Williams has been a long-time advocate on getting extra ladies to work within the business. Claire Williams, the deputy workforce principal from 2013 to 2020, is considered one of solely two ladies to guide a Formulation 1 workforce, together with Monisha Kaltenborn at Sauber.
Williams instructed Formula 1, external that when she took over the workforce in 2013, “9% of my workforce had been feminine, after I left in 2020, 19.5% had been feminine”.
She gave former racing driver Susie Wolff the chance to drive the Williams automobile in 2014 in a free follow session, with Wolff occurring to be instrumental in serving to extra females get into the game.
Wolff is now the managing director of F1 Academy, an all female-series with races happening at seven Formulation 1 tracks this 12 months.
“I spend a variety of time at kart tracks with my son and I’ve by no means seen so many younger ladies now racing with a transparent purpose of constructing it to F1 Academy and that is so encouraging,” Wolff instructed BBC Sport.
Sullivan spoke about how F1 Academy and Williams have additionally helped carry extra “publicity and illustration to the game as an entire”.
She grew up with two feminine function fashions within the engineering business, her mum and her sister, however felt a “bit secluded” when she first started finding out engineering.
“You positively do discover that it is often simply you and one different girl within the room, however you rapidly get used to it,” she stated.
“My mum and sister taught me fairly rapidly to advocate for myself and to be assured and people two issues are huge hurdles if you end up a youthful feminine engineer.
“It is nonetheless early days, there may be positively nonetheless much more development that should occur, however I feel that particularly Williams have taken the steps in the best course.”
With the biggest regulation changes in history this season, Sullivan and her workforce have been particularly busy.
“The aerodynamicists will come to you and say ‘we predict that is going to be necessary, we predict we have to develop this space of the automobile’, or ‘we want this kind of device within the wind tunnel to have the ability to decide’,” she stated.
“So the previous 12 months and a half has been altering so much. We have been pivoting fairly quickly however it’s been fairly thrilling.”
Drive to Survive might have been the rationale for Sullivan entering into F1 however that does not imply she nonetheless watches it.
“I am too busy,” she laughed. “Now that you just’re in it, you are similar to ‘oh. I do know what occurred there’.
“So, yeah, I do not watch. I ended watching it really after season two.”
