Isabel Hall is the Head of Marketing at Veloce Racing, a team that will be chasing victory in 2021 in the Extreme E Championship. Speaking with Females in Motorsport, Isabel looks forward to an electric year in motorsport.
For the past few years, the Veloce brand has been a leading name in the esports world. In 2021 the team - co-founded by Formula E champion Jean-Eric Vergne - will take the plunge into Extreme E and, for Head of Marketing Isabel Hall, this means a hectic but immensely exciting schedule.
“There's a lot to do; we are a start-up effectively,” Isabel told Females in Motorsport. “At this stage, it's very much getting to understand the sort of infrastructure around Extreme E, there's a lot of moving parts at the moment.
“It's almost like being thrown in at the deep end a little bit, which I thrive off as a person. A lot of people that work in the sports world kind of do - you naturally tend to be a bit of a competitor or an extrovert, just in my experience.”
Despite taking to the challenge like a duck to water, Isabel admits that she fell into the world of motorsport somewhat by chance, having left university and entered a graduate scheme with a big fast-moving consumer goods company.
“I think, whilst I enjoyed it, it didn't really tick any sort of passion points for me,” she says. “I enjoy team sports, I have always loved sport and I got to a point where I sort of thought, well, why aren't I doing something within the field I'm really passionate about? I was fortunate enough to get an opportunity to work on the Volvo Ocean Race which brought me into the world of sports”
A passion for sport, a competitive spirit and proactivity all led Isabel to Veloce Racing in June 2020. Like many motorsport fans worldwide, Isabel was immediately intrigued and excited by the new all-electric concept.
“I heard about Extreme E right at the beginning and I loved the sound of it, that the core purpose was to raise awareness of climate change and to spread the awareness of the adoption of electric vehicles across the world and I thought it sounded like such an exciting and innovative series,” she says.
“I went on LinkedIn and I reached out to a couple of the teams and Veloce came back to me and it was just by chance that they were at the stages where they were starting to look for someone for that sort of marketing role, so being in the right place at the right time and having a proactive approach came through.”
With sustainability at the heart of the series and several motorsport titans staking their claims for victory, many believe that Extreme E is destined to succeed, and Isabel is certainly one of them.
“Bringing in the likes of Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg, and some of the drivers that have been announced like our Jamie Chadwick, that is what makes it so exciting,” she says. “To have these sorts of locations and the purpose of raising awareness of climate change and having this amazing talent and these vehicles - they're huge, they're really powerful beasts, bringing those three aspects together makes me think, how can people not be intrigued by it?”
Although Isabel is quick to highlight the prominence of ‘chance’ in her arrival into motorsport, her passion for the Veloce team, the Extreme E series as a whole and their mission of sustainability and female inclusion is obvious.
“I look at someone such as Jamie Chadwick who is our female racing driver and I think well, the possibilities are endless,” she says. “It's just educating, raising awareness and giving more girls the opportunity to realise that I can go into motorsport, I can do this.
“I don't see how we can go backwards. There’s so much going on and there's so much avocation from men and women for women to take on roles in what would have been traditionally male dominated fields.”
For young women inspired to follow a similar career path into motorsport, Isabel is quick to stress the importance of one key quality: proactivity.
“The more you can be inquisitive and understand exactly what it is you want and where you want to go, but then once you know, it's that proactivity. Get on LinkedIn and reach out to the right people, introduce yourself, make it known what you're interested in and what you want to achieve, don't shy away from being just honest, open and upfront”.
Follow the progress of team Veloce in 2021 here.
Images are credit to Veloce and Isabel Hall.