‘Drive to Survive got me into F1 – now I work at Williams’

Five years ago Christina Sullivan knew nothing about Formula 1.

Back then, the 27-year-old says she “definitely wasn’t into motorsport”. Now, she is a wind tunnel systems engineer with the Williams F1 team.

The turnaround is thanks, in part, to the Netflix show Drive to Survive.

Studying an engineering degree at the University of Waterloo in her native Canada, Sullivan began watching the show with her sister in 2021.

A work placement had fallen through because of the Covid-19 pandemic and, as she looked for an alternative, the excitement of an F1 season caught the Canadian’s imagination.

“We really got into the show,” Sullivan tells BBC Sport.

“I got really interested in the sport, the technical side and the engineering side.”

A university project focused on F1 followed and, before long, Sullivan began to wonder if the sport could provide a career path.

She applied for internships and, that same year, was accepted on a placement at Williams’ headquarters in Oxfordshire.

Sullivan said her new aspirations were a surprise to friends and family, adding: “It was a big pivot, I hadn’t watched the sport before the show came out.

“My sister is a really big F1 fan. When I got the interview she was so excited.”

Just over four years after starting that first placement at Williams, Sullivan is now a full-time wind tunnel systems engineer.

The wind tunnel model she works on replicates track conditions, testing a scale model of a car in a wind tunnel to determine its performance in different environments.

The results of these tests are then used to enhance the aerodynamics of the car and improve its performance on the track.

Sullivan is not alone in being drawn to the sport in recent years.

According to the 2025 Global F1 Fan Survey, between 2017 and 2024 the proportion of fans of the sport who are women grew from 8% to 42%.

Drive to Survive first aired in 2019 and YouGov research in 2023 found that 46% of the show’s seven million viewers in the UK were women.

Williams has been a long-time advocate on getting more women to work in the industry. Claire Williams, the deputy team principal from 2013 to 2020, is one of only two women to lead a Formula 1 team, along with Monisha Kaltenborn at Sauber.

Williams told Formula 1 that when she took over the team 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 opportunity to drive the Williams car in 2014 in a free practice session, with Wolff going on to be instrumental in helping more females get into the sport.

Wolff is now the managing director of F1 Academy, an all female-series with races taking place at seven Formula 1 tracks this year.

“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 told BBC Sport.

Sullivan spoke about how F1 Academy and Williams have also helped bring more “exposure and representation to the sport as a whole”.

She grew up with two female role models in the engineering industry, her mum and her sister, but felt a “bit secluded” when she first began studying 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 said.

“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 still early days, there is definitely still a lot more growth that needs to happen, but I think that especially Williams have taken the steps in the right direction.”

With the biggest regulation changes in history this season, Sullivan and her team have been especially busy.

“The aerodynamicists will come to you and say ‘we think this is going to be important, we think we need to develop this area of the car’, or ‘we need this sort of tool in the wind tunnel to be able to make a decision’,” she said.

“So the past year and a half has been changing a lot. We’ve been pivoting quite rapidly but it’s been pretty exciting.”

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’re in it, you’re just like ‘oh. I know what happened there’.