Meet Stephanie Travers, in 2020 she became the first Black woman to stand on a Formula 1 podium.
The former Mercedes engineer was identified by Lewis Hamilton as a rising star during her time at Brackley, with the seven-time world champion functioning as a sort of mentor to Zimbabwe-born Travers. Lewis Hamilton has touched countless lives with his work on and off the Formula 1 track – and Stephanie Travers can certainly count herself among those people.
Travers was born in Harare and went to school there until her family moved to the UK when she was 10.
She comes from a family of motorsport fanatics and recalls the stories her parents and older brother would tell her of the F1 grands prix held in neighboring South Africa during the early 1990s.
It helped, too, that both her father and grandfather were engineers and Travers’ quickly developed a passion in her dad’s engineering workshop.
“That liking for the sport just grew as I got older and older, to a point where I began traveling to some races with friends,” she says. “I just really knew that I wanted to work in the sport.”
Knowing that it could potentially get her into F1, Travers decided to specialize in chemical engineering. Ultimately, however, she says it was important to find a career that she enjoyed, as the competitive nature of the F1 meant earning a place in the sport was anything but a foregone conclusion.
But even then, Travers still dreamed that one day she would stand on a F1 podium. When she finally got there, it was a realization of everything she and her family had worked towards.
“The emotions really got the best of me at that point,” she says. “I was quite lucky to be wearing a mask, you couldn’t see the tears in my eyes, but it was a great feeling and it’s completely different to being on the other end with the entire team.
“But knowing that the team was there standing with me and supporting me in that moment and we’re all celebrating the win that we had worked so hard for that weekend, it was a great feeling and I’m just so thankful that I got to experience it from both sides.”
Now, Steph is Senior Development Officer at @mission44 and has embraced her position as a role model, inspiring the next generation of engineers.
Stephanie holds a BEng in Chemical Engineering with Industrial Studies from the University of Bradford, and an MSc in Advanced Chemical Engineering from Imperial College London.
