After spending years trying to put myself in a position to work in the sport, now I mostly just follow F1 for the politics and gamesmanship more than the racing itself.
There are much more fun motorsports to watch, but rarely do they come so packaged with intriguing technical drama.
A few years ago I did a spec Job application to RBR racing
I wasn't cheeky enough to mention the two DNF's (ran out of fuel) they had had the previous season, and how as a former Research Assistant / Experimental officer at a world leading hydro dynamics RnD org - I would have at least made sure the second one did not happen
I would have identified the issue and put plans in place to make sure it didn't happen the second time - any idea how much a DNF costs a top F1 team?
I worked on Campus at Cranfield Uni (close to RB and Maclarren) At a tier 1 research organisation in hydrodynamics, there was one US lab that was working at our level.
I worked on research projects and managing out risk like this is a big aspect of the work. If the materials for a single run of an experiment cost as much as for a small flat you take great care not to fuckup or at least not to make the same mistake twice
I also did a niche specialised Vocational Course in thermofields basically to support military /aerospace.
Were I an interviewer, I think I would have actually really liked that one. It demonstrates real understanding of how human mistakes get made and prevented.
That was brought home to me, when I asked the guy that I shared an office why they used band new non rechargeable batteries for each run of a particular experiment - testing how to improve mixing for the chemical industry.
He commented that some of the runs cost 20k (about 10x my salary at the time) in chemicals to fill the tank (this was a full size 1:1 experiment) so using a brand new set every time made sense - and also the environmental cost of disposing of the several tons of chemicals was not trivial either.
Interesting though that compared with most individual series vs motorsport as a whole, F1 has more races (or at least, this season certainly would have done), and Liberty was rumoured to even be pushing for a 25 race calendar (nudging even closer to the BTCC calendar, and they do 3 per weekend...).
If the double-headers do well this year, I can see that being how they manage that many next year.
Yeah, but Indycar was only something like 18, WEC 8, WRC 14, Blancpain 10. An F1 race isn't a rarity in itself compared with most other motorsports, even MotoGP was only scheduled for 20.
There are much more fun motorsports to watch, but rarely do they come so packaged with intriguing technical drama.