Be bold, be brave: Sioned Edwards’s unconventional route to becoming Aston Martin Aramco Formula One™ Team’s IT Director
- Jasmine El Samad
- 13 hours ago
- 5 min read
Working in motorsport can sometimes feel so far out of reach, and the more the sport progresses, the more we hear about less conventional ways of cracking into the industry. We have seen the sport make leaps and bounds of progress over the last few years, through more diversity within the teams, technological advancements and a stronger presence of female leadership.
Meet Sioned Edwards, the IT Operations Director at Aston Martin Aramco Formula One™ Team, whose journey into F1 was, in her own words, “a really, really odd one”.
When she sits down at the impressively sleek AMR Technology Campus with Females in Motorsport, just after the chaos of the Singapore Grand Prix, she’s already had a day of fighting fires, working with some of the team's most prominent tech sponsors and managing the IT budget.
Sioned has been with the team now for nearly five years, and has worked her way up the IT ladder. She started out in an entry level job, before moving into the IT team, and for nearly a year, she has been in the director’s chair. She never thought she would work in F1 as a child, and while her route in wasn't the most typical, it shows that there is always a way.
“I loved Formula 1 as a kid,” she says. “A 10, 11-year-old girl loving Formula 1 wasn't very popular, so I didn't really see a career in it because I think on TV you only get to see the drivers, the engineers, and I didn't want to do any of that. I did a master's degree in geology, and then ended up in IT, so that was a weird jump in to begin with.”
After completing her studies, Sioned ended up working for a software company, which led her to Racing Point, the name of the team before it became Aston Martin Aramco Formula One™ Team. As an implementation consultant, her job was to go to the factory twice a week to learn about the team and explain the software, how it works, and how to optimise it for the team. After a year working alongside the team, an opportunity arose.
“I was really cheeky and I asked the Head of Production Control at the time: ‘Do you think there's an opportunity to make a space for me here so I could come here full time? I love being here. You're my favourite customer, it's close to home, and I love Formula 1,’ and he said yes,” she recalls.
“So, a really odd route. Love Formula 1, did geology, then ended up in IT. I didn't think I'd ever get a job into Formula 1 and the opportunity just presented itself.”
Sioned’s promotion to IT Operations Director was announced at an International Women’s Day panel, where she had been asked to speak under her previous job role. When she was introduced and her promotion announced, the reaction stuck with her.
“The amount of applause I got from the females in the organisation was quite magical really, because we're a collective,” she says. “We don't do enough together, and praise each other, because we're all doing amazing things in our departments. But we all came together, and to feel that love from all of them was really nice and special.”
The day to day for Sioned can range from making sure the lights come on Trackside or managing over 1000 IT users back at the factory. She is responsible for the daily operations in the IT Department - the infrastructure that runs the state-of-the-art technology campus. Her role is to make sure that all the IT systems are running reliably and all team members are happy with the IT that they use in their day-to-day roles. Sioned’s team is also responsible for the data centre that travels around the world with the car, which must be unpacked at the track, sometimes before the race weekend has even started. Her team then oversees the set-up, ensuring it’s all operating as it should be, and that the trackside team of engineers are satisfied.
“The importance of IT on a race weekend is you need a laptop to start the car,” Sioned says. “Without the laptop, you're not starting the car and it doesn't go out the garage. My team is responsible for making sure the laptop works - if it doesn't work, that's the most stressful part of my day on a race weekend: making sure that the car starts and the laptop isn't broken, or the power hasn't gone out.
“If you think about a data centre, it needs power, so if the power goes out at the track - which we have no control over and it does happen - that data centre turns off, so we've got to keep that reliable and performing all through the race.”
Sioned has faced this exact problem head on, notably last season in Bahrain for pre-season F1 testing. The power went out across all of the garages, meaning that the data stack powering the engineers turned off. The first red flag of testing was called as the teams scrambled to fix the grid-wide issue.
Having women in leadership roles is massively important, something that we have been desperate to see more of within Formula 1, and Sioned takes huge pride in what she has already achieved by age 30. Career progression for women in terms of age can sometimes be weaponised and stigmatised, but Sioned feels that it has given her the upper hand, noting that it sometimes shocks people that she is already in a role of this nature. Having that visibility is important, and Sioned is a perfect example of why. The tech industry is notoriously male-dominated, especially in F1, but Sioned knows from experience that there is more than enough space for women.
“If you look at the team principals and the race engineers, the people that are getting the TV time in the sport, it's male-dominated,” she says. “But if you come back to the factory, it's less so. So it's bringing a light to those roles and getting women into leadership positions.
“Be bold and brave. My story speaks to the fact that I asked the question. I read a stat that most women, if they can’t do 20 per cent of a role, they won’t apply, whereas males would. So, it’s just being a little bit braver and putting yourself out there.”
Sioned’s story is especially inspirational, reminding us of the importance of speaking up and chasing what you want. If she hadn’t asked, she wouldn’t have got to where she is now, and she is clearly the right person for the job, whether it's making sure the 1000 strong team at AMRTC has everything they need from IT or getting the lights back on in the most high-stakes of situations. Apply for the job, raise your point, put yourself forward; if you can see it, you can be it.