When Haas driver Esteban Ocon races around Albert Park this weekend, a female voice will be on the radio telling him to “box, box” — that of Laura Mueller, the US team’s newly promoted race engineer, calling him in for a pit stop.
German engineer Mueller is the first woman in F1 history to hold the coveted role, which provides the main point of contact between a team and a driver. The 33-year-old joined Haas as a performance engineer three years ago, after several years working in motorsport events such as the World Endurance Championship and European Le Mans Series.
Mueller’s promotion is noteworthy in a sport where female engineers remain few and far between — even more so than in the engineering sector nationally, where 15.7 per cent of employees in 2023 were female, according to EngineeringUK.
In comparison, according to gender pay gap reports from April 2023, women held just 7 per cent of technical roles at McLaren in April 2023, despite making up almost a fifth of its total workforce; at Mercedes, 10 per cent of technical staff were female; and at Williams the figure was 8.7 per cent. Other teams did not publish this data.
Like Mueller, Hannah Schmitz is one of the sport’s most high-profile female engineers, sitting on Red Bull’s pit wall as its principal strategy engineer. But when she first joined the Milton Keynes-based team on a student placement 16 years ago, she recalls being one of just five women across its whole design department.
Schmitz treated that disparity as a “motivation”: “If someone tells me I can’t do something, then I definitely want to do that thing.” She acknowledges, however, that “having to prove yourself to be better than your male equivalent” probably hindered her early in her career.
In her view, the key barriers to female F1 engineers remain “lower down” at education and entry, with not enough quality female applicants.
She studied mechanical engineering at the University of Cambridge, where she designed a solar-powered car and raced it across Australia. But STEM degrees remain male-dominated — in 2022-23, just one-fifth of engineering and technology students in UK universities were female, according to the Higher Education Statistics Agency.
Another challenge is retaining women, Schmitz adds, noting that none of the four women with whom she started remain in the sport. She says teams need to ensure that roles in the sport — renowned for its gruelling travel schedule — remain “accessible” to those with families, whether male or female.
One change that has made this easier in recent years is the ability to arrive at the track slightly later in the race week, allowing Schmitz to “maximise time with my family outside of that”.
Schmitz’s proudest career achievement — being invited on to the podium after Max Verstappen’s victory in the 2019 Brazilian Grand Prix, a victory she helped clinch with a call to pit the Dutch driver under a safety car — was made even more “special” by her recent return from maternity leave, she says. “It felt like a personal achievement as well as an honour to represent the team.”
External perceptions pose further barriers to women in the sport, explains Bernadette Collins, Sky Sports pundit and former F1 engineer. In a career spanning multiple teams, she worked as Jenson Button’s performance engineer at McLaren in 2014 and Aston Martin’s head of race strategy from 2020 to 2022, overseeing Sergio Perez’s “phenomenal” win at the at the Sakhir GP in Bahrain in 2020.
In contrast to the F1 teams in which she worked, which she found meritocratic and supportive, Collins recalls revealing that she worked as a gearbox engineer for McLaren to pubgoers whose response was, “‘I didn’t think that was a girl’s job’”. I never got that when I was in the office,” she adds.
Visibility is the solution, she says, pointing to Mueller’s recent promotion: “I hope there’s going to be a lot of excitement around that. We’ve got much better at highlighting the different careers that people can have within the industry. And the more we do that, the more I think we’ll encourage people to think of entering the industry and not just disregard it as a boy sport, which it’s totally not.”
Amelia Lewis, a performance engineer who has worked at McLaren since joining the graduate scheme in 2016, agrees. “When you can’t see other women in the space, it’s a lot more difficult for you to imagine yourself there.”
As a teenager, Lewis loved maths and physics and was passionate about F1, but the only women she saw in the sport were senior management figures such as Sauber’s Monisha Kaltenborn and Williams’ Claire Williams. It was only when she attended a McLaren talk in her first year of university that F1 engineering moved from a “hobby” and “far-fetched dream” to a realistic career prospect.
Now working in the team’s data performance department, Lewis remains passionate about promoting female representation, through both her involvement in McLaren’s mentorship and 60 Scholars schemes and her Instagram account (@the.female.engineer), which she set up “to show young women and girls there’s a space for them as well”.
A similar purpose drives Girls on Track UK, a joint initiative between the FIA and Motorsport UK. As well as its ‘community’ — a Facebook group with more than 10,000 members, which connects women in the industry with peers and students, advertises job opportunities and hosts webinars — it holds day-long events for girls aged 8-14, with mechanics-based pit-stop challenges and coding Lego race cars.
“We want to inspire them when they’re young,” says programme director and former teacher Jenny Fletcher, ahead of any “preconceived ideas”. The aim is for the girls to “understand what motorsport and motorsport jobs are all about”.
Female engineers such as Mueller, Schmitz, Collins and Lewis are less anomalous than they may have once been, with increasing numbers across the sport, particularly in entry-level roles.
Megan Gilkes, an engineer on Aston Martin’s graduate scheme, is one example. The Canadian made the switch from racing to engineering after competing as a driver in the W Series in 2019 and the inaugural F1 Academy season in 2023, balancing both with her aeronautical engineering degree at Imperial College, London.
Gilkes’s dream is to be a trackside engineer, or even a race engineer. “It’s really awesome that there’s a female race engineer,” she says of Mueller’s recent promotion. “Hopefully, gender in the future won’t be something that particularly matters for the role.”
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