With the start of the 2025 Formula 1 season just around the corner—the first race happening in Melbourne, Australia, on Sunday, March 16—there is no better time to highlight the historic accomplishment of Laura Mueller, who recently became F1’s first full-time female race engineer.
The U.S.-based MoneyGram Haas F1 Team promoted Mueller from her previous role as Performance Engineer to Race Engineer for French driver Esteban Ocon.
The race engineer acts as the sole link between the driver and the team via on-track radio communications and during the post-race debrief. During the race, they are a crucial point of information for the driver: relaying car performance, track position, and brake balance, among other things.
Off the track, the role of race engineers continues, as they are also responsible for the cars engineering team and its overall performance.
According to an article released by Formula 1, Haas’s Team Principal Ayao Komatsu said of Mueller, “She’s a pretty determined character. And then she’s very hardworking. Her work ethic is really, really good.”
He continued, “And then what she’s really good at is, when she sees a problem, she digs deep, and she doesn’t stop at the first answer.”
Komatsu went on to say that while he recognizes the historic nature of Mueller’s appointment as a race engineer, he did not give her the job because of her sex but rather because of her work ethic and ability to maximize the team’s performance.
Mueller has both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in automotive engineering from the Technical University of Munich. As a child, she aspired to be an F1 driver, but truly began her racing career as an intern at Phoenix Racing, where she assisted the race engineer in analyzing data.
After her internship, she became an engineer in Formula Renault 2.0 before going to Brazil to work as a data engineer at Hero Motorsport. After her stint at Hero Motorsport, Mueller became a data and performance engineer with the racing team Nederland and later on the Algarve Pro Racing Team.
Mueller gained further experience serving as a race engineer in the Deutsche Tourenwagen Masters— a sports car racing series based in Germany, where she is from— and the Manthey Racing team before joining Haas in 2022.
Mueller herself has spoken of her new job. In an interview for GP Blog, Mueller stated that she found it “quite sad” that she was the first female race engineer in a sport that just celebrated its seventy-fifth birthday.
Mueller went on to say that she simply wants to focus on her job and the performance of the car and team.
Mueller’s new role is a positive step in the right direction for women in Formula 1. There has been momentous progress for women in F1 in the form of the F1 Academy established in 2023. The F1 Academy is an all-female racing series headed by former professional racing driver Susie Wolff, whose goal is to promote access for female drivers in higher levels of motorsport.
Having a female race engineer such as Mueller is an inspiration for young women who wish to get into the more technical aspects of Formula 1. Mueller agrees, stating, “If my face being on TV can make girls and young women think they can achieve this too, I’m actually quite happy.”