Words by Shayni Solanki
Her passion for Formula One has taken her from South Africa to China. And now, Naomi Schiff is intent on leaving her mark.
It’s sunny in London, and the day is already looking pretty damn good. It’s made much better though by the arrival of Naomi Schiff. In Formula One, she needs no introduction – but for those unaware, a short one will do: she’s a petrol head, mad for all things cars and F1. It all began in South Africa, where she moved, after being born in Belgium: “I started racing karts in South Africa and the majority of my karting career happened in South Africa. If you qualify for the national team, then you go to the World Championships”.
She’s also the latest, biggest addition to the Sky Sports F1 team, helping the broadcaster dissect just about every turn, track and race in the ever busy F1 calendar. It’s obviously a big job, and she seems genuinely ecstatic about it. But the presenting world of F1 needs Schiff, just as much as Schiff needs them. F1 suffers bad from a lack of diversity. Don’t just take my word for it, if you will, take Sir Lewis Hamilton’s: “the higher up it goes, the less diverse it is”. Over the past year or so, the sport’s issues with access for others has dominated sporting news, led by Hamilton, its greatest export.
Schiff, though, isn’t filling that gap with any awkwardness. She belongs on the screen. Helped, it seems, by the perfect mix of charm and an easy-going persona. She’s not new to this either. She spent 16 years behind the wheel, making a name for herself as a world-class racing driver. Like many other racers, it started with go-karting: “It took me being invited that day to realise that I enjoyed it, and I enjoyed it a lot. I loved it so much to the point where when they said the party was over, I was quite upset and I was like, ‘No, I have to come back’”.
A small taste of life in the fast lane was enough to get her hooked. The next, harder step was convincing her dad to help kickstart her newfound passion. Professional go-karts aren’t cheap. Retailing at £2,000 to £10,000, they cost a pretty penny: “I needed to show my commitment, and [my dad] was enjoying himself too, so he bought himself a go-kart and I just tagged along with him and kept renting cars as we went. Within a year, he had bought me my first go kart”.
Then came the big, grand 18th birthday and, with it, a decision to make: to race or not to race? To race it was, and she’s never really looked back. Her Dad was her biggest support, she says, and he “ended up taking a second loan out on his house to send me racing in Europe”. It wasn’t exactly all smooth sailing though – “The championship went bankrupt after a month. So all that money that my dad had loaned me went down the drain after one race”. Money aside, Schiff had also left education, choosing to go all in on racing.
“Shit, we’ve spent all this money, I’ve not made a name for myself in one race, no one’s going to know who I am. How am I going to make this work?”. That was her reaction soon after it all started to look a little shaky. Still, racing drivers are a real stubborn bunch, and Schiff is no exception. Making it in motorsport – at any level – requires a bonkers amount of grit and determination: “I basically printed out thousands of business cards, put them in my pockets, and I drove to every race that I could reach in driving distance. I just knocked on a lot of doors and told them that I was the next Lewis Hamilton and that if they gave me a test, I would prove it to them”.
She knocked and doors soon opened: she got to race in the 2014 Clio Cup Series in China. It was a pretty big deal, she says – especially given the language barrier and all: “I was communicating problems that I was having with the car to my mechanics, and I was hoping that they’d understand what I said, because when you’re looking for tenths of a second on track, you can’t afford them to make the wrong change”.
Schiff is a real cool cat, the kind you could talk to for hours. True, being a big racing fan like myself helps, but so does her ability to hold a good chat. We spoke at length about endurance racing, something Schiff has been involved in a fair amount. She’s competed in a few different 24-hour races, famously securing 2nd place in the 2018 24 Hours of Nürburgring: “Endurance racing is one of my favourite forms of racing, it can go so wrong so easily in sprint race formats,” she says, “whereas in endurance racing you’ve got 24 hours so it’s not over if something goes wrong in the beginning, you can still redeem yourself”.
“I just knocked on a lot of doors and told them that I was the next Lewis Hamilton and that if they gave me a test, I would prove it to them”.
Schiff’s time in the W-Series was short-lived, mostly because of the pandemic. When she joined W-Series in 2019, she hadn’t raced a formula car for 6 years, contributing in part to what she describes as one of the toughest years in her racing career: “I had no money to test for W-Series, so I went into race weekends cold turkey with no practice. It’s very difficult to do well when you’re competing with drivers who have more budgets and are more prepared”.
Had Covid not shown up, she had big plans to spend 2020 training, testing, and securing sponsorship with the aim of making it big. The pandemic meant she’d be “out of the car for two years rather than one”, forcing her to rethink things because she “wasn’t that young anymore”. And so she started working for the W-Series: “I was reserve driving for them before an opportunity to work for them as a pundit came up”.
Soon another big call would come, this time in the form of Sky F1, the biggest Formula One broadcaster there is. “The call from Sky” was a pretty big deal, and she speaks about how she jumped at the chance to get a break from W-Series: “[W-Series] was too close to home for me, because I wanted to be in the car”. Ex-athletes have long loved the transition from active participation to punditry. Some are good, some are crap. Some have the whole charm thing sorted, whilst others can barely get their lines right. Schiff knows where she stands, charmingly great at what she does. It’s all working out pretty well.
There was a bit of a learning curve, she admits: “I don’t always get it 100% right”. The world of F1 is fairly complicated – and though she’s not an engineer, she’s still keen to learn. Why? Because in motorsport, people want a driver’s opinion (and not always an engineer’s). That’s where Schiff’s appeal lies: “Everytime I open up my mouth, it’s about conveying the emotions that drivers go through, and explaining why they make the decisions they do. I try my best to just talk from the driver’s perspective – a perspective that I know – rather than trying to be super technical”.
She’s doing the whole learning thing in front of millions of viewers, some of whom are loudly judgemental. Over the past two years, she’s found herself between the crosshairs of some vitriolic F1 fans. The hate got so bad that Lewis Hamilton felt obliged to lend some support, defending Schiff publicly and asking any incensed fans to give her a break.
On the topic of online abuse, she’s fairly candid: “I think the hardest thing is realising that you can’t prepare yourself for it. I thought going into this that I had extremely thick skin”. It’s hard, she says, knowing that there are people waiting to catch her out on every little mistake. Still, if fans criticise her commentary, all Schiff really needs to do to quell any naysayers is show her 16-year-long resume.
“Once a racing driver, always a racing driver”.
“Sometimes when you’re reporting the facts, it’s not always positive. So it’s tough because it’s like being between a rock and a hard place. You don’t want to upset anyone, but at the same time, you’ve got a job to do”. Sports presenting is a hard, hard job. Everyone has an opinion, and they’ll swear they know it better than you.
For now, she’s a reporter (that doesn’t mean she’s retired from racing, though). The opportunities for women to progress in motorsport are still slim, but she’s found her place on the Formula 1 grid, even if it’s not in the typical way: “It’s nice to have some security and I think that’s where I’m at right now: in the career that allows me to stay in the sport that I love”.
“Once a racing driver, always a racing driver, it’s like a bug that bites you and it’s in your blood” is her way, I think, of not making any promises as to what the next steps are. She’s busy, that’s good: “I’m a spring chicken. If I can’t keep going now, when am I going to keep going? Now is the time”.
Naomi Schiff is firmly in the fast lane. She’s on track to be one of F1’s biggest presenting names. For that, she has her dad, her love of the sport, and a great personality to thank.