Why I’m Writing This

In my last post I talked about why I left retail and started studying with the Open University. What I didn’t get into is what I actually want to do with the degree once it’s done. It’s easy to say “I want a career in IT” — that’s true, but it’s not specific enough to actually aim at. So here’s the specific version: I want to work in Formula One.

I know how that sounds written down. It’s a big, competitive, slightly unlikely goal for someone starting a part-time degree from a home lab in their spare room. I’m writing it down anyway, because I’d rather aim at something specific and fall short than aim at “a job in IT” and end up somewhere I don’t actually care about.

Why F1, Specifically

I’ve followed the sport for years, so part of this is simply that: I’m a fan, and the idea of working in it rather than just watching it is obviously appealing. But the bigger draw for me is the technology underneath the racing.

F1 teams run an enormous, high-stakes IT operation that most viewers never think about. Every race weekend, a team ships an entire trackside network — comms, telemetry, systems that need to talk reliably to the factory back home — and builds it, runs it, and tears it down again, at a different track, on a different continent, roughly every one to two weeks for most of the year. There’s no maintenance window. There’s no “we’ll patch it next sprint.” If the network goes down during a session, that’s it, it’s gone. That combination of scale, pressure, and zero margin for error is genuinely fascinating to me, not despite the pressure but partly because of it.

Why This, Not Just “Any IT Job”

The honest answer is that this is an extreme version of what I already do for fun. My home lab, the UniFi network, the VMs and containers I’ve broken and rebuilt more times than I’d like to admit — all of that is essentially a small-scale, low-stakes version of trackside infrastructure work. I already gravitate toward exactly this kind of problem: build it, keep it running, understand it well enough to fix it fast when it inevitably breaks.

The roles I’m aiming toward sit on that same line — trackside and network infrastructure work, and IT/systems support more broadly, whether that ends up being factory-based or traveling with a team. Both are a natural extension of the networking and systems administration work I’ve already been doing at home, just at a scale and under a level of pressure I haven’t experienced yet.

Being Realistic About It

I’m not under any illusion that a degree alone opens this door. Motorsport IT is a small, competitive world, and most people working in it got there through a combination of relevant experience, networking within the industry, and a fair amount of persistence. The degree is the foundation — the networking fundamentals, the systems knowledge, the credibility on paper — but it’s not the whole plan.

What I can control right now is making sure the foundation is solid: finishing the degree properly, continuing to build and break things in the home lab, and picking up the kind of practical, hands-on systems and networking experience that’s actually relevant to trackside work, wherever I can get it. If a path into F1 specifically doesn’t open up, the same skill set is exactly what’s needed for infrastructure and IT roles across plenty of other high-pressure, real-time environments. It’s not a wasted bet either way.

What’s Next

This blog is going to track that whole process, so this post is really just a marker — this is the direction, written down, so I can look back on it later and see how close the plan actually got. Homelab experiments, degree progress, and anything relevant to motorsport tech that I come across along the way will all end up here.