Acceler8 Your Future: Jane Power, Trackside IT Engineer

A Trackside IT Engineer with the Aston Martin Aramco Formula One™ Team, today, Jane manages mission-critical IT systems under relentless pressure. One weekend, she’s resolving telemetry issues mid-session, the next, she’s in Mission Control supporting the race from thousands of miles away. It’s high stakes, high performance and exactly where she wants to be.

“I was always a humanities girl,” she admitted. In fact, Jane initially studied film and English, choosing passion over practicality. But after graduating, the job market forced her to rethink. She retrained through a telecoms apprenticeship. And then, bored and restless during lockdown, she typed a single phrase into Google: Formula One® telecommunications jobs.

“Formula One® was always on the television growing up, and I’ve always had an interest in it,” Jane explained. But, she didn’t necessarily grow up thinking that love for the sport could turn into a career. “Then I applied kind of on a whim, and I got the job, and found myself working IT trackside.”

Today, she’s part of a lean, tight-knit IT team at the Aston Martin Aramco Formula One™ Team, where every race demands adaptability, speed, and constant self-development. “If you’re not moving forward, you’re standing still — and to stand still is to move backwards,” she says. “You don’t want to stand still. You want to always be pushing.”

Jane’s story is a powerful reminder that growth isn’t always a straight line — and that the most exciting careers aren’t always the most expected. For those bold enough to retrain, reimagine, and rethink what’s possible, there’s always an opportunity to Acceler8 Your Future.

What makes working in IT at Aston Martin Aramco Formula One™ Team different from any other tech job you’ve had or could imagine having?

I'd say what makes it different here is the sheer amount of stuff you get to do and the immediacy. You see the results, and everything moves very quickly. So you can have an idea one day, be implementing it within a week and see the effect it has on the race team a week later.

What gets you out of bed in the morning?

I love the variety of my job. One day, I can be looking at why I'm not getting telemetry from the car, and then another day, I am dealing with a headset that's broken. So it is a complete range of IT stuff — from configuring a firewall to adjusting a microphone.

I also enjoy the challenge of finding solutions to problems. Troubleshooting is a standard part of my job — constantly figuring out what's gone wrong. But, I like knowing how things work. If you understand something, that means that you can find the problem. If you don't understand it, it's a lot harder to pinpoint the issue.

What’s a key skill or mindset that has helped you thrive in such a fast-paced, high-stakes environment?

I think it's really important that even if someone's technical, they can explain the technical stuff in a way that's accessible. You could be talking to anyone across the business, so having that ability to explain things is really, really important. And also the ability to understand and empathise with other people.

At Circle8, we see coaching, training, and mentorship as key to career growth. Tell us about the importance any of these have played in helping you get here today.

In my career here, there's always been people very willing to answer questions I have about specific technologies or specific processes. And that's not just in IT — that's throughout the whole team.

Our Total Talent Flow is about recognizing that todays perfect fit might evolve tomorrow. Have you experienced a time at Aston Martin Aramco Formula One™ Team when embracing change led to professional growth?

Embracing change is encouraged here. You're encouraged to grow here, and your ideas are listened to. I haven't had anyone say, ‘No, don't do that.’ Everyone's always saying, ‘Yeah, okay, give it a go. Let's see what happens.’ And I think that’s also something our team has in common with Circle8.

In fast-paced environments like F1®, HR doesn’t always get credit. But, where have you seen them make a real impact on your career or team?

HR are really helpful here. Although people think we're massive, we're still quite a small team, particularly in IT, and having the right people in place is huge. If it's the wrong person, then it's going to affect us all, because we're going to have to train that person even more.

Can you share an example of how teamwork has helped overcome a challenge within your IT role at Aston Martin Aramco Formula One™ Team?

So working trackside, for example, is really interesting because we get there at the beginning of the week to essentially put up an entire mobile data centre and network. Some of the countries we go to are very hot, and the temperatures will cause things to overheat and stop working. We have to work together to make sure that we balance all that — make sure power and cooling are in, generators are up, all that sort of thing.

Teamwork helps with this all the time. The nightmare is that it’s 2:00 AM and no one's up at Mission Control, and it’s really hard to get support contracts to help. But, we rely on the fact that there are always people at the factory willing to help out. I rely on our infrastructure, cybersecurity and architecture teams for extra support all the time. We're not doing it all alone. You have to have a team to help you.

What advice would you give to aspiring IT professionals looking to work for a high-performance team like Aston Martin Aramco Formula One™ and a sport like F1®?

My advice to anyone looking to work in this industry is to try and understand the technology you're working with and the reasons and processes why that technology is used. You can't just throw everything at it and say, ‘We're going to change everything.’ Because very clever people have made a lot of the processes.