It was the best half-day of my life.
My new boss was personable and excited to have me, and as he was telling me about the cool projects I was going to be working on, helping develop new technology for more environmentally friendly systems, mate, I walked past two McLaren F1s! I had made it – I was nineteen and had somehow hustled a real job in one of the best motorsport companies in the world, and I’d done it almost entirely off my own back. Excited doesn’t even begin to cover it.
It wasn’t until after lunch when HR called me that things began to unravel.
‘Yassmin, do you mind bringing over your work visa?’
I told her I’d thought the company had sorted out my visa.
‘Oh no, we never look after visa applications,’ she informed me. ‘It’s always the employee’s responsibility. Well, if you don’t have a work visa you can’t be an employee, and if you’re not an employee we can’t have you on the premises. You’re going to have to leave.’
They kicked me out.
It was the most embarrassing, humiliating, wretched experience I had ever had. I was certain the person who organised my contract had assured me there was nothing more I needed to do. Somehow, I had missed out on a crucial part of the whole process and just came in on a tourist visa. Ironically, my dad was studying to be a migration agent at the time.
I slunk back to my uncle’s house in Southampton, an hour’s train ride away, miserable and defeated. I tried to find a way around it but the only option was to fly back to Australia, get the visa and return, and I just didn’t have enough money.
So I sat on my uncle’s couch for about a week, watching EastEnders and feeling sorry for myself while my uncle tore me a new one. ‘You didn’t even sort your visa out? What is this! Why are you sitting on the couch wasting your time! Do you even want to work in this industry! Go out and do something!’
I was trying to find other things to do, but I just needed some time to feel miserable. There was no sympathy from my uncle, who didn’t think I belonged in the automotive world anyway. He didn’t buy it as my true passion.
I was racked with shame, anger and frustration that I had got so close to my dream to have it thwarted by something so innocuous. A visa! I couldn’t believe that no one at the embassy could help me, that no one even seemed to care. I wondered whether it would have been different if I’d been someone with ‘connections’. It was probably the first time I had messed up so badly, and I had nothing and no one else to blame but myself. I kept kicking myself for not paying more attention, or asking the right questions. I couldn’t believe it was a situation there was no quick recovery from. My parents didn’t seem to think it was as catastrophic as I did and had little pity – they just told me to ‘find a way around it’ and take it on the chin.
I decided they were right and that I needed to do something about the situation. Who could I meet in the UK?
I had a few contacts from the Age article – a documentary filmmaker who wanted to chart my story (if only there was a story to chart) and someone who ran a race team in the USA, who’d told me to meet up with his friend who taught the motorsport Masters at Cranfield University, if I was ever in the UK.
I emailed around and organised times to meet, but when I told my uncle I was meeting people I only knew through the internet, he was worried and wanted me to cancel the appointments. When I disobeyed and met with people anyway he called my mother and told her that I was out of control, that I was immature and a danger to myself.
‘The thing is, Yassmin,’ he said to me in frustration, ‘I sit at work fearing I’ll get a phone call from the police telling me they’ve found you dead in some gutter. You’re causing me so much stress!’
My uncle’s fears were based on his own experiences in the UK, which had often been far from happy. Apparently, people in the countryside weren’t fans of African migrants, particularly educated ones like my uncle, who would fight back, verbally and physically. He’d suffered from some dangerous racism in the 1980s and 1990s, and at one point had almost been killed, so it’s no wonder he was worried for me. But he didn’t explain this at the time, or perhaps I just wasn’t able to hear him. I couldn’t understand why he didn’t see I could handle myself; I thought he was just trying to control me. I was used to the trust and relative freedoms my parents had allowed. He had a different view on how young women should act and I didn’t quite adhere to those principles.
Don’t get me wrong, my time with my uncle was otherwise thoroughly enjoyable. We would have nights sitting on the couch, watching Michael McIntyre make ridiculous jokes – we both loved stand-up comedy. When the rest of his family returned from overseas, we went to restaurants for dinner together, a little bit of normalcy.
Family problems aside, I made something of the trip.
The contact from Cranfield University was a great person to meet, and he helped me for years thereafter to make my way through the industry. He linked me up with a whole lot of contacts so for the next few weeks I travelled hundreds of kilometres by train, meeting people all around the UK: small race team business owners who manufactured their own cars; the CEOs of big companies like Protech and Triple Eight; influences in Williams F1; the Head of the Institute of Mechanical Engineers; and some of the best chassis and F1 designers in the world. By the end of the trip I had actually constructed a better network in the motorsport industry than I could have ever hoped for. I got accustomed to waiting at random stations around the country, hanging out at Milton Keynes and getting taxis into country towns that were more than a little Midsomer Murders. Sure, I was dirt poor and still didn’t have a job, but I had contacts, and that was important. I accomplished a lot, but I think I’ll always wonder: what if I had just got that damn visa?
On my last morning in England my uncle asked me a simple question: ‘You say you want to dedicate your life to motorsport, huh. When you wake up in the morning, what’s the first thing you think about?’
‘People,’ I replied, without hesitation. ‘Working with people, helping people –’
Then I realised his point. ‘Oh, and motorsport, of course!’ But the damage was done, and it was a thought that sat in the back of my head for months and years to come.
I went back to do my final year of university at UQ and enrolled in the Masters in Motorsport at Cranfield for the year after. Most of the Cranfield graduates ended up in F1 teams so this was my in.
I got a call from the university at the beginning of 2012, offering me another once-in-a-lifetime opportunity – work experience as an engineer and designer with Mercedes F1 that would lead into my Masters and would help me secure a job with them after I graduated. It was a chance to work in a real F1 team, at the cutting edge of technology and designing stuff that would actually go on to compete in – and hopefully win – races.
This was before Merc started winning and they were still finding their way, so it would have been the perfect time to join. But it was unpaid work, and I couldn’t afford to live in England while I did it. My parents hadn’t financially supported me since I finished school and I wasn’t about to change that now. I had been living at home while I was at uni in Australia, but I had covered all the rest of my expenses with tutoring and scholarship funds. I would need more than that kind of money to last a few months in England and my parents would not have been able to afford that.
Motorsport is a prohibitively expensive sport in which to compete. Many people who are able to enter it come from money; if not, their families make the financial sacrifice to support them. My parents had sacrificed a lot, but this was the level of support they couldn’t provide – and I would never ask them to either.
After saying no to Merc, the reality of the opportunity in front of me – going to study a Masters in motorsport in the UK – suddenly became much more real. If I’m going to do this, I thought, I have to be completely and utterly honest with myself. Is this what I want to do with my life? I’d worked towards it for so long!
I gave it a red-hot
go. Instead of throwing in the towel after missing out on a scholarship to pay for the Masters, I took a job as a field engineer in the oilfield with the goal of saving enough money to fund my year of study and my living expenses. Once I’d got to the end of that year, I had saved enough money and was ready. I had picked the college where I would stay, started collecting the books – yet something didn’t feel right.
I was so close to my goal, but something was off. I began to realise that two things had happened. One was admitting that the reality of working in F1 was different to the expectation, and the second was that I was no longer sure this was the path I wanted to take for the rest of my life.
It was the most confusing, debilitating state of mind and I didn’t feel like I could admit it to anyone. I just couldn’t. I’d invested so much time in this world; it was part of my identity, part of who I was! My social circles were all about cars, my contacts and the network that I had so carefully cultivated were about motorsport; I had developed great relationships with people in this industry in the UK. People had sponsored me into this role. I would be letting more people down than just myself. However, at the end of the day, I couldn’t bring myself to leave the work I had begun in Australia – empowering others through Youth Without Borders – for an ultimately selfish pursuit. The hardest call I’ve ever had to make was telling the university that I wasn’t going to study motorsport that year, or any year after that. Part of me wishes I’d stuck by it, just to be able to say that I had made it in the industry and to show other girls that they actually could too, even if they were Muslim. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it.
I was lost. But then I went back to the rigs and tried not to think about it.
Even though I’d decided to not work in motorsport as an engineer, I wanted to keep a finger in the pie and an opportunity came from a different angle – by writing for Richard’s F1 website, now called MotorsportM8, as a correspondent. Richard was another person who had emailed me when the Age story came out, and has since been an amazing support, allowing me to write for the website even though my personal schedule is always a bit of a mess.
I began writing for the site as the V8 correspondent in 2012, but it wasn’t until 2014 that I got a big break when Richard asked me to go to the Monaco Grand Prix as an internationally accredited journalist. Monaco! Who was I?
The Monaco Grand Prix is one of the most glamorous events on the global motorsport social calendar; ‘A sunny place for shady people’, with multimillion-dollar yachts, billionaires making deals and supercars the norm. I arrived in the French Riviera, exhausted but pumped, the Friday before the Grand Prix weekend, after driving three hours from a tiny place in the Netherlands to the Hague and then on to Amsterdam, where I’d dropped off the rental car and caught a flight to Nice.
A friend had told me I could stay at her apartment in Nice, but when I logged on to the airport wi-fi the girls had changed plans and were staying at a villa in Monaco. Armed with the new address and instructions to message them on arrival, I picked up my new chariot, a turbo Astra. The two gentlemen helping me with the hire car were lovely, but very quick to correct me when I asked if they were from the area. ‘Oh no no no, I’m from France,’ one said. ‘Monaco is weird. The people are weird, their cars are weird, the lifestyle is weird … you’ll have fun, though. Enjoy your time here!’
My thoughts were joyful as I sped off. What a drive! Honestly, television does not do that circuit justice. Driving to Monaco that night gave me a tiny taste of the adrenaline rush the drivers experience over their seventy-eight laps. The course of winding streets and tiny lanes is almost entirely on the edge of the cliffs; the blind corners and fast cars are an intoxicating combination. I drove the hell out of that Astra and thought to myself, Welcome to Monaco, girl. You’ve made it!
It was only when I arrived at the villa that I realised I’d need to find a place to park. I did a couple of laps of the suburb looking for a spot and eventually capitulated, parking a couple of kilometres away.
Walking back to the villa, I got completely and utterly lost. I eventually started going up random streets in the hope I would see something I recognised, and up and down stairs for the faint chance of a spark of inspiration. I couldn’t find any wi-fi for a map, and didn’t want to ask someone, convinced that people up at that time of the night would be shady. At one point I tried to retrace my steps but didn’t want to pass by a bunch of guys who were lingering outside a shop … I’d passed them once and if I walked by again it would be obvious I had no idea where I was going.
After a stroke of luck and a healthy amount of internal praying, an hour later I stumbled across the right street. Success! I skipped to the door … and stopped. There were eight different villas for the one address, and I had absolutely no clue which one the girls were staying in. I perched on the steps out the front, eventually found a wi-fi connection and sent off some messages, confident that I was now minutes away from a shower and a comfortable bed.
Nothing.
I made a couple of calls via Skype and Viber.
Nada.
By this point, it was the early hours of the morning and getting quite cold. People were starting to return from their night’s entertainment, and I was running out of viable solutions. I googled the nearest hotel, glad to see it was noted as an ‘affordable option’. Trundling over, I pressed the doorbell and the guy at reception reluctantly buzzed open the glass door.
‘Englay?’ I asked, hopeful.
His face grew even more unimpressed. ‘A leetle.’
‘Is there any chance you have a room for the night, sir?’
He looked at me, eyebrows up. ‘Miss, it is impossible! 500 euros a night, but we have nothing. Very, very busy until Sunday.’
500 euros! My goodness. ‘Can I use your phone then?’
‘Oh no, miss, impossible, impossible. Try Olympica, they may have a room.’
I picked up my luggage and shuffled out. No way was I trying another hotel. I was running out of phone battery, so the only thing to do was head back to the car to charge that baby. A seed of thought formed as I made my way to the silver beast. I sat in the driver’s seat and pushed the back all the way down. There was enough space, I thought.
I slept in the car.
If my mother and father could have seen me in that moment! It was something we just didn’t do, and I had never expected to do anything like that in my life. It was ironic that I was slumming it in the ritziest place on earth.
Three hours later I woke up, freezing my rear end off. Heater on full blast, I scrubbed my eyes and contemplated the next step.
I needed to be at the media centre in a few hours so I made my way back to Nice. Again, I wove through the crazy awesome roads – stopping briefly to check out the view – and found a parking spot right out the front of a Nice bakery that was actually open! It was in this shop that I happened upon a lovely French woman.
I remembered that in French, shower was ‘douche’.
‘Douche?’ I asked the lady hopefully. She nodded, though she looked slightly perplexed. A conversation in broken French later, I was invited in for breakfast and a shower. Phew!
Reporting in Monaco was everything it was cracked up to be – glamorous and fast-paced. I rubbed shoulders with the drivers, the team bosses, the journos and occasionally the engineers. I was on smiling terms with Fernando Alonso and actual greeting terms with Hamilton and Button. The trip was a whirlwind of press conferences, filing reports, trying to find out juicy F1 gossip and reading between the lines. F1, it turns out, is less about racing and more about money and power. The journo friends I made looked after me, and I learnt how to ask questions from the best. I walked along the track during qualifying, standing at the exit of the tunnel, closing my eyes and letting the noise and vibration run through me as the cars sped by. Breakfast at McLaren, lunch at Ferrari and afternoon drinks at Red Bull; I had somehow made it into the world of F1, just not in the way I had expected.
My forays in th
e world of motorsport have had their incredible highs and deep lows. I’ve made more than a few mistakes along the way, most of which I have to take responsibility for, and they have reminded me that not everything happens the way we want – or expect – it to. If anything, I’ve learnt more about myself, and started to understand how to deal with situations when they don’t quite work out. This too shall pass, and something else is just around the corner. I may have felt at times that my world was falling apart, but you know what? It all worked out at the end of the day, Alhamdulillah. Happy days!
Chapter 20:
The Romanian Painter
‘Oh, Baba, do I have to?’ We were finally getting our house walls painted, something Mum had been saving up to do for years. It would have been a cause for celebration, except Dad was asking me to stay home and keep an eye on the process. I was on my mid-year break from fourth-year mechanical engineering and all I wanted to do was go for coffee with friends or hang out at the race team garage.
My father introduced me to the painters – two Eastern European lads, youngish and stoic.
‘Gentlemen, my daughter will be around while you’re working.’
I smiled toothlessly at the gentlemen. ‘I’m just going to be there,’ I said, motioning my head to the right. ‘Let me know if you need anything.’
I wandered over to the desk and switched on my laptop. Might as well put this time to good use, catching up on the last season of The Wire …
It wasn’t until the third day that I had a conversation with them. The lead painter was working on the entrance doorframe when I walked past.
Yassmin’s Story Page 24