time women tested this ban. Think about what ‘punishment’ means in Saudi Arabia. Then try to imagine being one of those women out there on 17 June.)

There is, of course, a danger to conflating correlation and causality. Yes, women protesting by driving happened to take place at about the same time that women’s voting rights were being revived for discussion in Saudi Arabia. It could have been a massive coincidence, and 30-40 women, however courageous, hardly make up a political movement all by themselves. And anyway, what does driving have to do with political representation?

The Times‘s Janice Turner is pretty clear where she stands in a now-paywalled article titled The Freedom of the Road is a Feminist Issue. Consider being a woman in Saudi Arabia. Ignore all the discussions about political representation for the moment, and focus instead on the daily grind. You get up, you get dressed, you have to go to work or to the market or whatever. Luckily, your husband has hired you a car with your very own (male) driver… and should he feel perfectly comfortable in sexually assaulting you, there is nothing you can do about it.

Or how about you forgo the potential dubious safety of a hired car and opt for a taxi. Prepare to walk the streets trying to hail one: streets where your mere presence outdoors may be cast as a sexual provocation. Inevitably, in trying to lock women away ‘for their own protection’, lest they be seen by vociferous male eyes, the Wahhabi religious laws have created a space so deeply hostile and threatening to women that their mere presence is transgressive. It is little wonder, then, that Manal al-Sharif talks about how safe she feels in her car, with her doors locked.

A person’s first car has always symbolised their freedom: be it at 17, with their newly-minted license and the entirety of the countryside filled with welcoming ditches to drive it into, or at 50, with a newly-issued divorce and a hesitant rediscovery of independent living. A woman who has a car gets to choose the place she is occupying. If she wants to leave, she is not dependent on anyone else. What could be more terrifying to the Saudi religious leaders? Never mind that neither the Koran nor the law bans women from driving; they were so terrified at the freedom driving would afford women that they went ahead and issued a fatwa just to be safe.

New Saudi Arabia's traffic sign (women2drive). (Image = public domain via wiki. Created by Carlos Latuff)

So what actually happened on June 17th, when these 30-40 women took to the road? Did governments fall or cities rock? Reports differ. For one thing, no one can agree on the number. Even the Guardian seems confused, using the 30-40 figure in one article, and “at least 45” in another. The government of Saudi Arabia is in flat-out denial, refusing to acknowledge that the protest happened at all (despite a traffic ticket being issued).

Two weeks on, five of the drivers were arrested, despite early comments from the government that they would allow their families to ‘deal with them‘. Despite this, campaigners are not deterred, continuing to maintain a significant social media presence. And even before the protest took place the Shoura declare that they were ready to discuss women driving “if requested“. I’m thinking that women risking arrest in order to parallel park in Riyadh would qualify as such.

Meanwhile, Manal al-Sharif hasn’t given up. Since her release from custody, the former prisoner of conscience has been spearheading a movement to teach more and more women how to drive. With the moderate King Abdullah on the throne, and the authorities apparently turning a blind eye to the recent on-road excursions by three women during Eid, it looks like the driving ban may not be in place for much longer.

Vintage print by Rene Vincent, 'Women Join The Racing Driver Fraternity'

So, if women compete in the same events as men – and why not, given that it is just as much about the cars as it is about the drivers – why are there so few women racing drivers? After all, there’s an entire association out there promoting women in motorsport with handy lists of everything you’ll need to buy to get started, and it’s not like lack of body mass would be a disadvantage in what is essentially a test of lightness and speed. OK, at the top ends you’re going to need some neck muscles to prevent you being spontaneously decapitated by your own car as you hit maximum G, but no more so than a female bodybuilder needs to achieve, surely. So why the lack?

To the internet! The wonders of googling “female racing drivers” yielded this pertinent thread where I didn’t learn much other than the names of four female drivers in the history of the entire sport. Thanks, guys, that totally answers my question.

Anyway, I decided to do a little more research. How do you become a racing driver? Surely you can’t just turn up outside Ferrari’s headquarters and demand to join their team? (Why hasn’t anyone tried this?) Silverstone’s driver testimonials are unsurprisingly all by men. They do have one thing in common, though: they all started young. The official site for the Ginetta Challenge, one of the many races I’d watched that day, has a helpful flowchart showing what it takes to get to the top of the league, as well as a price list. The Independent interviewed a young Porsche driver and explained the top wage (£60k) and the likely costs (thousands of pounds if you don’t get sponsorship).

So, to summarise: this is a sport where you have to start investing hundreds, if not thousands, of pounds into a pre-teen child, shepherding them along and making them practise every waking hour until, in their mid-teens, they get signed up to a racing team that then commandeers their careers until they’re 35, at which point they’re expected to retire.

I WANT TO BE JUST LIKE DANICA PATRICK WHEN I GROW UP. Image courtesy of Hot Fresh Pics and numerous dodgy sites.

This is all well and good, and we can assume that no families on income support are ever going to produce the next Monaco GP winner. However, there is more to it than that. Starting that young, a child has to show a pretty strong preference for the sport, and the parents have to be supportive/pushy enough (delete as appropriate) to pour their savings into karting and rallying and fire extinguishers. They have to want it just as much as the child.

So there you are, eight years old, going up to mummy and daddy and saying, “I want to be a racing driver! Will you sign my permission slip?” And mummy and daddy look down on their precious little one and say, “Why don’t we buy you a new dolly instead?”

Maybe that’s not what happens to every little girl. Some undoubtedly come from racing families, and just as much effort is poured into their motorsport careers as would have been done for a male child. In some circles, with the right family emphasis, girls in motorsport can flourish. I’m guessing that this is about the same ratio as male ballet dancers.

To answer my own question, there are female racing drivers. Sabine Schmitz is queen of the Nurburgring. Danica Patrick rocks IndyCar and NASCAR. Amanda Whitaker won the National Formula Ford Championship. Wiki has a list of five – five! A veritable cornucopia of choice! – Formula 1 female drivers, including Desiré Wilson, the only female F1 driver to actually win anything in Formula 1.  You can see an entire bevy of them in this poll listing the “10 Sexiest Women in Motoring and Motorsport“. Now not only am I armed with names, I also have cup-sizes. MY QUEST IS COMPLETE, GUYS.

I will leave you with the baffling sight of Top Gear – not precisely the bastion of political correctness – pointing out that this is insulting and patronising in the extreme:

Actually, I think it starts a lot earlier than that, but the sex kitten perception is unlikely to encourage any parent to finance his or her daughter’s racing dream.

My point is this: it takes a pretty determined kind of little girl to decide that she wants to go into motorsport when the whole world is insisting that she should be playing dress-up. And it takes a pretty supportive kind of family to encourage her, rather than simply buy her something frilly to shut her up. Maybe the tide is turning. Maybe the little girl with the need to go faster faster faster only needs to ask. But if it’s not turning fast enough, we will have an entire generation of little girls with no female motoring heroes to look to.

And I can promise you that no one ever tried to talk Jenson Button or Lewis Hamilton into playing with their dollies.

To be fair, I don't think the bikini shot is far off. Image (c) McLaren Sport

The first person I didn’t kill was the bloke in the angry Merc behind me, who decided to respond to a downpour in London rush hour traffic by tailgating a car sporting L-plates and stalling at tricky junctions. I don’t understand the mindset of people like this. There you are, in your expensive and pointless car (because who cares about 0-60 when you’re gonna be doing 0-10 at most, and wearing out your left foot), and you think, “Hmmm, yes. I think my car could do with having a little more Fiat inserted up its nostrils.” So you start breathing down the neck of a tiny little 500 with a driver who clearly has yet to master indicators. Or the clutch. Or – worryingly – the handbrake.

It was worse with the second person I didn’t kill. That was me, by the way. It was a few weeks later, with the indicators now mastered but the elusive handbrake still outfoxing me at every turn. I turned right, as I am often instructed to do, and did NOT get rammed in the passenger side by on-coming traffic. I declared the turn a success, and exited the main road, entering the right-hand street, which had a rather steep gradient, almost hill-like in its ferocity.

At the top of the hill was a van.

We are all familiar with Van Man. He cat-calls with the firm conviction that he is somehow brightening up your day. He plays obnoxiously loud music and makes racist remarks, happy in the belief that he represents The Real England, whatever that might be. He also never – ever – gives way. Ever.

Spare a thought for the state of my pants when I saw Van Man accelerating down that hill towards me.

At my left was a car. At my right was a tiny narrow spare, then another car. Behind me was a busy main road. And in front of me was my rapidly-approaching death, in the form of a van so big it wouldn’t even see my tiny little Fiat before it squashed it like a bug. A small, white, L-plated bug.

At the very last second, when my eyes were like saucers and I was seriously regretting not having sorted that sodding will, he veered off into the tiny gap on my right. He didn’t even clip my car (although the car on the other side may not have been so lucky). By all accounts he didn’t even notice that he had nearly caused vehicular dismemberment.

“Well,” my instructor said brightly, after a horrifying and awkward pause, “shall we get on, then?”

Needless to say, I nearly burst into tears. “What the hell was that? That was like a cartoon death! I don’t want to die a cartoon death! I don’t want to be killed by a flying piano or a toilet seat, or a giant truck that doesn’t see me and runs me over!”

“Don’t worry,” my instructor soothed, looking a little rattled himself. “That sort of thing doesn’t actually happen in real life.”

That thought gave me pause. I wondered what, precisely, he thought we were doing right now. Maybe it was a rehearsal for real life? Maybe real motoring wouldn’t be like this. Maybe – and here was a horrifying possibility – it would be worse.

Like this, except white, a Fiat, and EVEN SMALLER. Photo from petithiboux@Flickr

It was.

Over the next few weeks I’ve had parking spaces stolen by aggressive BMWs that more or less manhandled me out of the way, I’ve nearly been killed by drivers doing 40 in a 20mph zone down a sodding bus lane during restrictions, I’ve nearly squashed toddlers that decided to run out into the middle of the road while their parents looked on, oblivious, and – worst of all – I once nudged the rear bumper of another car. It was at less than 1mph and left no physical mark whatsoever, but I maintain that the psychological scarring will stay with me.

My conclusion is this: you would have to be absolutely mad to want to drive in London. You have nowhere to park, and everywhere there are people that view red lights as simply suggestions, bus lanes as express lanes, and children as speed bumps. If you are a woman in a small car, every large car will attempt to physically crowd you off the road, and if you are a woman in a large car, everyone will hate you because you are clearly being overly aggressive in daring to get behind the wheel of something bigger than an armchair.

And yet.

I loved that stupid little Fiat. I called it Bertie, and the moment it was named, it leaped about like an eager little puppy. I did a little dance of triumph on discovering that my turns in the road were textbook-perfect, and that parallel parking really isn’t all that bad. True, my instructor was a closet sadist who decided to make things ‘more interesting’ by making me do obscenely complicated compound manoeuvres – reversing around a corner with obstacles and a time limit springs to mind – but once you choose to view the whole thing as an elaborate obstacle course, it’s fine. And the little Fiat 500 made me feel ridiculously proud of myself every time I got behind the wheel. Look at me, I’m driving!

It’s a shame it had to end. All things must, I suppose, but it made me tear up a little bit just the same to walk around to the passenger side and get in, knowing that this would be it. The thing about driving tests is, no one tells you that you don’t get to have any more lessons after you pass.

Bye bye, Bertie. You were a smart little car and you took a lot of abuse. I’ll come visit you over the summer for my advanced driving course.

In the meantime, though, I’m going to look up Bertie’s sexy two-wheel cousin and sit my CBT.

After all, what’s the point of a driving license if you only get to drive cars? There’s a motorbike out there with my name on it.

Yes, my mum sent it to me. It has little hearts inside as well.

• Vik has now recovered from her driving ordeal, and is fully licensed to make cars go vroom. Stay tuned for Project Engine and further motorsport adventures.

No. It’s: “Will it make me look hotter when I step out of it outside a bar or restaurant?”

Yes, the main thing that will make a woman decide on a particular car is how ‘hot’ she feels in it. Telegraph writer Neil Lyndon – bemoaning the fact that his wife’s friend opted for a car she liked and he deemed useless – goes on to tell us all about the new Citroën DS3, decorated by graphic artist Orla Kiely. Now you really will be able to match your car to your handbag. Isn’t that snazzy, girls? All your tricksy car decisions solved by this one simple, fashionable step!

The new Citroën DS3 - if I use the Orla Kiely design, can I have this racing version? Image (c) CarsRoute.com

According to Lyndon, his wife’s divorced friend ignored all sensible, practical considerations when making her car choice, and simply went for a pretty French hatchback. Because that’s what women do, of course: we go for the pretty option despite it possibly being on fire.

The thing is – and this will come as no surprise to those familiar with his prior work – Lyndon is talking complete twaddle. According to AutoEbid.com’s Help Me Choose a New Car function, you can choose from six factors when trying to find the perfect car for you. They are: Comfort, Styling, Handling, Depreciation, Economy, and Safety. The price is a liming criterion: the thing that helps you to narrow your choice, rather than the main principle of selection. In fact, unless you are going into the market with an extremely limited amount of money, the cost of the car will only ever help you to select a class, or possibly a financing option. Put it another way: no one will switch from a brand-new Fiat 500 to a second-hand Volvo XC90, even though both can be had for roughly £10k.

So how do people choose cars, then, if it’s not the price?

1. First and foremost, functionality. What are you going to use the car for? If you have five children that will need running to school every morning, you will probably end up with that Volvo. If, on the other hand, you’re looking for an urban runabout, something small and easy to park is probably better.

2. Up there as a consideration is styling: you want it to look good. In fact, certain TV shows have gone so far as to have an entire segment over whether a car is ‘cool’ or not. The guide there, by the way, is whether a cool person would drive it. Perhaps X & Y Communications neglected to canvas the Top Gear audience in their research.

3. The last, all encompassing question is: I live with it? This includes things like reliability, fuel economy, ability to park it in London, whether the suspension will destroy your spine the first time you drive over road-humps.

The ‘price’ question helps to narrow your options, and, on occasion, to disabuse you of the notion that you really could afford to buy a supercar if you sell the house and both kidneys.

The key question Lyndon ignored was what his wife’s friend wanted in a car: she wanted a cute little urban runabout that would cheer her up in the mornings. Put simply, she wanted that ‘new car’ feeling: you’ve chosen well, your car looks good, and you love it more than it is natural to love an inanimate object. If she was a man lovingly polishing his vintage (decrepit) Rolls, Lyndon would have smiled indulgently.

What Lyndon is bemoaning is not women’s tendency to pick cars that make them look good – we all do that. No one has ever looked at a car and thought, “sure, it’s beautiful, but given the choice I’d go for the ugly, uncomfortable one on the left.”  Our budgets and priorities may vary, but the intent remains the same. You buy the thing that makes you feel happy when you’re inside it. Lyndon seems to have forgotten that, or have momentarily blanked out all car adverts, ever. It’s such an established cliché that car makers can now produce meta-tastic pastiches of previous ads and we lap it up. Check out this Volvo V60 “How to make a sexy car advert” clip:

When you sell a lifestyle, of course you’re going to sell a cool, stylish one. Only a fool would try to market a boring car for boring people.

I'm told it has great fuel economy. Image (c) NewCarNet

Of course, that’s really the thing Lyndon is taking an issue with. He wanted his wife’s friend to go away and make a list of her requirements, and bring back the top three cars that fulfilled them. He would then counsel her to make the reasoned, practical decision. She wanted to buy a cool hatchback following a messy divorce. The thing is, women going through messy divorces are not meant to want cool hatchbacks. They’re not meant to want anything funky or stylish. They should be worried about making ends meet, and where the rent is coming from, and how they’re going to get to work now that their ex-husband has custody of the car. No divorced woman should want to look or feel attractive, and she certainly shouldn’t be be gallivanting around bars or restaurants. I could choose this point to make a catty comment about how Lyndon left his wife for another woman, published a book railing against the “universal dominance of feminism” and has since been struggling to rebuild his career.

Lyndon’s article reveals nothing about gender or, indeed, about car choice (and I highly doubt the odious Mr Lyndon chose his own car based on a set of requirements and flowcharts). All it shows us is how deep his prejudices still lie: a woman who is hard up and urgently needs a car should not, in Lyndon’s world, get to make that sort of choice. Having asked his advice, she should have acknowledged his superiority and allowed him to select one for her. After all, her preference for a “chic little French-made hatchback” instantly indicated to him that she must not have the know-how to do it herself.

And as for the Citroën DS3, the target of Lyndon’s ire: well, it’s not doing too badly, despite Lyndon’s contempt. It’s just been named Top Gear Magazine‘s 2010 Car of the Year.