As Haas driver Esteban Ocon races Albert Park this weekend, a female voice will direct “Box, Box” on the radio. This is what Laura Mueller, the newly promoted race engineer for the US team, is looking for a pit stop.
A German engineer, Mueller is the first woman in Formula 1 history and has played a much-needed role. This provides the main point of contact between the team and the driver. The 33-year-old joined Haas as a performance engineer three years ago after working for several years at motorsport events such as the World Endurance Championship and the European Le Mans Series.
According to Engineeringuk, Mueller’s promotion is notable in sports where female engineers are far more distant than the engineering sector nationwide.
In comparison, according to the Gender Pay Gap Report from April 2023, women held just 7% of their technical roles at McLaren in April 2023, accounting for almost a fifth of their total workforce. At Mercedes, 10% of the technical staff were women. At Williams, this figure was 8.7%. No other teams released this data.
Like Mueller, Hannah Schmitz is one of the most famous female engineers in the sport and sits on the Red Bull pitwall as a leading strategy engineer. However, when she first joined the Milton Keynes-based team in student placement 16 years ago, she recalls that she was one of only five women in the entire design department.
Schmitz treated the inequality as a “motivation”: “If anyone tells me that I can’t do anything to me, I definitely want to do it.” But she admits that admitting that she “has to prove that she’s better than her man’s equivalent” could have probably hampered her early in her career.
In her view, the important barriers to female F1 engineers remain “low” at education and admission, with no quality female applicants.
She studied mechanical engineering at Cambridge University, where she designed solar powered cars and raced all over Australia. However, according to the Bureau of Higher Education Statistics, STEM degrees remain male dominated.
Another challenge is keeping women alive, Schmitz adds, noting that none of the four women she started is in sports. She says the team needs to ensure that the sport’s role (known for its tough travel schedule) remains “accessible” for people with families, whether men or women.
One change that has made this easier in recent years is the ability to arrive at the track a little after race week, allowing Schmitz to “maximise time with my rest of my family.”
Schmitz’s most proud career achievements — invited to the podium after Max Burstappen’s victory at the 2019 Brazilian Grand Prix, helping her clinch in a call to hire a Dutch driver with her recent return from maternity leave — she says she helped her win. “Representing the team felt like a personal accomplishment and honor.”
Bernadette Collins, Sky Sports Pundit, a former F1 engineer, says external perceptions bring additional barriers to sports women. In a multi-team career, she worked as a performance engineer for Jenson Button at McLaren in 2014, as head of race strategy for Aston Martin from 2020 to 2022, and overseeing Sergio Perez’s “amazing” victory at the Sakil Grand Prix held at Balein in 2020.
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In contrast to the Formula 1 team she worked for, she decides she is capable and supportive, and Collins reveals to the performer who responded, “I didn’t think it was a girl’s job,” that she worked as a gearbox engineer for McLaren. I never got it when I was in the office,” she adds.
Vision is the solution, she says, pointing to Mueller’s recent promotion. “I hope there’s a lot of excitement about it. We’re way better at highlighting the different careers people can have within the industry, and the more I do it, the more I think the more we encourage people to think about entering the industry.
Amerialis, a performance engineer who has worked for McLaren since joining the 2016 graduate scheme, agrees. “If you can’t see other women in the space, it’s much harder to imagine yourself being there.”
As a teenager, Lewis loved mathematics and physics and was passionate about Formula 1, but the only women she saw in sports were figures from senior management positions, including Monisha Caltenborn of Sauber and Claire Williams of Williams. Only when she attended a McLaren talk in her first year at university was Formula 1 engineering shifted from “hobbies” and “distant dreams” to a realistic career outlook.
Currently working in the team’s data performance department, Lewis is passionate about promoting female expression, both through McLaren’s guidance and involvement in 60 academic schemes and Instagram accounts (@female.engineer).
A similar purpose drives girls from Track UK, a joint initiative between FIA and Motorsport UK. It promotes employment opportunities and hosts webinars, as well as the “Community,” a Facebook group with over 10,000 members that connects women in the industry with peers and students.
“We want to inspire them when they’re young,” says Jenny Fletcher, a program director and former teacher, ahead of “preconceptions.” The goal is for girls to “understand everything about motorsports and motorsport work.”
Female engineers like Mueller, Schmitz, Collins and Lewis are less unusual than they once were, especially in their entry-level roles, as numbers are increasing across the sport.
Megan Gilkes, an engineer at Aston Martin’s Graduate Scheme, is one example. The Canadian competed as a driver in the 2019 W Series and then competed for his first F1 Academy season in 2023 before switching from racing to engineering, balancing his aeronautics degree at Imperial College in London.
Gilkes’ dream is to become a trackside engineer or race engineer. “It’s really great to have a female race engineer,” she says of Mueller’s recent promotion. “Hopefully future gender isn’t particularly important to that role.”
