Curating excellence: How Ella Justh brings experiences to life at Aston Martin Aramco Formula One™ Team
- Jasmine El Samad
- 10 hours ago
- 6 min read
Formula 1 teams constantly drive evolution, on and off the track. While the engines roar to life, the paddock sparkles with innovation from the hospitality teams as they pull off seamless spectacles 24 times a year. Technological feats are accompanied by meticulously crafted trackside experiences that operate just like an F1 car: with speed, precision, and elegance. Who is responsible for this? Who manages to make the sometimes unfathomable happen?
Meet Ella Justh, Event Manager at Aston Martin Aramco Formula One™ Team. At just 26, Ella packs her life into a suitcase and travels with the team from country to country doing just that. From integrating team sponsors Glenfiddich and ELEMIS, to organising culinary pop-ups and local activations all around the world, Ella spoke to Females In Motorsport about her journey into F1 and just how she curates the perfect event.
Ella has worked with Aston Martin Aramco for almost three years, and her route into the industry was not the most conventional. She moved to the UK from Spain, having studied at an international school, but she originally comes from Sweden. Ella was set on being a corporate lawyer, but her focus shifted to curating global guest experiences once she started university. She began hosting TED Conferences as a volunteer in her first year, eventually running the entire society by her third.
“By the end of that experience, I realised that I loved organising large scale, complex events with amazing teams. I found that anyone working in events was so passionate and dedicated that I just felt that was the environment I wanted to surround myself in,” Ella tells Females In Motorsport.
After finishing her degree, Ella did her masters and began working at a startup, aiming to move into the company’s events section. Eventually, she was leading their community events and conferences that centred around finance, tech and cryptocurrency, but she still had her eye on the ultimate goal.
“I was really, really pushing to get into F1,” she says. “I loved F1 as a sport, had always really been a fan, but found that I was quite junior for the F1 roles that existed at the time.
“I kept saying ‘yes’ to different experiences, until I saw this job pop up on LinkedIn and I applied. Two and a half years later, I’m still here.”
Ella leads Aston Martin Aramco’s Paddock Experience Programme, making her responsible for anything that happens in the paddock all over the world. She oversees creative spatial design, set-up logistics, catering teams and each event that takes place and the general day to day experience of guests.
“My day to day role is all about curating these unforgettable moments around the world for our guests,” she says, “and coming up with new and exciting experiences that really make our hospitality stand out from our competitors, and also to put us on this global platform of: this is what luxury motorsport hospitality and event management is all about.”
A large part of the job is tapping into niches specific to the locations that the sport travels too. This means researching local trends, artists, brands and suppliers in order to create the best, most original experience for guests, whilst aligning with the teams identity. Working alongside a talented team, Ella’s goal is to ensure that, in her words, “no race is the same”.
“The other part [of the role] is ensuring that anything we do really plays into this luxury, heritage, elegant perspective that we have,” she says. “Anything we do has to meet that standard and has to shine through any event, conversation or interaction we have with anyone who is in our spaces.
“I think that’s how we really connect. With our aim and our goals of being world champions, we also aim to be champions within our hospitality. The way we operate with our partners, our sponsors, our catering team sets the tone for that: to connect in every single level to those main goals.”
Having just returned from the 2025 Singapore Grand Prix, Ella told us about real-life challenges of executing an experience across a race weekend. The team organised for local Michelin star restaurant Fiz to run a pop-up in the team’s trackside hospitality at Marina Bay. The chefs would be live-cooking, producing four localised dishes per day over the course of the weekend. However, the coordination that goes into an experience like this one is not a small task.
“You get on site and you realise that all the food needs to be brought in fresh daily, how do we get that in there?” Ella says. “They're located 45 minutes away from the track, all the roads are shut, you can't drive there, how do you get everything in? And it's also 95% humidity and 32 degree heat.
“Just getting from A to B is so tricky just to make this happen. Somehow we made it happen and we made it work, but it's always so logistically challenging to actually do that.”
Logistical challenges of this nature are no stranger to Ella and her team, who found themselves carrying surfboards and art supplies through Albert Park after last year’s Australian Grand Prix. Ella had organised for a local artist to paint a mural across four surfboards over the weekend, but at the end of the event, the team had to rally together to get the finished artwork out of the track with no road access. The solution? A 20 minute walk with surfboards on their backs.
“It's pretty crazy, and actually, our teams are really small,” she says. “I think our real edge in our team is that no task is too big and no task is too small. Everyone is just hands-on and we're all really dedicated to what we're doing, and to the experience we're hosting.
“We know how that's going to move the needle, we know how guests will interact with us, we always feel it's worth it, so everyone rallies and everyone helps each other which makes the environment much easier to operate in. If everything was an uphill battle, it would be such a nightmare, but luckily the logistics are the uphill battle and everyone else just helps you push it up the hill, and that's kind of the beauty of the team really.”
One of Ella’s career highlights also came about in Australia, this time at the 2024 Grand Prix. Aston Martin Aramco collaborated with Aussie-favourite, Tim Tams, producing a custom wrapper for VIP guests and fans. The designing process was underway well before 2024 testing had even kicked off, so Ella had to work under strict NDAs alongside the legal team in order to keep the collaboration a secret, as the customised design featured the AMR24. The event also featured a local Aboriginal artist, who painted a mural across six hours on race day, who Ella worked alongside closely in the build-up to the weekend.
“My favourite part of the job is really understanding the cultures that we're in, what will resonate with guests who are being hosted in our spaces for the first time, but also guests who continuously attend races with us,” she says. “So, it's fun to tap into those local influences, because it brings an edge and it really delivers something new.”
As Formula 1 continues to grow, Ella believes that the hospitality sector of the sport will only excel. Aston Martin Aramco’s partnerships with ELEMIS and Glenfiddich are indicators of this with their hands-on approach with fans and guests trackside.
“It's really powerful to see that they are actually face-to-face with our guests,” she says. “We’ll start seeing more of that from other teams and also our own partners which I think is really exciting because it brings everyone within this one ecosystem and as it gets bigger, we all get closer, and I think that's great.”
Ella knows the challenges and nuanced intensity that comes from working in motorsport, especially at such a high level with an iconic brand. Amidst that chaos, her advice is simple: say yes to everything. Since starting her degree, she took on new experiences, like volunteering at London Fashion Week, just to get exposed to such huge-scale event planning. Now, she is someone who defines the paddock and the unforgettable experiences that take place there.
“‘How are you still smiling? How are you still running around the track? Are you not tired?’ That's the main question we get from guests especially,” she says. When you're surrounded by a team where everyone has real high performance on their minds, everything becomes easier, and you grow so much more because the benchmark keeps moving.
“You keep feeling like, "I can do more, and I feel inspired to do more and motivated to make bigger things happen."