‘Drive to Survive got me into F1 – now I work at Williams’ Media caption, The Williams engineer on how a TV show led to her career in F1ByElla StirlingBBC Sport journalistPublished34 minutes agoFive 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 mentioned 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%. , external
Drive to Survive first aired in 2019 and YouGov research in 2023, external found that 46% of the show’s seven million viewers in the UK were women.
Female fans make up three in four new viewers of the sport, according to F1, and 57% of all new fans in 2025 were under 35. , external
