Behind-the-scenes at McLaren: The lesser-known role that keeps F1 cars running

McLaren has shared a behind-the-scenes look at one of the many lesser-known roles in Formula 1.

The Woking outfit has shared a day-in-the-life video of trackside reliability engineer Abbie Robison, who joined the team in 2021. Robison’s role involves proactively preventing issues that might occur with the cars during a race weekend and reacting quickly to any issues that do arise.

“A reliability engineer, in a nutshell, is a problem-solver,” Robison explained to McLaren.

“It’s about dealing with any problem we have as quickly as possible, and ensuring the car stays on track – but there is also an element of thinking ahead. I like to break it down into the reactive element of dealing with issues as they appear, and then a proactive element of thinking about how to stop those issues from happening in the first place.”

The video follows Robison during her last day at the McLaren Technology Centre before she heads to the Austrian Grand Prix, where Lando Norris won and his team-mate Oscar Piastri finished second.

“I’ve got quite a busy Monday before travelling tomorrow,” she said in the video. “So, defining what the car configuration is going to be for this week, my personal workload as well. And then I’ll start focusing on the race team’s work when they hit the ground on Wednesday.

“When we’re trackside, there are just surprises hitting you from every turn and you’ve got to be really reactive. So, I think especially when I’m back at MTC and I’m more focused on the proactive work, I like to be quite regimented in how I do that. Make sure we get the most out of the time available.”

She added: “I’m that first point of contact if we’ve got an upgrade. So, I need to understand what I’m looking at well enough to be able to answer those questions. It’s that iterative learning.

“I don’t think people realise that you can have jobs that are actually still so human-centric. I spend not that much time at my desk. I’m talking to people a lot. That’s part of my job as an engineer – working with people and constantly learning, which I think is really cool and quite niche to what I do.”