EXCLUSIVE: The young woman who rose from a Harare suburb to the Formula One limelight
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It was always going to be in a year as upside down as 2020 that a disparate group of events that included the killing of a black man in Minneapolis in May colliding with the hard work and lifelong ambition of a young woman from Harare on a Formula One podium in Austria in July, absent of any crowd, would provide one of the year’s most endearing moments.
But this is exactly what happened when Stephanie Travers, the 26-year-old Petronas trackside fluid engineer working with the Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One (F1) team, became the first black woman to stand on an F1 podium, an outstanding achievement in a sport dominated by European men.
The moment she stepped onto the podium, Travers became a powerful reminder of why it is important to eradicate gender bias, racism and inequality. Here is a woman who, through her talent, hard work and dedication, has risen to the pinnacle of motorsport, and all she required from society to seize it was a fair chance.
As with the outrage that followed the killing of George Floyd a few months before that brought the US’s long, suppressed history of racial injustice into sharp focus and highlighted the glaring reality that people of colour are still treated differently to everybody else, Travers’s incredible achievement posed a very uncomfortable question: why had it taken so long?
Staying fluid
In 2010, the Malaysian petrochemical giant Petroliam Nasional Berhad (Petronas) became the title sponsor and technical partner of the Mercedes-AMG Petronas F1 team. As part of its technical contribution, it custom-manufactures the Primax race fuel, Syntium gearbox and engine oil and Tutela transmission fluids the racing cars consume.
Petronas also staffs and equips the specialised mobile trackside laboratory that accompanies the team to all races. Extracting, testing and analysing the fuel, engine oil and transmission lubricant are the primary responsibility of Travers and her trackside laboratory colleague, En De Liow.
Over the course of a racing weekend, the duo will extract nine engine oil and six transmission lubricant samples per car, and 70-80 samples of fuel.
“I provide analysis of all the fluids we send trackside. In the case of analysing the fuel, we take a fingerprint from a fuel sample, and much like when you unlock your phone, the fingerprint has to match the standards of the ‘golden sample’ preapproved by the FIA [motorsport’s sanctioning body]. So much of the ...
But this is exactly what happened when Stephanie Travers, the 26-year-old Petronas trackside fluid engineer working with the Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One (F1) team, became the first black woman to stand on an F1 podium, an outstanding achievement in a sport dominated by European men.
The moment she stepped onto the podium, Travers became a powerful reminder of why it is important to eradicate gender bias, racism and inequality. Here is a woman who, through her talent, hard work and dedication, has risen to the pinnacle of motorsport, and all she required from society to seize it was a fair chance.
As with the outrage that followed the killing of George Floyd a few months before that brought the US’s long, suppressed history of racial injustice into sharp focus and highlighted the glaring reality that people of colour are still treated differently to everybody else, Travers’s incredible achievement posed a very uncomfortable question: why had it taken so long?
Staying fluid
In 2010, the Malaysian petrochemical giant Petroliam Nasional Berhad (Petronas) became the title sponsor and technical partner of the Mercedes-AMG Petronas F1 team. As part of its technical contribution, it custom-manufactures the Primax race fuel, Syntium gearbox and engine oil and Tutela transmission fluids the racing cars consume.
Petronas also staffs and equips the specialised mobile trackside laboratory that accompanies the team to all races. Extracting, testing and analysing the fuel, engine oil and transmission lubricant are the primary responsibility of Travers and her trackside laboratory colleague, En De Liow.
Over the course of a racing weekend, the duo will extract nine engine oil and six transmission lubricant samples per car, and 70-80 samples of fuel.
“I provide analysis of all the fluids we send trackside. In the case of analysing the fuel, we take a fingerprint from a fuel sample, and much like when you unlock your phone, the fingerprint has to match the standards of the ‘golden sample’ preapproved by the FIA [motorsport’s sanctioning body]. So much of the ...
