QuestionQUESTION: Hey Adam, I'm a big formula 1 and am seriously looking into working in the motorsport industry. I am currently doing a business degree and majoring in the accounting and finance field. Is there any specialized job description that suits a business graduate. I am particularly interested the management of a formula 1 team. Hope to hear soon.
ANSWER: Hello Kevin, thanks for your interesting question.
I think the answer is no, there is no specialised job description that suits a business graduate (in terms of a path to F1 team management), which is a very lofty ambition. F1 team managers are a very, very rare breed, there are only 12 of them in the World and there have only ever been less than 300. They are drawn from various sources;
- engineers
- entrepreneurs
- former drivers
- auto industry senior personnel
Interestingly there is no real feeder system as there is with drivers, F1 managers have usually not managed motor racing teams at other levels of the sport and so generally the first motor racing team they manage is an F1 team.
There are lots of different jobs in F1. A typical leading F1 team has about 200-300 staff. This comprises the race team, the test team, promotion/communications, engineering, management, dieticians/physiotherapy, finance, hospitality, HGV drivers and mechanics. Engineering involves a range of specialities such as engine, tyre, aerodynamics, wind tunnel, model making, composites manufacture and design, CAD/CAM experts, fuel technicians, laminators, hardware/software engineers, machinists and mechanical designers. There's probably more, but this will hopefully give you an idea. One could get into an F1 team by being expert and enthusiastic in any of these disciplines.
You obviously will need to get the appropriate qualifications in your chosen field. In addition to get into an F1 team (in a role other than manager of it) they will probably want you to have some experience of using your skills in a real life setting in one of the junior series, e.g. Formula 3, Formula renault, sports cars etc.
One tip is to look at the F1 teams' websites, some may give information on current vacancies and could stipulate what sort of qualifications they are looking at applicants having.
Hope this is helpful for you,
Adam
---------- FOLLOW-UP ----------
QUESTION: Hi Adam thanks again for your insight. Just wanted to clarify,you said an F1 team has about 200-300 staff comprising of various fields. Two of what you mentioned was finance and management. Could you go into detail about these to fields related to formula1.
AnswerHello Kevin,
An F1 team is like any large organisation. It has staff and products, needs raw materials and accounting practises etc. Therefore, you would expect it to have people responsible for:
HR (including employment terms, recruitment, contracts etc)
Procurement and inventory management
Accounts and financial management (budgeting etc)
IT management
Logistics (travel, moving kit around)
Communications, PR, sponsorship etc.
Site management - taking care of facilities and certification etc
Then each functional team will also have management
test team
CAD/CAM & design team
fabricators/modellers/laminators
tyre
race team
fuel, etc.
If you look at F1 job pages, you will see such as:
Ride analysis engineer
Tyre analysis engineer
Composite lamnators/fitters
Aerodynamicists
Machinists
CNC programmer
In other words, the trickier jobs to place are specialist ones, the easier ones to place are general managament/finance, presumably as the staff pool to recruit from is much larger.
Adam
