Hire with us
My Account
Nobody tells you what happens after you walk through those factory doors. Here are 7 things I wish someone had told me before I joined an F1 team.
If you thought university was tough, if you thought Formula Student was a challenge, if you thought your master’s thesis was a test of endurance… you were wrong. Those were training camps. Boot camps for what was coming.
The pace is brutal. There are no slow weeks. There are no quiet days. Every single day there’s a problem to solve, a simulation batch to run, a correlation to check, a deadline that’s already passed. You get thrown into the deep end on day one. They don’t hold your hand. They don’t give you time to settle in. They give you a problem and expect you to solve it yesterday.
You’ll feel overwhelmed. You’ll feel like you’re drowning. That’s normal. The people who succeed are the ones who learn to swim fast.
If you’ve spent your whole life being the smartest person in the room (top of your class, best in your year, the one everyone came to for help…), prepare for a humble check.
In F1, you’ll be surrounded by people who are more dedicated than you, more competent than you, faster than you, smarter than you, with better ideas than you. And that’s not a bad thing. It’s the best thing.
You’ve walked into a room full of number ones. And not everyone can be the number one. That’s just math. In a room full of geniuses, being the smartest isn’t the goal. Being the one who learns the fastest is.
So how do you handle it? Humility. Accept that you’re not the best anymore, and that’s okay. Curiosity. Watch how others work, ask how they think, steal their methods. Growth. If you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room. In F1, you’re in the right room. Now get to work.
There’s a video that explains this better than I ever could, and I’d recommend watching it if you’re serious about working in this environment.
You’re excited. You’re motivated. You want to prove yourself. You want to show everyone that you deserve to be there. So you work fourteen-hour days, skip lunch, answer emails at 11 PM, come in on weekends. And then three months later, you crash.
Burnout in F1 isn’t a myth. It’s a pandemic, and it takes down the best and brightest. If you push too hard too fast, you’ll burn out before your first season ends, and then you’re no use to anyone.
The reality is that you’ll have more than enough time to work. There will be plenty of opportunities. Late nights, early mornings, triple headers. You don’t need to prove your dedication in the first month. Find your rhythm. Set boundaries early, even if they’re flexible. Learn to say no strategically. Take your days off seriously.
Remember, this is a marathon, not a sprint. The people who last ten-plus years in F1 aren’t the ones who worked the hardest in year one. They’re the ones who worked smart and stayed sane.
In high-performance environments like F1, everything is chased and everything is questioned. Nothing is assumed. You can’t look at a result and say “close enough.” You can’t look at a correlation gap and say “it’s probably fine.” You can’t see an anomaly and say “it’s not important.”
Everything is important. Every thousandth of a second matters. Every correlation mismatch is a potential performance loss. Every unexplained behavior is a risk. If you can’t explain it, you don’t understand it. And if you don’t understand it, you can’t improve it.
In university, close enough was good enough for the grade. In F1, close enough is losing. You need exact. So you ask the hard questions. You dig deeper than anyone else. You never stop chasing the why. You correlate everything, question everything, validate everything.
Your job isn’t just to solve problems. It’s to understand them completely.
F1 is amazing. And F1 will take everything from you if you let it.
If you work trackside, forget about weekends. Friday nights are gone. Saturday plans are out the window. Sunday brunch? You’ll be in a garage. Your friends won’t understand why you can’t make it to their wedding. Your partner will have to accept that you’re gone for half the year.
And on top of that, you’ll probably live in the middle of nowhere. Most F1 teams are based in rural England—Oxfordshire, Northamptonshire. Beautiful countryside, absolutely nothing to do. You’re not just joining a team. You’re moving to a new world, and that world has different rules.
So how do you survive? Accept the trade-off. You’re choosing F1 over a normal life, so own it. Build a life around F1. Make friends in the paddock. Find hobbies that work with your schedule. Create a routine that works for you, not against you. Communicate with your partner, your family, your friends. Set expectations early. And when you have time off, actually use it. Don’t just lie in bed scrolling. Go out, travel, see people.
You can be happy in F1. But you have to build that happiness. It won’t come to you.
It’s incredibly hard to get into F1, and it’s incredibly easy to switch teams once you’re in.
The best place to network in F1 is inside an F1 team. Your colleagues will move. Engineers jump between teams constantly. That guy in the next department might be at Ferrari in two years. That girl who started the same week as you might be at Red Bull in three years. Your reputation travels. F1 is a small world. Everyone knows everyone. If you’re good, people will notice. If you’re bad, people will notice faster.
Build relationships with everyone. The person who answers the phone at reception today could be the hiring manager at Aston Martin tomorrow. Be helpful, not just to your boss but to everyone. Be reliable. If you say you’ll do something, do it. Be memorable for the right reasons. And stay in touch. When people leave, send them a message. Keep the connection alive.
You never know who will open the door to your next opportunity.
When you join an F1 team, there’s a natural fear. You’re new. You’re surrounded by people who’ve been there for years. You don’t want to look stupid. You don’t want to seem incompetent. So you stay quiet, you nod along, you pretend you understand.
In F1, not asking the question is a bigger mistake than asking a stupid one. You haven’t been in this team for long. You don’t know their methodologies, their acronyms, their culture. That’s okay. You’re supposed to be learning.
Asking questions shows you’re engaged. It shows you care. It shows you want to get it right. Asking questions also prevents mistakes, and mistakes cost time.
Ask questions early. Learn the acronyms, learn the processes, learn the shortcuts. Let your questions decrease over time, but never stop being curious. The day you stop asking questions is the day you stop growing.