Ex-Red Bull Paula Pow Touches Down on Life As An F1 Storyteller and Building Her Brand

Paula Pow describes herself as a “crazy creative” who got into motorsport by taking a chance and leaving it up to the unknown to decide her fate. By being her true self and believing in her abilities, she got to work with Oracle Red Bull Racing and is now leading her own video production company which works with F1 teams.

Paula got into motorsport by working with an agency who produced content for F1 Paddock Club. Eventually, one conversation led to another and she spent almost a year travelling the world with the F1 championship-winning team. Recently, Pow co-founded Double Stack, a company which offers video production and content management for sports teams and brands.

However, this project isn’t just about producing content. This is Paula’s ticket to educate others about how to accelerate their creative careers. Making it to F1 or to any other motorsport series shouldn’t just be the pinnacle and a career is a continuous work in progress and a fun journey in which an individual never stops learning.

For Paula, this video production isn’t just a job, it’s her passion. In fact, during the interview, we didn’t even refer to it as video production but instead called it storytelling. It stemmed from Pow making skiing videos with her friends while at university. 

“Storytelling is like a gift to somebody,” she tells Females in Motorsport. “It used to mean so much to the people that I went on these trips with and made amazing memories together, to have a video to remember it. One time, my friend came up to me and said that every time she has a bad day, she just puts one of the ski edit on and it’s all good. I was like this is exactly what I want to do.”

Pow realised the art of storytelling from making edits of her ski trips with her friends

How it started

Paula never imagined herself getting into Formula 1. When COVID was nearing its end, she was moving out of her apartment in York and going to London. At that point, she didn’t have much to lose because she had no secured opportunities in the English capital. So she started emailing every person she admired or aspired to work with such as film directors, book authors and also people who worked in F1. 

Pow wanted to get in contact with the team that worked on the Netflix docu-series Drive To Survive because she was astonished by its storytelling.

“It wasn’t my passion for motorsports that led me to work in F1 as much as it was my love for storytelling,” she said. “I’m a storyteller at heart. I want to go where the best stories are and at the time I was working in sports already. I worked a lot of freestyle skiing but I felt like it wasn’t enough. I wanted something more.”

So Pow started sending several emails and remained hopeful that someone will get back to her with an opportunity.

“It’s like 99% of them never replied and I look back at those emails and some of them are absolutely terrible,” she said. “I wrote every one of these emails with full honesty. I was like this is who I am, this is what my strengths are, don’t expect me to follow very strict systems. I’ve done these things that I have results and proof of, I’d already at that point built a big audience on Instagram.”

So the key to getting herself a talk with someone from the agency who hired her was being her true self, taking a chance but also showing proof of what she already achieved. Showcasing your portfolio is something Pow really stands by and made the difference. 

Paula Pow describes herself as a “crazy creative” who remains being her true self while producing top content for high-performance sports teams

She earned the job at the agency and started creating content for the F1 Paddock Club. Pow explained how she was showing the unseen side of F1, however, there were still some rules to follow while creating the content, as she said, “it’s not all about creating art”. From here, she learned how to balance her passion with the reality of working in a space like F1. She also mentioned some other realities that come with working at a high-performance sports team.

“The hours are very long,” she said. “You’re sacrificing so much for the work to be great. You question things a lot. You’re surrounded by people who are like 10 times better than you and your entire perspective shifts, everything is competitive. Everything is very fast-paced and you’re still in the midst of trying to make the best work you can and show the storytelling against all odds.”

Working for Oracle Red Bull Racing

Pow says that her move to Oracle Red Bull Racing was all down to luck. Although, she isn’t a big believer of luck. She rather believes that if you keep creating as many opportunities as you can for yourself, you will eventually be lucky. Getting herself working for the agency and working in the F1 paddock was already one foot in the door. Her goal was to eventually work for a team and it turns out that Red Bull is the team closest to her heart too. 

She had aspired to work for Red Bull already and in fact before she got the role at the agency, she was in the process for an editor job for the energy-drink outlet in Austria. However, it wouldn’t have enabled her to work in F1, because it was in a different department and that’s why she proceeded with choosing the agency work instead. So once she started attending all the races, she started meeting different people and having conversations.

“I made some friends and it was a natural process,” she said. “I ended up getting introduced to Red Bull’s Head of Content further down the line. The whole process took time. It probably took a year and most people don’t realise that if you’re trying to build your way into something, it won’t take you one message.”

However, Pow keeps stating how important it is to create opportunities for yourself, where you are speaking to different people, because you never know who you’re about to meet. The meeting with Red Bull came from a casual conversation she was having with someone about the fact that they loved the same bands.

Pow believes that one needs to create opportunities for themselves in order to be lucky and get roles such as those at Oracle Red Bull Racing

As Pow puts it, “there will be people in your life that will change everything, but the problem is, you never know exactly who it’s going to be”.

Paula gained a lot of experience extremely fast in varied areas, because she’s sometimes working with a team, sometimes with a promoter and other times with a sponsor. With a team, it’s slightly different because you’re working with the same members of staff and the same two drivers. There are also some rules that one has to follow.

“You have to get really creative to find ways to still make engaging content that doesn’t break the rules, within that garage setting and with the limited driver time that you have,” Pow says. “The biggest difference was being able to work with the drivers directly, which was awesome and again came with its own set of challenges. You get 10 to 20 minutes to create 20 pieces of content and you have to make the most out of it, so the way you prepare for it is very important and you need that confidence, you need ideas.”

It was also great to have the team spirit in the workplace and the sense of everyone supporting each other. This was a very important aspect of the job because Pow wasn’t alone when she had to face difficult aspects of the job. 

“It’s so difficult to stay on top and to keep those doubts away and to focus on the job every now and then,” she says.  “There was one triple-header where by the end of it, I was so drained and sleep-deprived. I wanted to go back home and sleep for three days. You had lows which were low, but the highs were really high. You have those people around you who get which is a massive help, because the problems we face on track are not relatable at the slightest.”

Working within a Formula 1 team came with its challenges, but having people who understood her really helped

Creating Her Own Story

Recently, Pow embarked on a new journey in which she co-founded her own company, Double Stack. She took this decision because she felt at her best when she was a freelancer and she values the creative freedom it brings with it. 

Another aspect that pushed Paula to take a leap towards something different is the fact that she wanted to write her own story too. She was so busy making amazing F1 content, that she realised she forgot to document her amazing journey too.

“I was just full tunnel vision, focused on the work and eventually I got to the point where the work was really good,” she says. “It was getting really good traction but nobody knew it was mine. Everybody was talking about the Paddock Club videos and nobody knew it was me that actually made them. And I realised that I’ve spent all these years trying to create this amazing work, but in the meantime, I was building nothing for myself.”

Pow feels privileged that she got to work with teams and athletes, whether it was as a full-time job or even freelance, however, she now wants to build something which she can consider her own. At first, she thought it was too late to start telling her story. But then she quickly realised that it’s not really too late because the lessons she learned along the way are still valid.

“It’s not easy,” Pow says. “It requires a completely different skillset than the brand work. As I’ve been finding out in the past few months, but it’s absolutely doable. And what’s on the other side is absolutely magical. You get into the room where you thought you shouldn’t be, you build a name and reputation for yourself and you finally get the recognition that you’ve been earning with all the work and sharing your story and that in itself is so freeing. In a way, it’s scary but it really opens up a whole world of possibilities.”

One of the new skills that Paula taught herself was writing. She finds it strange that she is telling her story through writing about it on LinkedIn and she hasn’t yet made a video of herself speaking. Being in front of the camera requires a different skillset as opposed to being behind it and Pow is still building up that confidence.

“I just want to be able to put my ideas into words,” Pow says. “I noticed that even with my clients, I would see a video in my head, but I had trouble describing what I was seeing in a way that’s understandable to them.”

And writing wasn’t the only skill Paula got to learn. Making the switch to a business leader comes with a whole lot of lessons that even Paula is trying to figure out.

“Most business founders and creative entrepreneurs will tell you most of the time, we have no idea what we’re doing,” Pow says. “We’re winging it and learning as we go and it gets tough sometimes. But then at other times it’s really rewarding and it’s really cool to have that sense of ownership as well.”

As a freelancer, she worked with several F1 teams such as Red Bull and McLaren Formula 1 Team. Working with McLaren helped her learn how a different team approaches things and she could apply her creative, out-of-the-box social ideas there too. Recently, Pow also got involved with a new sport - powerboat racing.

Time Is Just A Construct

I chose “time is just a construct” for the conclusion to this article because this interview truly made me realise that there is no race against time. No one is chasing us down to become successful overnight. As Paula explained, there will never be a point in life where we have it all figured out, and that point definitely isn’t landing a job in F1. 

“You’re just going to keep finding a new reference point, a new sort of person to look at and it’s just a learning process that never ends, so you might as well figure out the best way to do it yourself and that’s enjoyable,” Paula says. “You need to structure your work in a way that you enjoy it, that you wake up and you’re looking forward to things and building skills is a very important part of that. You need that motivation to keep going.”

Nowadays, the world is dominated by trends and by what works or not. However, Pow believes in timeless storytelling principles and as she said, she’s “a big advocate for brands to stop chasing the latest trend, burning their people out in the process for an extra thousand likes”.

Despite being a creative who’s passionate about the art of a video, Pow is “obsessed” with getting to know what works and doesn’t and something will grab the audience in. Content should be timeless and that the more creative freedom one has, the more successful the production is going to be. Pow also touched down on her style of production.

“I never liked manufacturing moments,” she says. “I always capture them as they happen. I make them pretty but I make them real. I did realise that this is the same thing I used for my silly ski edits, which proved valuable down the line for working with pro athletes like Max Verstappen. Those authentic moments, you can’t really manufacture. You convey them on video and that’s what people resonate with.”

Pow now works freelance, leading her own company, and while she still is involved in Formula 1, she’s branching out to other sports too