Surrounded by a wall of screens showing live footage from a Formula One race track, Rowan knows her next decision could change the outcome of the race.
The 24-year-old graduate engineer is analysing data from hundreds of sensors on the suspension of driver Pierre Gasly’s Alpine F1 car.
She is sitting in the Operations (Ops) room of Alpine’s Oxfordshire factory, watching the car’s performance on a circuit halfway across the world.
As a suspension performance engineer, her choice to replace a damper or a spring on the car will have a direct effect on the result.
“I love being in the Ops room and getting to experience all of that excitement live,” said Rowan. “I don’t know if there are many jobs in the world where you can be so nervous that you can barely type on the keyboard because so much is relying on it. And I like it. I know it’s just a car driving around in circles, but it is an amazing feeling.”
Rowan was chosen from hundreds of hopefuls to be a graduate engineer at Alpine F1 after graduating from St John’s with an MEng in Mechanical Engineering – swapping rowing boats for cars after competing in the 2024 Boat Race women’s reserve boat.
At St John’s, she did a four-year Engineering course, which includes a BA (Hons) and a Master’s, choosing to specialise in Mechanical Engineering from her third year.
A career in Formula One is a dream finally realised for Rowan after she first developed a love of the sport as a child, watching races on television with her family.
“I always knew I wanted to be on the performance side of Formula One engineering. Designing is okay. But what I really find interesting is when I’m making changes live to the car that’s then going out onto the track, and I can watch it go around and think, ‘Yeah, I did that. I made that go faster’. I like the excitement of being in the moment and being in the action.”
Two years after arriving at St John’s to study Engineering in 2019, she took an industrial placement for one year at Williams F1. There, she supported the track in mission control for 27 races and worked on a simulator with academy drivers.
Rowan said: “That placement really set me up for my career. Also, the problem-solving skills and programming I learned during my degree, as well as the vehicle dynamics course in fourth year, were all vital for this role. But the most important skill I learned was data analysis, which feeds into everything I do. Just being able to look at a massive database and get out the information I need and the graph I want has been so helpful.”
After completing the final two years of her degree, Rowan won the role at Alpine. “As jobs go straight out of university, it is definitely the dream,” she says.
Her proudest moment so far has been the work she did monitoring Gasly’s car during the 2024 São Paulo Grand Prix. The driver was unhappy about the car’s performance and after running some scans overnight, Rowan realised she needed to change a damper.
Rowan says, “They changed the damper. And then when it got to the actual race, both cars ended up on the podium, which is the first time that’s happened in about 20 years, and it was the only podium we got all year. It felt very much like I had made something happen. I felt like I had made this change, the car had gone better, and suddenly we’ve got two trophies back in the factory.
“It’s also amazing to think how many people are watching Formula One, and how big a deal it was for the team. I was a very small part of all of that, but it’s still pretty cool.”
As a student at St John’s she discovered her talent and passion for rowing. “I loved my time at St John’s and became very involved in the Lady Margaret Boat Club,” said Rowan. “I learned to row at John’s in first year.
“In my third year, after I got back from the placement, I was Women’s Captain, and we had an incredibly successful year. We won every race we entered. We got blades in Bumps. At the end of that, I went to trial for the Boat Race, and last year I was in Blondie, the reserve boat, so rowing was very important part of my time in Cambridge.”
Find out more about studying Engineering at St John’s
The full version of this article appears in The Eagle 2025
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