"It's a total shame": Sophia Floersch shares hard-hitting message against racing stereotypes
Racing drivers are measured on their abilities and skills, but teams and fans often look at a driver's age to determine their acceptability in the racing sphere, urging Sophia Floersch to break her silence on this. The German driver has faced a myriad of stereotypes in her career, owing to her racing in a male-dominated field, and has first-hand experience of the age clause that many imply about drivers.
In the junior racing category, the prodigies and deserving candidates seemingly end after they hit a ceiling in their age. If a driver takes a few years to adapt to the machinery, whether in the open-wheel or stock car racing, their time is seemingly cut short by the paddock's expectations.
Many teams avoid investing in a driver that will soon get out of their prime, and vice versa. Similarly, Sophia Floersch is already 24 and has taken a few years at a single championship series in her racing ladder; such concerns have been raised against her. Speaking against such stereotypes, Floersch asserted how age should not be a relative metric in determining a driver's future, and wrote on LinkedIn:
"Age is just a number and I think it's a total shame to be reduced to that. Whether at work or in sport. What counts is performance, skills and personality. Whether I'm 18, 24 or 57 - it doesn't matter! And yet you're always reduced to your age. She's too young.... Or he's too old..."
"There's no such thing as too young or too old, there's only good or bad! Please, please, please stop this and take people as people and not as a number, gender or anything else," she added.
Sophia Floersch's Indy NXT career came to a premature end after just one race as HMD Motorsports and the German driver parted ways.
Sophia Floersch shared a cryptic message on her LinkedIn after leaving HMD Motorsports
While the reason for the split was not public, according to RACER, the 24-year-old ran into financial struggles seemingly caused by her primary sponsor. This insists that there might be some legal clauses from Floersch preventing the true reason.
However, she shared a cryptic post on her LinkedIn on April 3, and wrote:
"What does change really mean? Is it always a bad thing? I think a lot of people only perceive it that way because we are creatures of habit and prefer to do everything the way we've always done it. But change is above all a great opportunity!"
On the other hand, only a single round of racing action has been observed so far in the Indy NXT series. Dennis Hauger won the opening round of the season, and the grid now readies up for the next race at the Barber Motorsports Park on May 4.