At the beginning of April, UWA Motorsport Team Project Manager, Jess Gugliotta was invited to attend Motorsport Australia’s annual Career Development Program event held at the Formula 1 Grand Prix in Melbourne. Jess was delighted to be selected as one of 20 from a pool of over 500 aspiring women pursuing a career in motorsport.  

The jam-packed day consisted of sessions with the program’s “ambassadors” and “champions,” such as Jessica Dane (Co-Owner of Triple Eight Race Engineering) and Krystina Emmanouilides (Alfa-Romeo F1 CFD Engineer), and an extremely valuable two-hour networking lunch with some of the motorsport industry’s most inspiring and successful women, at which attendees encouraged to make connections and make themselves known.

It is not often you are able to stand in a room amidst dozens of people who have worked tirelessly to make it in an industry that requires such resilience, and who are so ready to support you in pursuing your passion. 

The second half of the day took attendees into the F1 Paddock where they not only were able to meet-and-greet the Alfa-Romeo Race Engineering team but also drivers Valtteri Bottas and Zhou Guanyu. They were taken on tours of both the Williams and Alfa-Romeo garages and hospitality suites where they got to witness all of the pre-race engineering actions up close, and even practise pit-stops on the F1 cars themselves. 

It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience that Jess says she is still coming down from. A gracious thank you goes out to Professor Tim Sercombe and the School of Engineering for assisting with travel costs. 

Since then Jess has continued to support the Girls on Track initiative as a volunteer – most recently at the V8 Supercars weekend in Perth where she helped mentor high-school students through a STEM workshop and got to listen to more amazing women give their career advice. More about Girls on Track can be found at https://motorsport.org.au/events/girlsontrack