“Drive to Survive got me into Formula 1 – and now I work at Williams”

Williams has been a long-time advocate for attracting more women to work in the industry. Claire Williams, deputy team principal from 2013 to 2020, is one of only two women to drive a Formula 1 team, along with Monisha Kaltenborn at Sauber.

Williams told Formula 1, external That when she took over the team in 2013, “9% of my workforce was female, and when I left in 2020, it was 19.5% female.”

Former racing driver Susie Wolff was given the opportunity to drive a Williams car in 2014 in a free practice session, where Wolff has been instrumental in helping more females enter the sport.

Wolff is now managing director of the Formula 1 Academy, a women-only series that will hold races at seven Formula 1 tracks this year.

“I spend a lot of time at the kart tracks with my son and I have never seen so many young girls racing now with the clear aim of getting into the Formula 1 Academy and that is very encouraging,” Wolff told BBC Sport.

Sullivan spoke about how the Formula 1 Academy and Williams will also help bring more “exposure and representation to the sport as a whole”.

She grew up with two female role models in engineering, her mother and sister, but felt “a little isolated” when she first started studying engineering.

“You definitely notice that it’s usually just you and one other woman in the room, but you get used to it quickly,” she said.

“My mother and sister taught me very quickly to stand up for myself and be confident, which are both big hurdles when you’re a younger engineer.

“It’s still early days, and there’s certainly still a lot of growth to happen, but I think Williams in particular has taken steps in the right direction.”

With the biggest organizational changes in history this season, Sullivan and her team have been especially busy.

“Aerodynamicists will come to you and say: ‘We think this will be important, we think we need to develop this part of the car,’ or ‘We need this kind of tooling in the wind tunnel so we can make the decision,’” she said.

“So the last year and a half has changed a lot. We’ve been moving very quickly but it’s been very exciting.”

Drive to Survive may have been the reason Sullivan got into Formula 1, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t still watch it.

“I’m so busy,” she laughed. “Now that you’re in it, you’re like, ‘Oh. I know what happened there.”

“So, yeah, I don’t watch it. I actually stopped watching it after season two.”