Williams has been an extended-time advocate on getting extra ladies to work within the business. Claire Williams, the deputy staff principal from 2013 to 2020, is one in all solely two ladies to lead a Formula 1 staff, together with Monisha Kaltenborn at Sauber.
Williams instructed Formula 1, external that when she took over the staff in 2013, “9% of my workforce were female, when I left in 2020, 19.5% were female”.
She gave former racing driver Susie Wolff the chance to drive the Williams automobile in 2014 in a free follow session, with Wolff happening to be instrumental in serving to extra females get into the game.
Wolff is now the managing director of F1 Academy, an all feminine-sequence with races going down at seven Formula 1 tracks this 12 months.
“I spend a lot of time at kart tracks with my son and I’ve never seen so many young girls now racing with a clear goal of making it to F1 Academy and that’s so encouraging,” Wolff instructed BBC Sport.
Sullivan spoke about how F1 Academy and Williams have additionally helped carry extra “exposure and representation to the sport as a whole”.
She grew up with two feminine position fashions within the engineering business, her mum and her sister, however felt a “bit secluded” when she first started finding out engineering.
“You definitely do notice that it’s usually just you and one other woman in the room, but you quickly get used to it,” she mentioned.
“My mum and sister taught me quite quickly to advocate for myself and to be confident and those two things are big hurdles when you are a younger female engineer.
“It’s nonetheless early days, there’s undoubtedly nonetheless much more progress that wants to occur, however I assume that particularly Williams have taken the steps in the fitting path.”
With the biggest regulation changes in history this season, Sullivan and her staff have been particularly busy.
“The aerodynamicists will come to you and say ‘we predict that is going to be essential, we predict we’d like to develop this space of the automobile’, or ‘we’d like this type of software within the wind tunnel to find a way to decide’,” she mentioned.
“So the previous 12 months and a half has been altering quite a bit. We’ve been pivoting fairly quickly however it’s been fairly thrilling.”
Drive to Survive may have been the reason for Sullivan getting into F1 but that doesn’t mean she still watches it.
“I’m too busy,” she laughed. “Now that you simply’re in it, you are identical to ‘oh. I know what occurred there’.
“So, yeah, I don’t watch. I stopped watching it actually after season two.”
