"I'm a minority among minorities" - Alpine F1 female engineer talks about diversity and inclusion in the French team

Dalia Ramos is a female engineer who is the Head of Build and Test for the BWT Alpine F1 team. Coming from a Mexican background, Ramos moved to England to pursue a master’s degree in manufacturing engineering and management at the University of Nottingham.

After graduating, she worked as a manufacturing engineer for Rolls-Royce. A huge opportunity to work for Formula One opened up when French company Renault rebranded its F1 base as the Alpine F1 team. After joining the French team as the head of testing and building, her first task was to build the 2022 car.

Ramos described her earlier days with the team as "extremely tough" and said she and her team had to pull long shifts in the factory to build and enhance the car. Throughout the year, modifications were made to the car.

The data collected during the race weekends from the drivers is passed onto the design and development divisions, where they see what can be changed or added to enhance the performance of the car. All this data is then forwarded to Ramos and her team back at the base for them to work on it.

Women in STEM are hardly seen and appreciated, even in today's advanced age. But Formula One teams celebrate these women in their teams. According to Ramos, only 11% of the 850 employees at Enstone production are women, and only about five are from Latin America.

She said:

"A friend told me that I'm a minority among minorities. I feel very proud of that."

Working with the Diversity and Inclusion Committee, the French team hopes to boost female representation to 30% by 2027. Romas, being one of the few women in Alpine at a higher position, said:

"We also have to educate people in the factory who aren't used to seeing women in certain positions."

In its debut season in 2021, Alpine finished fifth in the Constructors' World Championship with 155 points. Their first F1 race win was at the 2021 Hungarian GP, where French driver Esteban Ocon finished first. Ocon was eleventh in the Drivers' Championship, with teammate Fernando Alonso finishing tenth.

---

How Alpine plans to bring Female drivers to increase inclusivity and diversity

Alpine has announced the Rac(H)er program to increase diversity, with the goal of not only discovering and nurturing future female F1 talents but also significantly increasing the female employee ratio.

Rac(H)er aims to increase the team's proportion of female engineers to 30% by 2027, with women currently accounting for only 12% of the car company's workforce. They will begin immediately by recruiting a 50:50 mix of male and female trainees and graduates.

Aseel Al Hamad and Abbi Pulling became the first women to drive a Formula 1 car in Saudi Arabia in March 2022 as part of an Alpine-run demonstration across the Kingdom.

The F1 team will also collaborate with numerous training organizations and provide financial support to field a female driver in F1 - with research from the Paris Brain Institute (the ICM, or Institut du Cerveau) to "properly appreciate" the steps to becoming a Formula 1 driver.