My job in F1: Chief strategist at Sauber

Ruth Buscombe is an Aerospace and Aerothermal Engineering graduate with distinction of the University of Cambridge. She began to work in F1 at Ferrari in 2012 as a Simulations Development Engineer and Race Strategist. After a short spell at Haas F1 Team, she moved to Sauber in Switzerland in September 2016.

My job consists in...

I am the Senior Strategy Engineer at Sauber. My job is to facilitate the best possible decision making across the race weekend, such as tyres we pick, sessions we run them in, information we need to gather in order to help us make the best decisions, where we stand in terms of competitiveness, do we need to change our approach or something on the cars, plan the qualifying session and then the race strategy itself.

What your weekend programme?

It begins with tyre selection, which is made several weeks in advance. I get to the track on the Thursday for set-up work and meetings with drivers and engineers where I explain what the game plan is for the weekend. On Friday, I provide support during the sessions such as track evolution and tyre usage. Between FP1 and FP2, I give an update on our competitiveness, and at the end of the day, it’s a big meeting to plan the rest of the weekend. During FP3, we just focus on the qualifying effort. After qualifying, we establish the game plan for the race, what tyres are we starting on, our biggest strengths of weaknesses, and how do we get our cars into the points. During the race, it’s acting that plan out. Depending on what we see, we have to make decisions based on the homework we made up to that point. It’s 98% preparation. So if I see X, we do Y. It’s reactive and based on a lot of homework.

Most important aspect of your job

The box call [the pit stops]. The most important aspect is pulling the trigger and say to box or not to box? If the Safety Car comes out, do we box or not? If you’re in someone’s undercut window, do we box or not? What tyres do you put on during that pit stop? All intuition is just basically estimation of all of the information you gained beforehand. So it’s not really about what you feel but rather what the numbers are saying.

Three tools that are essential

A laptop, a pit wall - to be able to look at everything - and a good connection to the data feed. If you don’t have a data coming in, you are completely useless. That’s the data coming from telemetry, timing and the GPS data.

People I’m always in contact with

Engineers and drivers, basically. I report to the Chief Engineer, Xavi Pujolar who’s the ultimate decision maker when it comes to everything on the track. I contact the drivers to know what their concerns are, and how they can extract the most out of their cars. And I am in contact with their respective race engineers and performance engineers. I have to explain why we’re doing the things we’re doing. Fifty per cent of strategy is maths and the other 50% is salesmanship. If people don’t believe in that you’re doing, it doesn’t work. Everyone has to be on the same page.

When you're away from motorsport...

I actually like to travel. And spend time with people you love, because we’re away from home so much. Have a nice dinner in good company.

Without me around…

Mmmm… The car would never stop? [Laughs] I think without me around everything would be fine. That’s the great thing about F1 is it’s a team. Nobody is ever truly replaceable. Because we’re a team, if one person is not around, you can count on other fantastic people who are there. The only persons you really need are the drivers, but there are reserve drivers anyway!

F1 is...

Life! Everything else is just waiting! There’s something unbelievably captivating about racing. There are very few careers in terms of engineering where you get to go and put on this amazing show in front of millions of people and where you get your decisions sometimes brutally analysed by the whole world. That challenge is very exciting. When you do a good job, you see the result immediately. You get immediate feedback, and you don’t get that in other forms of engineering. I’ve always enjoyed the pressure to deliver.