One job on the Formula One grid may be more exclusive than being a driver. Laura Mueller is part of that club.
Working for the Haas F1 team, Mueller is F1’s first female race engineer. There are 20 race engineers on the grid, one for each driver. They are the chief link between the driver and team, working on track through radio communication and away from it while preparing for the next race. They commonly remain at their positions longer than an F1 driver stays in their seat.
Mueller was elevated to the position this season and is paired with Haas newcomer Esteban Ocon. Mueller had previously worked as a performance engineer at Haas, while Ocon, a Hungarian Grand Prix winner in 2021, joined the American team after five seasons with the Alpine F1 team.
“She’s a pretty determined character,” Haas team principal Ayao Komatsu told F1.com in January. “And then she’s very hardworking. Her work ethic is really, really good. … Esteban is a pretty determined character as well. So that side, I think the driving force, I think that personality matches pretty well.’
Entering the 2025 F1 Miami Grand Prix, Ocon was ninth in the drivers’ standings with 14 points through five races. Haas ranked sixth among F1 teams with 20 points, just five short of Williams in fifth, a position Haas will chase throughout the season as the best-of-the-rest prize behind stalwarts McLaren, Mercedes, Ferrari and Red Bull.
Haas has been the ultimate underdog outfit since joining the grid in 2016. It finished fifth that season but has only managed to equal that result once (2018). The lone American team until Cadillac joins the grid next season, Haas has yet to win a race or secure a single podium finish in F1.
Mueller is tasked with helping the downtrodden team make waves in the midfield this season. In addition to Williams, Haas will need to battle with Alpine, Racing Bulls, Sauber and Aston Martin for points in the constructors’ standings. For Haas, it takes a strong work ethic to find those extra margins over their rivals, many of whom have considerably larger resources.
“It’s been great to work with Laura,” Ocon said during a recent appearance on F1’s Beyond the Grid podcast. “She’s really a great engineer. She’s been having a lot of experience in a lot of different categories. She’s done DTM (Deutsche Tourenwagen Masters), I’ve done DTM, so we have that point in common. But she did a lot of different categories, and her trajectory is very impressive.
“She’s awesome to work with. The amount of hours she puts in is very, very impressive. She doesn’t count hours.”
Ocon recalled one particularly demanding weekend in Japan when the French driver struggled to find consistent performance.
“I remember in Suzuka, we had a difficult one, but we were still having meetings and debriefs because it was not the way we wanted to have the performance, and she didn’t stand up to take a sandwich or drink for probably the whole day.
“She was like, ‘Esteban, I will probably go and take food now because it’s 7:30 or 8 in the evening.’ And I’m like, ‘You didn’t eat yet?’ And she’s like, ‘No’’ because she didn’t want to because she was flat-out with work.”
Uphill battles come with the territory at Haas. For Komatsu, the difference is having the right people scaling those mountains.
“We don’t care (about) nationality, gender – it really doesn’t matter because what matters is work,’ Komatsu said when Mueller was promoted. ‘How you can fit into the team, how you can maximise the performance. I believe it is the right choice.”