“We’ve both gone from
washing wheels with club-
level teams, while others
have come from F1. So
we’re quite hands-on. In
some ways we’re quite
old-school, but we do
move with the times.”
Those words from Sarah
Shaw describe the start that
she and husband Tony got
in motorsport – long before
they ever met. Now they’re
the married couple who
jointly engineer Jordan
King at MP Motorsport
in the FIA Formula 2
Championship. Along the
way, they ran the successful
Manor Competition team in
Formula Renault UK before
interest in that series dried
up and they jumped ship
in 2012 to take up an off erfrom Dutch team MP.
That was initially in
European FRenault, before
the Shaws added F2’s
predecessor GP2 in 2014-15.
“That was a bit crazy
because we hardly ever got
to go home and we’ve got a
little daughter,” says Shaw.
“From 2016 we said we’d
just focus on GP2.”
The husband-wife
dynamic is easier in F2 than
it was in FRenault, where
they engineered two drivers
each: “I’d try diff erent tyre
pressures and then absent-
mindedly mention it over
dinner and Tony would
go nuts! Now we’re
constantly sharing.”
Shaw, who describes
King – who raced in
FRenault with Manor in2011 – as “almost family,
not just on a personal
level but his work ethic
is really good”, believes
there’s little to stop
women in motorsport.
“It’s strange – I see a lot
of women engineers in the
F1 pitlane but still don’t see
many women mechanics,”
she says. “When I started in
the mid-1990s, there were
a lot of dinosaurs around
but because I was a novelty
people were willing to give
me the opportunity. The
initiatives [to help women]
are great but they’ll
still only do it if they’re
passionate about it. It’s
not a nine-to-five job.
I don’t think there’s any
barriers to stop them.”
MSShaw reckons there’s
little to stop women
if the passion is thereSarah Shaw
Role Race engineer, MP Motorsport
Series FIA Formula 2Betty Klimenko
Plain-speaking Erebus Motorsport
boss has made her ‘team of
rejects’ one of Supercars’ bestMichela Cerruti
Operations manager
successfully mixes
motherhood with
“a job I really love”Leena Gade
Race engineer brings
Le Mans-winning pedigree
to Mazda’s IMSA eff ortCharlie Broughton
Power Maxed Racing mechanic
is back working with JasonPlato aft er (^19) years
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22 AUGUST 2019 AUTOSPORT.COM 33
A WOMAN’S WORLD