Growing up in motorsport valley (my life history)
I grew up listening to the sound of racing cars in my garden. We lived fewer than 5,000 metres from Silverstone circuit when I was little. I have distant memories of being in the living room, watching F1 on ITV, and going out into the garden and hearing the cars. Sure, the cars were quiet at that distance, but still I could hear the sounds of the engines wafting over the fields.
I had family who worked in motorsport (indeed my father’s CV includes BTCC with Audi, Le Mans with the Silk Cut Jaguar and later the Bentley, and F1 with both Williams and Red Bull, and my cousin was so successful in karting that there’s now a track with a corner named after him), and later friends who worked in motorsport (the type of people that do engineering degrees with a placement year at an F1 team, who then go on to work at the team full time once they’ve graduated), but I never thought F1 was something that would be accessible to me, someone who practically failed A-level maths and never went to university.
I got involved with timekeeping (‘timing and scoring’ if you’re American) from a young age. When I was still single-digits, I would collect lap sheets from the timing room and ride my bike across the paddock to deliver them to race control. When I became a teenager, I started creating the manual lap charts* myself, spending days constantly writing numbers down. Kart meetings are busy places, often with upwards of 25 races per day. When I was 18, I applied for my trainee timekeeping licence with Motorsport UK, and got all the paperwork signed off almost immediately.
Because I didn’t go to university when I finished school, I got a job working locally. I worked as a web developer, using skills I’d taught myself (although living in motorsport valley is great if you like racing cars, there’s not actually a whole lot going on in terms of night life and clubs, and since those of us who were chronically online were spending our time learning CSS to change the colour of the scrollbars on our MySpace profiles, I did what it seems many people did, and got so engrossed in HTML/CSS that I turned it into a career).
That was my life, and I enjoyed it. Building websites all day at work, and playing with websites all night. Involved in motorsport communities on livejournal, creating and sharing icons and other works of fandom. Autosport was a popular printed magazine back then and their job advert section was always an interesting read. I was deeply under-qualified to be an aerodynamicist or a mechanical design engineer, but still it was fun to see all the different jobs that existed in motorsport.
At the end of 2010, I saw an advert from FOM looking for a ‘sporting analyst.’ It caught my eye because it didn’t immediately imply you needed an engineering degree. I read the job advert and realised they were effectively looking for a timekeeper. A job like that had always been my dream**, as corny as that sounds, because I knew that someone must be doing that job. The results don’t make themselves. Realising that I ticked all the requirements of the ad, I sent off my CV. I figured the worst that would happen is that I’d get a rejection letter from FOM. How exciting that would be!
I heard back from them and went for an interview. Ol’ countryside me struggled first with working how to get a bus from somewhere called Bromley to somewhere called Biggin Hill, two places I’d never heard of or been to before. And then I struggled further with actually getting into FOM HQ, because I’d never been to a workplace with a locking door before.
You can imagine my surprise when they invited me back for a second interview. Really? This young, awkward, naive, anxiety-riddled 23-year-old was what interested them? My thinking went from ‘oh, I had an interview with FOM, that’s a fun thing I can say I did’ to ‘oh shit I am actually at risk of getting this job!’.
The awkwardness continued when HR phoned to make me an offer. When they asked ‘will you be accepting the offer?’, I heard ‘were you expecting the offer?’ and replied with a great big ‘No!’ I’ve got a High School Musical poster on my bedroom wall and you think I’m the right person to work on the results of a multi-billion dollar sport?!
It turns out timekeeping skills can be a useful niche. I managed to clarify that I would very much like to accept the offer. The paperwork was done, and I became employed by FOM. The best thing they did for me before I started was give me a list of phone numbers for local ‘digs’, people who had houses in the area with spare bedrooms they offered. I’d never lived away from home before. I didn’t want to live away from home. I didn’t know how to use a washing machine. Or cook. Or eat anything that wasn’t yellow.
I did 17 races out of 19 in my first F1 season. Every race except the first one and the last one. I had so much annual leave and time off in lieu built up that I finished for Christmas on the 18th of November. I did six seasons in total before handing in my notice. I’m not ready to talk about all the dark times of that part of my career, but what I would say is that as with most things, when the list of cons outweighs the list of pros, it’s worth considering whether you want to make a change. There were definitely lots of upsides though and I’m glad I did it. I’m proud of my FIA Super Licence, it’s fun to say that I was there for Max Verstappen’s first win, it was a joy to be there when the Red Bull Ring returned to the calendar, it was cool to go up the tower at COTA before it had even opened to the public, and that ‘inner child F1 fan’ felt giddy every time I got a personal email from Charlie Whiting thanking me for my hard work. I never actually met or spoke to any of the drivers, or even many people from the teams. I once asked some Red Bull mechanics if they had any spare cable ties, and that was about it. My work was seen by millions of people, but I was incredibly invisible.
It wasn’t straightforward to find another job, because there aren’t too many paid jobs at all for timekeepers. Fortunately I was able to use some transferrable skills in software testing and get a job in that, which then freed up my weekends to do voluntary timekeeping again.
The benefits of working in F1 compared to grassroots British motorsport: there’s a team of people who can help you when you have an issue, there’s a lot more budget to replace broken things, you get to work in lots of hot and sunny places, the equipment is a lot more reliable, and nobody ever forgets to actually attach their transponder to their car.
The downsides of working in F1 compared to grassroots British motorsport: there’s sometimes only one race per day (bit boring), you’re usually jetlagged and you rarely get to sleep in your own bed (terrible), one time there will be a race that’s so long that it leads to them actually changing the rules on how long a race is allowed to be and after sitting at a stationary computer screen for four hours, the race finally comes to an end and your favourite driver gets overtaken by Button on the last lap, and one time someone will decide that qualifying should change and even though you know it’ll be terrible, you still have to make it work and so you do all the overtime to make it work and you fly to Australia and work 80 hours in five days to make it work and it finally does work, at which point everyone else now agrees that it’s terrible and it’s immediately scrapped and nobody even knows about your hard work, let alone gives a crap.
Anyway, I now work for a software company that makes systems which help people run motorsport events. I get paid to talk to motorsport people all week and all weekend, and I find it deeply rewarding. I got head-hunted. I used the company’s software, sent them a couple of beautiful bug reports (those few years working in QA really came in useful), and they asked me if I was looking for a job. Turns out, I was.
I still have my timekeeping licence with Motorsport UK. I went from Trainee to Kart to ‘F1 Events Only’, and then back to Kart. And this year, I’ve added Trainee back in because I’m hoping to get my ‘Race’ licence, which will mean I can do timekeeping for big circuits again (yay!). My F1 experience doesn’t count for anything here, unfortunately, though after 20 years of spending my Sundays tracking four-wheeled vehicles going round in circles, I think I’ve got a pretty good understanding of how it all works. I’m excited to get involved in endurance events. The shortest race I’ve worked on (that didn’t get red-flagged and abandoned) was 6 minutes. The longest (so far) was 4 hours, 4 minutes, and 39.537 seconds.
I also still live in motorsport valley. I’ve been in Brackley since 1997. The F1 cars these days are too quiet and too far to hear from my house. But, my home office lines up perfectly with the runway at Turweston Aerodrome, so when teams are up there testing their cars, even with modern double-glazing I can hear the screaming sounds of engines. And when that happens, I get very nostalgic.
In the next newsletter, I’m going to teach you to become an expert in timekeeping so that you can outsmart all your mates / deeply understand what you see on telly. Until then, I hope you all stay hydrated. <3
* I actually did the maths on this at an event last year, and calculated that over the course of the day, I wrote down 6,500 separate numbers.
** My other dream job was to be in the orchestra that does music for cartoons. I might have to let that one go at this point though.