EXCLUSIVE Lives of the F1 WAGs revealed: They're the new queen bees of the sport world. Now MOLLY CLAYTON tells their secrets - from money to their splashy lives..
. and the 'love triangle' that electrified their circle By MOLLY CLAYTON Published: 01:59 GMT, 29 November 2024 | Updated: 02:02 GMT, 29 November 2024 e-mail View comments For decades, Formula 1 was famous, if not notorious, for its playboys and ‘grid girls’. Scantily-clad models draped themselves over F1 cars and paraded around the pits holding umbrellas over cars, while drivers became household names for their legendary libidos.
Seventies champion James Hunt, for example, claimed to have slept with 5,000 women. But how times have changed. As the 2024 Grand Prix season comes to a climax over the next week, the drivers’ wives and girlfriends are very much a part of the modern F1 caravan, and they’re not just there to look pretty.
These days, as in the worlds of football and tennis, becoming an F1 Wag is a ticket to fame in your own right – as an influencer on social media. It might have been singer Nicole Scherzinger who started it, when she very publicly ran down the paddock to celebrate Lewis Hamilton winning the Championship in 2008. The Posh and Becks of the pitlane, her celebrity equal to his, for eight years they brought a whole new audience to the F1 circuit.
Today’s Grand Prix Wags are following in her footsteps, courting the spotlight to further careers – and fortunes – of their own. From a .