Krystina Emmanouilides, who dreamed of one day working for a Formula 1 team, she is one of those rare people who are right where they want to be. And belong to be.
From a young age, she wanted to be an engineer, and that desire only grew when she started gaining more of an interest in mathematics and science during high school.
While her family is full of architects and designers, Emmanouilides had the opportunity to follow in their footsteps, but deep down she knew that she truly wanted to work as an engineer in Formula 1. She wanted to create her own pathway.
And so her challenging journey to the pinnacle of world motorsport began upon graduating high school in Australia.
At first it wasn’t easy. The information wasn’t readily available and a clear pathway to working for a Formula 1 team was hard to come by. But she found enough to steer her in the direction of her next destination. The United Kingdom.
From there, she spent four years getting a Bachelor of Motorsport Engineering with honours at the prestigious Oxford Brookes University before completing her Masters at Durham University.
Despite having six years of tertiary education behind her and the desire to work in Formula 1 stronger than ever, her dream remained out of reach, as the opportunities remained scarce.
Soon after the completion of her Masters, she was employed at Jaguar Land Rover as a Vehicle Dynamics Engineer, before securing a role closer aligned to her dream – a CFD Application Engineer at Exa PowerFLOW.
As the years went on, she gained plenty of knowledge, stability, experience and contacts at her new job, but the opportunity to go in F1 still eluded her. Until it finally came in 2018 when she applied, interviewed and successfully obtained a role with Sauber Motorsport, whose entry in Formula 1 are the Alfa Romeo F1 Team ORLEN, as a CFD Development Engineer.
The role sees her and her team work in the aerodynamic department and are responsible for the team's aerodynamic simulations – a crucial cog, given aero testing is limited and her team figures out what’s best to test in the actual wind tunnel.