by Tilly Measures
As a female Formula 1 fanatic, I’m intent on pursuing a career in motorsports journalism, so I jumped at the chance to interview team boss and ex racing driver, Jamie Green. I’ve been a huge fan of Formula 1 since I was a child, attracted by the speed and the noise of the race cars, the stories of rivalry both on and off the track.
Over the last few years, the appeal of the motorsport world has broadened thanks, in part, to the Drive to Survive Netflix series, which has brought in legions of new fans to the sport, many of whom are female.
Recently, I’ve been able to channel my passion for racing into an academic pursuit, making gender inequality within Formula 1 the subject of my EPQ(Extended Project Qualification).
📸 Abbi Pulling, as an Alpine Academy driver is one of the more high profile women in racing, but women are vastly underrepresented on the whole in F1.
Having researched this topic extensively, this interview was a great opportunity to garner the opinion of a real-life racing driver on this subject amongst others.
The opportunity arose during a Performing Arts Mentoring meeting with my mentor, Mr Chessell. Whilst discussing a prospective arts-based future, I shared that in fact my dream career is in motorsports journalism and not musical theatre. Mr Chessell, though initially surprised by this revelation, suggested he could contact Jamie Green, a local ex racing driver turned karting team principal, to propose a potential interview. I firmly grasped this chance with both hands: what an exciting opportunity!
Meeting Jamie over the Easter holidays on a Zoom call, I started out by asking him to give me an overview of his life as a racing driver. “It became the plan, aged eight or nine. I had a fascination, and I knew it was what I wanted to do”. Having this foresight at such a tender age, that his future lay in racing, was prescient, as this was the start of Jamie’s extremely successful career as a professional racing driver.
📸 Jamie Green(middle), with Formula E’s Nico Müller and
After watching his dad race, he took up UK stock car racing before moving on, aged 12, to karting where he remained until he was 18. Jamie then welcomed the opportunity to start racing in single seater cars, where he was successful, and, by then, he was on the path to greater things in the world of motorsport.
In 2002, he progressed to Formula Renault UK, where he raced in a scaled down Formula 1 car with slick tyres, a front and rear wing, finishing in 2nd place.
Moving to Formula 3 in 2003, he ended the season with four race wins and finished 2nd in his first season. He competed alongside Lewis Hamilton and finished the season ahead of the future world champion. He then moved to European Formula 3 in 2004, where again he raced against Lewis Hamilton and future F1 star, Nico Rosberg. Jamie finished this season with seven wins, six poles and 139 points, winning the championship title.
📸 Jamie raced against former World Champions Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg as part of his development.
His career took him into the Touring Car arena in Germany, where he spent 16 successful years racing for Mercedes, amongst other teams before finishing his driving career and making the leap into team ownership.
I asked him to reflect on his career and share with me his thoughts on the defining moments, whether he had considered an alternative career and what skills he’d obtained as both a driver and a team boss.
What do you think was the defining moment, the highlight of your career?
If I had to pick one thing, it would be winning Formula 3 in 2004, especially considering what other drivers in that series went on to achieve: Hamilton and Rosberg became F1 world champions. To have beaten them quite high up the single seater ladder was a highlight because some guys like Max Verstappen and Jensen Button went straight from F3 to F1 racing in F1. I was on the brink of F1 and the fact I had won at the highest level was probably my best year as a driver.
📸 Lance Stroll, like Verstappen and Button is an example of a driver ‘skipping’ a series to get to F1.
Was there ever a point when you weren’t happy with what you were doing and when you wanted to do something else? Was there ever a point when you were second-guessing your decisions?
I think like with all sports, there are highs and lows and difficult periods. As a racing driver, the negative side is that it’s a very individual sport so you’re in the car on your own and you’re responsible for the performance. It doesn’t have some of the benefits of team sports where you always train and prepare together. In motorsports, your teammate is one of your biggest enemies, really, because he has the same equipment and opportunity that you have and its survival of the fittest. If you keep losing to your team mate, eventually you won’t be racing professionally.
One of the downsides for me was a period when I was racing in German touring cars. Obviously, in a German series, the German language, and being someone who struggled at school, was a challenge, as I didn’t naturally speak German or fit in that well. Luckily, most of the important meetings with engineers and performance-related things were in English, but there were periods where I felt like a fish out of water being in Germany on my own as a Brit.
But then I eventually learned German and was really well accepted by the fans and people in the team just because I’d made the effort to learn the language, so I overcame those difficult times. Through my career I have always focused on what you can do better. That’s the thought-process I always had, which has helped to keep me focused even if I wasn’t getting the results at the time. Just to keep working at it.
You now own a karting team, Jamie Green Racing: how was the switch from racing to team ownership?
I’m still getting used to it to be perfectly honest! It’s very different to what I’ve done for the last 20 years. There are lots of challenges and things I’m not accustomed to, mainly the paperwork side of running a business and having to be in control. In the past I relied on driving ability whereas now it’s things like my organisational abilities and managing groups of people to get the best results.
📸 Jamie Green Racing.
As a driver, you are always used to some form of stress on your shoulders to deliver in a competitive environment. I think running a racing team, in Karting, I’m now responsible for the performance of the people within my team and the performance of the young drivers I’m trying to help, so it’s a nice way to carry on being in in that same environment that I’m used to, being in under pressure. In that sense, it’s kind of the same.
I think I’m well qualified to coach drivers because I’ve driven so many races in my life and spent so much time driving that I know what it feels like to be the driver. From watching next to the track, in Karting, you can almost see the whole circuit so I can see what’s happening: what the driver is experiencing and where we can improve the set-up of the car and the equipment.
Do you think from your experience racing you have any unique skills or insight into team ownership?
Yes, I was fortunate to be part of some of the most professional teams in motorsport.
I worked for McLaren when they were partly owned by Mercedes when I was a Mercedes driver in early 2000s, so I’ve spent time within F1 teams and DTM teams and seen how they are run. I’ve worked with some of the most intelligent engineers around, whether in the F1 simulator testing with Mercedes and McLaren, or working within really good DTM and F3 teams. I’ve seen the necessary structure, mentality, and professionalism that I can now bring to my team.
📸 Jamie in the DTM setup.
How do you balance the competitiveness with creating a friendly and supportive culture?
I’ve never really struggled with that apparent contrast. My mentality is that I believe you get out what you put in, so I’ve always got a healthy outlook that we need to knuckle own and work hard to focus on what we’re doing to give ourselves the best chance of performing well. If you win a race, it’s great if your competitors congratulate you. I always do that to the other teams and drivers even if we don’t win a race: in fact, I go out of my way to congratulate them and be respectful. It’s decorum, really.
In my EPQ, I’m partly exploring why women don’t get sponsorship. What is your view here as a racing driver and team owner? You offer a first-hand perspective rather than a random piece of research I’ve done on the internet.
All I can say about sponsorship is that it’s hard to get generally. The two reasons you get sponsorship are as follows.
One: someone believes in you as an individual who is capable of getting to the point where you’ll earn money and the sponsor will get their investment back.
Two: advertising opportunities.
You would think that a female driver could be offered a great opportunity if she got the results to justify the exposure. You would imagine that, as a company, you would get a good return from a brand awareness perspective given you are sponsoring a female racing driver who strove hard to get to F1 and eventually made it. There are huge opportunities for brands who sponsor highly skilled women drivers.
How much do you think technology has an impact on the sport?
Massive. Competition drives development so you use anything to create the maximum performance from your vehicle and your driver to win races: computers, data logging software, cameras are a big part of what we do in motorsport now. For example, just silly things like in our karting team how we can download the data wirelessly from our computer in the truck to the karts without any cabling and without moving anything around.
Simulators are another example of technology developing and evolving really quickly and providing specialised, advanced equipment for drivers to improve. It makes me start to feel a bit old when I’ve seen how at the beginning of my career how little of that was involved!
It was a real privilege, and a fascinating experience for me to have this time to chat with Jamie and gain his insight into the world of Motorsport from both the perspective as a driver and a team boss. I’m extremely grateful to Jamie and Mr Chessell for setting up this opportunity for me to conduct this interview which I hugely enjoyed and which I consider to be the first step on my journalism journey.
📸 Image credits: Jamie Green Racing, Jamie Green, F1 Academy, Formula Motorsport Limited.
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