Kimberly Stevens carries her passion through her role as Senior Trackside Aerodynamicist with Mercedes-AMG PETRONAS Formula One Team

Passion is a driving force and that is what motivates Kimberly Stevens to always deliver her best in her role as Senior Trackside Aerodynamicist with Mercedes-AMG PETRONAS Formula One Team. Kimberly spoke with Females In Motorsport about her journey to working in the pinnacle of motorsport.

Behind the many highs, there are also many challenges which teams have to face. Kimberly touches on the ups and downs of working in motorsport, but also how she wouldn’t have it any other way. As she explained during our interview, she feels as if she “was born to do it.”

Kimberly has been with Mercedes for almost 13 years, and her success is a result of the valuable lessons and experiences that she earned from early on in university.

Kimberly Stevens is a Senior Trackside Aerodynamicist at Mercedes-AMG PETRONAS Formula One Team

How it started…

Kimberly doesn’t have any family members involved in racing or motorsport. She was born with a passion for cars though and the adrenaline that comes with them.

“I like the sound, the appearance,” she tells Females In Motorsport. “I have always liked the sensation of things going fast, you know, I like rollercoasters and all that kind of stuff.”

This passion led her to study Aerospace Engineering at the Ohio State University. During this period, she was part of the university’s engineering team, Buckeye Bullet. Kimberly worked primarily as an aerodynamicist in a team which would have 10 to 15 people involved at any time. They worked on several iterations of the electric land speed car, which reached speeds of up to 550km/hr. Being involved in the team helped Kimberly in future situations she’d have to face.

“There are things that prepared me for my role in motorsport,” Kimberly says. “We were such a small group that I had to be involved in every bit of the car. From welding things to soldering up battery connectors to building the car. We had to be involved in all of it, I wasn’t just an aerodynamicist.”

This experience proved useful when she worked at BMW Sauber. Eight months before Kimberly graduated, she had already signed a contract to join the F1 team in Switzerland once she finished university.

The challenges at BMW Sauber

During the 2009 season however, BMW announced they were withdrawing from F1 once the championship wrapped up. This was just 18 months after Kimberly joined the team. Around 40% of the workforce was made redundant but Kimberly was “fortunate enough” to keep her job. She described this experience as “pretty traumatic” but at the same time she found herself in the same situations she was once in with the Buckeye Bullet team.

“We didn’t have enough people to do the work at hand,” Kimberly says. “So anything that interested me, I was permitted to just get involved in it, which allowed me to learn a lot really quickly. We ended up having a really torrid 2010 season, our first year without the BMW support. And then by 2012, which was my last year with the team, we got four podiums. It was really satisfying to be a part of that growth in performance of the team. We spent a lot of time just grateful that the team won’t go bust.”

Kimberly found herself reflecting upon her years at BMW Sauber while Mercedes were dominating. Between 2014 and 2021, Mercedes won every single Constructors’ Championship and during those years, Kimberly explained that it became a routine for them to win. When they didn’t win, it was a shock for the team.

“I remember when we got our first podium at Sauber, we just lost our minds, we were so happy,” Kimberly says. “Everybody was crying. It was such an emotional moment. When you have so much success, it’s not as sweet as when it’s not expected and it’s not routine. I’ve been fortunate enough to be at the racetrack for over 100 podiums. You always go to the podium, it doesn’t matter, even if it’s the 12th in a row, it still means a lot to me. And because I had that rough patch, a podium is still an incredibly satisfying feeling for me.”

Moving onto Mercedes-AMG PETRONAS Formula One Team

While working with Mercedes, Kimberly got to work with several drivers such as seven-times F1 world champion Lewis Hamilton, 2016 champion Nico Rosberg and upcoming stellar talent George Russell and Andrea Kimi Antonelli. Her job as Senior Trackside Aerodynamicist sees her travelling to many races, aiming to ensure the car is as efficient as it can be aerodynamically.

“My role involves everything from ensuring that we’ve got the optimum car configuration to ensuring that the car is built correctly and that all the details are the best possible,” she says. “Then there’s also monitoring things, to see if there’s any way to perhaps construct them better, things that are sensitive, perhaps degrading.”

Kimberly gets to travel to many races as she makes sure the car is as efficient as it can be aerodynamically

Throughout the season, Kimberly gains information from drivers about the sensitivities of the car. This could be anything from the car feeling unsettled by the wind conditions to overbalance. However, Kimberly focuses on feedback which would affect the team long-term or little tweaks which can make a race weekend better. Drivers will communicate their concerns primarily with their race engineer while Kimberly makes suggestions for long-term development.

“You really just have to remember they’re just human beings, like all of us, dealing with all the same things that we deal with,” Kimberly says. “They’re emotional human beings, they get frustrated, they can also get really happy and if you interact with them as if they’re any other human, I think it works quite well.”

“They’re really under so much pressure in the car,” she says. “Having that appreciation for how much pressure they’re under is important. We would all probably behave much worse under a similar amount of pressure. If you just give them that freedom to be humans, it really helps build a relationship of trust.”

Thriving to be the best and getting on the F1 podium

As previously said, Mercedes enjoyed an eight-year dominance in F1 between 2014 and 2021 and Kimberly is part of that history. She made even more history when in 2015, she stood on the podium alongside Nico Rosberg and Lewis Hamilton who managed a one-two finish respectively at the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix. After first thinking it was “a joke” when told she would represent the team on the podium, she recalls what a “wild” experience it was.

Kimberly stepped on the podium with Nico Rosberg and Lewis Hamilton at the 2015 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix

Being part of a championship-winning team brings many glorious moments, however, as Kimberly says, “it’s really quite challenging to maintain such a standard all the time.”

She touches on how everyone in the team needs to keep performing to a high level all the time and she always bears in mind what Mercedes-AMG PETRONAS Formula One Team’s Toto Wolff says.

“He always encourages us to imagine our equal in our competitor teams, and to go above and beyond what they’re willing to do,” Kimberly says. “Just to make that internal challenge to yourself that you really want to be the best in the pit lane at your specific role.”

Keeping up to such a standard all the time is no walk in the park and Kimberly said it can be “difficult”. However, the results are very rewarding and the team holds those moments close to heart.

“We have seen swings in performance from race-to-race in this current era,” Kimberly says. “For example in Montreal, we won, and it was great. And then Austria, we were unable to fight for the podium. It’s pretty easy to just feel exhausted by that and to get a bit battered by it, but I think a lot of us really hold that advice from Toto.”

Another challenge Kimberly touched on is the constant travelling. She turned 40 last February and spoke about how physically different she feels compared to when she joined the team at 27-years-old. Kimberly realises that now she needs to take care of herself even more, which means get more sleep and have more healthy habits to make sure she can deliver her best while performing her job.

“I do proper sleep adjustments plans, where I try to adjust to the time zone before we go,” she says. “If we’re going east, I start to go to bed earlier and wake up earlier in the days going forward, and the opposite when we go west. You have to plan a lot; it’s slightly more intense than a normal 9 to 5 job!” 

Thankfully, the team takes care of its employees and provides the best resources possible so they maintain a healthy lifestyle. 

“We’re really offered freedom both within our jobs and when we’re in between races,” Kimberly says. “Even the airplane rides are very comfortable. The team really spends a lot of effort and resources to make sure that we’ve got the best chances of arriving well rested and able to perform.”

Make sure to show you’re passionate

Before we wrapped up our interview, I asked Kimberly what is the one key lesson she has learned from her career. She admitted that this was the first question that she stumbled on throughout the whole interview and understandably so. A career with so much experience and many highlights, brings a lot of lessons and life-changing opportunities with it.

But as Kimberly explains throughout, she strives to be the best. So she didn’t just give me one lesson, but she gave me two valuable ones. Firstly, always be passionate and make sure you show it. 

“I was really lucky I got a contract signed to go to an F1 team long before I graduated,” she says. “And that really happened because I was passionate about motorsport, which I demonstrated through my involvement in the Buckeye Bullet team. And I wasn’t shy about it.”

Showcasing this passion allowed people involved in motorsport to give Kimberly the chance to get her foot in the door. It’s important however, that once you’re in, you “keep the fire burning”. 

“It’s an industry that asks a lot and gives a lot back, so make sure that you latch onto something that really drives you,” she says. 

To explore opportunities with Mercedes-AMG PETRONAS Formula 1 Team, visit their careers website.

All image credits: Mercedes-AMG PETRONAS Formula One Team