Nearly 20 years later, and mechanical engineer Emilie Weaving is still chasing her dream, fingers wrapped firmly around the throttle. Her journey has taken her along some unexpected roads and through some sharp life corners.
Emilie grew up in a motorsport family. Her grandfather raced grand prix motorcycles and has a corner named after him on the iconic Isle of Man circuit. Her mother rode a Ducati Monster and introduced her father to the lifestyle. By the time she was 17, Emilie was on her own motorbike. She would have bought a scooter the year before, but her parents won a hard round of negotiations. There was always MotoGP (and its best-known champion, Rossi) on the television, and the garage at their Shropshire home was always full of bikes.
At school, Emilie was drawn to maths and science. And engineering. She loved building catapults and castles and unleashing the one on the other. Before long, she had a Yamaha FZR400, friends to ride with and a part-time job at a Ducati dealership. She learned her trade there and even visited the famous Ducati factory in Italy. When the shop was quiet, she and the others stripped motorbike engines for fun.
But the dream to get close to the racetrack rumbled in the background, growing louder and louder. Eventually, Emilie sat down to write dozens of emails to any British superbike team she could reach, asking them to let her join the crew.
She was keen but lacked experience. Five teams wrote back. One decided to give her a chance. The team, CN Racing, was led by a woman who liked Emilie’s audacity. She invited her to a team event that weekend. But there was a problem. Emilie was down for a shift at the Ducati dealership and her boss refused to give her the time off. The notice was too short. If she wanted to go, he said, she’d have to resign.
“So, I slept on it and handed in my notice the next day,” she recalls. “I thought: ‘screw it, I’m going to go for it while I can’. I knew what I wanted to do. I knew it was the right thing.”
The gamble paid off. Emilie spent four blissful years in the racing paddocks of the British Superbike Championship, working 600cc supersport and 1,000cc superstock bikes (which are more road-friendly and are allowed fewer racing modifications). As bikes screamed past at 150 or 200mph, she helped change tyres, tune engines and fix the ones that went down in a crash. She met her heroes, travelled and turned a part-time passion into a full-time job. She also met a JCB engineer who told her about an apprenticeship programme his company was running.
It was time to move on from the circuit and Emilie applied for the apprenticeship. There were only a handful of positions and they had all been filled. But, incredibly, one apprentice pulled out at the last minute and Emilie stepped in. For six years, she studied and worked at JCB, developing and testing diesel engines.
It was at JCB that she became a Stem ambassador. With the right support, she grew comfortable talking to strangers, often young ones, about engineering. She realised how little awareness there was about the wide and fascinating spectrum of jobs within the field.
“You Google ‘engineering’ and you get a picture of a white bloke in a hard hat,” she explains. “But engineering is so inclusive and so rewarding. We have the opportunity to shape the future. To find solutions to the world’s biggest problems. And to change stereotypes along the way.”
This year, Emilie joined Ruroc, a “super ambitious” company that makes motorcycle helmets. Her job ranges from testing the safety of the helmets (by doing things like dropping them onto steel anvils or yanking them with hooks) to developing an in-house wind tunnel for more sophisticated aerodynamic, thermal and acoustic tests. She loves being close to motorbikes again – doing “what makes you tick” – and the freedom to tinker and create.
Emilie runs The Female Engineer Blog, rides two motorcycles (a 1990s FZR400 is her “special bike” while the other, a Suzuki GS500, is the reliable commuter) and attends as many music gigs as Covid-19 allows (think Guns N’ Roses, Alter Bridge, Metallica). She also plays baseball and gets outdoors as often as she can.
And Emilie’s still got the letter she wrote when she was 10.
“I’m never going to settle unless I scratch the itch of working as an engineer in a MotoGP paddock,” she says, playfully noting that Valentino Rossi still runs a racing team.
Want the best engineering stories delivered straight to your inbox? The Professional Engineering newsletter gives you vital updates on the most cutting-edge engineering and exciting new job opportunities. To sign up, click here.
Content published by Professional Engineering does not necessarily represent the views of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers.