F1 news: Freelance data engineer and technical coordinator Nida Anis on breaking barriers and women in Motorsport

For a world that held its first Formula 1 race in 1950, it’s remarkable that the sport will see its first-ever full-time female race engineer, Laura Müller, only next year.

However, the world of motorsports is evolving.

More women have been breaking barriers on the pit wall since motorsport legends such as Michele Mouton became the first woman to win a World Rally event in 1982.

Hannah Schmitz, Red Bull Principal Strategy Engineer, Susie Wolff - current Managing Director of F1 Academy and the first woman in 22 years to take part in an official F1 session (FP1 with Williams).

And countless more inspiring women have been pushing boundaries and taking on the motorsport world by storm.

According to the 2025 Global F1 Fan Survey released by Formula 1 in partnership with Motorsport Network, there has been an increase in female representation within the fandom.

Three out of four new F1 fans are women, with 42% already following F1 Academy, making it the second-most followed series after Formula 1.

Beyond the appeal and status of the sport, its storytelling and emotionally resonant aspects are attracting a wider range of audiences, particularly among Gen Z.

This puts the motorsport industry on a culturally powerful trajectory in the current digital-first era of online streaming platforms.

Here, writing for Sports News Blitz, journalist Disha S. Charan delves into the story of a fearless motorsports trailblazer, Nida Anis.

Accelerating change in motorsport

At just 20 years old, Nida Anis is living a reality most could only imagine as a freelance motorsport data engineer and team technical coordinator on the grid.

Alongside her freelance work, she is currently pursuing a BEng (Hons) Motorsport Engineering degree at Oxford Brookes University, UK, and is about to begin her second year.

Recently named as one of the nine Asian women accelerating change in motorsport by Hairpin Media Magazine, Nida is making history by inspiring and encouraging girls to chase after their dreams and to become whoever they want.

She’s worked for race - and championship-winning teams in series including (but not limited to) GB4, the FIA Formula 4 Indian Championship, the FIA Formula Regional Middle East Championship, Lamborghini Super Trofeo Asia, GT World Challenge Asia, the FIA Motorsport Games, SRO Japan Cup, and Super Taikyu.

Most recently, she successfully completed a weekend in Thailand Super Series and is about to do a project involving Toyota 86s at the Malaysian Speed Festival, which is the biggest local motorsport event in the country with over 270 cars and bikes and over 300 drivers and riders.

Impact off the track

Beyond the roar of the engines and the data screens, Nida’s impact stretches far wider.

She’s been involved in Feeder Series, Carbon Culture, and has also ventured into journalism, photography, and building websites for racing drivers.

Moreover, Nida mentors aspiring engineers, advocates for charities, and consistently proves that passion and persistence can rewrite the rules.

Having been on 294 flights so far, she is soon to embark on her big 300th milestone flight.

With over 37 countries stamped in her passport, she has carved her name into the high-octane, fiercely competitive world of motorsport engineering that precedes its reputation.

Beyond her multi-media involvement and technical engineering background, she’s a passionate artist who has played the piano since the age of five and continues to practice music regularly.

Nida is now learning a travel-sized electric guitar, which she uses for stress relief in the physically and mentally demanding career of motorsport.

On the whole, she has built a renowned place for herself in a sport where milliseconds matter and women are still in the minority.

The call of destiny

For Nida, there were no early mornings at kart tracks. In fact, she was the first in her family to even hold a driving licence.

Her father, who has Usher syndrome, is deaf and partially blind, while her mother never learned to drive.

For most of her childhood, Nida’s closest brush with racing was in a car’s back seat – proving that sheer will, relentlessness, and determination can pry open doors in the most inaccessible places of the industry.

Doors that often seem beyond the reach of an outsider with no prior connections to the sport.

Indeed, her entry into the sport was almost incidental to her passion for computers and coding.

Throughout school she took part in various computer science programs, attaining cybersecurity qualifications through the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) and participating in various student robotics and informatics competitions.

Originally, she aimed to pursue a career in software engineering.

As she recalls: “As a child, I had access to lots of laptops. I’d go into settings and I’d change them, or I’d go and try to code my own programs.

“I remember messing around with a few Linux distributions as a kid, installing them on these laptops and trying to figure out how they worked.

“I remember learning how to code my own video games on Scratch as a kid in primary school, which led me to discover Python and other programming languages as I got older.

“I loved trying to solve difficult problems – I guess that’s why I liked cybersecurity so much in school, as you really had to think hard and put yourself in the mind of the other side.

“And there’s nothing like the rush of finally getting your code to work after you’ve been struggling for hours!

“More often than not, I would break things, but I’d learn by breaking things and my family noticed from a very young age, I was very interested in computers and in coding.”

But destiny had other plans.

Bahrain GP turning point

At 16, she had been following the America’s Cup – ‘the Formula 1 of yacht racing’, as she describes it.

“You have these yachts and they have these attachments on each side called hydrofoils, and these hydrofoils work like plane wings in that they generate lift forces that push the hull of the boat out of the water, reducing the drag and allowing these boats to sail, you know, just fully sail powered at around 50 or so knots,” Nida explains.

“So that’s really fast for a sailboat. And yeah, I was very captivated by the America’s Cup. And I remember thinking, ‘I want to do this, I want to do this.”

Later, a friend suggested she watch “the real thing”, so she tuned in to the 2021 Bahrain Grand Prix, and there’s been no turning back since.

It wasn’t the celebrity drivers or the glitz and glamour of the sport that drew her in, but the invisible mechanics of success that emerged behind the scenes, which quickly became a source of inspiration through the screen.

As she watched the precision of pit crews and the quiet orchestration of engineers required to find fractions of a second for the cars, she was hooked.

In pursuit of greatness

After that, she devoured everything she could, exploring World Endurance, World Rally, MotoGP, any discipline where engineering met speed.

“I'm focused on being the best engineer that I can be,” she says.

Determined to understand the sport from the inside out, she immersed herself in books, pored over online forums on Reddit, and even turned her school’s Extended Project Qualification into a 5,000-word report on motorcycle racing safety.

That diligence won her a scholarship to the Motor Vehicle University of Emilia-Romagna’s summer programme among 20 high school students, with access to Ferrari’s engine assembly lines, Lamborghini’s Urus factory, Ducati’s workshops, and Dallara’s design rooms.

Standing among the whir of machines and the scent of carbon fibre, she realised this wasn’t just a passing interest, it was the beginning of a calling.

However, the path to her racing success wasn’t always easy.

With no racing mentors, guidance, or connections – nothing except her relentless determination – she offered to build a driver’s website, trading her time for a paddock pass which would be the beginning of her racing journey.

That small stepping stone paved the way to a role at the Walter Hayes Trophy, which evolved into trackside work at the GB4 Championship, all while she was still studying for her A-levels at the age of 18.

The Bahrain Grand Prix may have sparked the interest, but everything since has been powered by her drive in pursuit of greatness.

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Pushing for social change

Nida is more than her career, though, as she has also co-founded Asian Motorsport, a news platform dedicated to shining a spotlight on underrepresented news about motorsport in Asia.

Particularly, on Asian drivers and teams competing overseas. 

“Every engineer, every mechanic, everyone in motorsport has a story and a narrative but these stories aren’t often getting told or getting the spotlight that they deserve,” she says.

She’s also involved with several impactful motorsports organisations like Driven By Us and FIA Girls on Track UK, where she constantly uses her platform to advocate for inclusivity, diversity, and representation across motorsports and media.

Additionally, she’s also a STEM Ambassador Volunteer, supporting Hayes School’s F1 in Schools teams, acting as a role model and helping secondary school kids learn CAD, CAE, and engineering design skills. 

Furthermore, Nida runs a private tutoring business for children worldwide, which transitioned from in-person to online teaching due to travel for motorsports, where she tutors clients, mainly from Hong Kong, in English as a second language.

On top of that, she is currently training for a half-marathon to raise funds for Survivor Space, a charity supporting survivors of sexual violence.

It’s a cause that’s close to her heart and one she describes as “often overlooked, yet able to make a huge difference to the lives of women”.

She’s aiming to raise £350, and every step she runs is a stride toward change.

You can read more about Nida’s charity fundraiser here.

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Blocking out the noise

In the competitive industry, she has learned to filter out the noise, literally and figuratively.

She says: “I don’t see myself differently because I’m a woman or because I’m young or because I’m Asian. To me, I try to perceive myself in the same way as everyone else.

“You know, the fact that I’m a woman, I’ve often been one of the only women in paddocks, within a team, or, you know, in like a technical role within a paddock and I try to just put that aside.

“I remember at the beginning being slightly daunted by it. But I try to focus on the factors that I can control.

“I can control my performance. I can control my attitude. I can control, okay, my actions. I can control things like choosing to help other people when they need it.

“So I focus on that. And I try to block the rest of it as noise.”

Her place in the paddock wasn’t handed to her – she built it, piece by piece, with data traces, late nights, and unwavering belief in herself.

Q. Laura Müller recently became F1’s first full-time female race engineer. When you see milestones like that, do they feel like personal victories too?

Nida Anis: “It’s great to see more representation on the grid, like across the paddock. For me, I guess I’m very focused on my own career path, my own journey.

“So, you know, I’ll see news about Laura Müller being a race engineer, and that’s really cool. That is really cool. And it’s another role model that I look up to.

“But at the end of the day as well, I have to remind myself that these people can do it, so I need to focus on how I can get up to that level.

“I recently had the pleasure of talking to Hannah Schmitz about race strategy at a Red Bull Racing International Women in Engineering Day event.

“And she was, you know, very articulate, very smart, you know, knows what she’s doing, where she’s coming from, how she’s going to talk about a particular situation or approach to a certain race.

“And it’s great to be able to see more role models for women and, I guess, for underrepresented groups in the motorsport industry.

“At the end of the day, though, I always evaluate my own career and I think, okay, what could I do better? What am I able to do better?

“And I try to focus on that as much as possible because I know that, I guess, there’s also an element of trying not to compare yourself too much to other people, because when you compare yourself too much to other people, you can lose track of what you’ve actually achieved.

“I always used to judge myself, actually, because I’m quite tomboyish. I don’t usually wear makeup, you know, well, I wear very, very little makeup. I don’t usually do my nails. I used to have very short hair for a long time.

“And I used to always compare myself to, you know, other women. I studied in two all-girls schools and I found it really difficult, because I was studying alongside people who more closely matched the normal image or the traditional stereotypical image of what a girl should look like.

“And I was like, I’m not that, you know, I’m tomboyish and rebellious. I’m quite outspoken. And I kept sort of judging myself for it and comparing myself to other women.

“And then I realised it’s sort of like focusing on your own race in a race meeting or focusing on your own journey. I realised, you know, just because other people do it doesn’t mean you have to match them exactly.

“You know, I have my hair dyed blue for this reason, actually. I’ve got like blue highlights in my black hair. And it’s because I like it and because, you know, it’s one of the things that I’ve done because, yeah, it’s not very conventional, but I do it because it’s a sign of my individuality.

“But yeah, I think it’s great to see increasing representation in motorsport. At the same time, I’ve just got to be focused on not comparing myself to others and reminding myself that, okay, you can do it too, but you don’t have to be a hundred percent like a carbon copy of them.

“And just recognising that is enough, I think. Just recognising that, yeah, that’s enough.”

She’s paying that forward, proving to young women everywhere that you don’t need to ‘fit to the narrative’ to break the narrative entirely.

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Q. In an industry still working towards gender parity, what’s the subtlest barrier you’ve faced – not overt sexism, but the quiet assumptions – and how did you push through it?

Nida Anis: “I think I get a lot of questions about how I’m surviving or how I’m thriving in a ‘male-dominated’ industry, and my answer to these questions is always: why are you using the term ‘male dominated’? 

“The reason I ask this is because I know plenty of women, female engineering students especially, who are exceptionally talented, perhaps some even more so than myself. I look at their achievements and think, what have I been doing?

“They’re interested in motorsport, but I’ve seen female engineering students choose not to pursue a career in motorsport because they feel that motorsport is too ‘male-dominated’.

“I feel like part of the problem is actually continuing to refer to motorsport as ‘male-dominated’ when, in actual fact, in a general paddock, I’d say now the gender balance that I typically see is like a 70:30 split – roughly 70% men and 30% women.

“Granted, the majority of these women are in non-technical roles, and there’s nothing wrong with that, by the way.

“I want to say this as a disclaimer: it’s good to have more women in the paddock overall, regardless of whether they’re in technical or non-technical roles.

“I think there’s a big focus on pushing women into engineering, which is great, and I’m actually a very big supporter of that.

“But I don’t think it should come at the expense of saying women should do engineering instead of coordination or logistics work or a more managerial role, because the two can coexist.

“You can be a really good female team coordinator, and you can also have a really good female engineer. I think the two go hand in hand.

“The majority of these women are not in technical roles, but you still have a 70:30 split in the paddock, again, roughly 70% men and 30% women.

“I feel like the term ‘male-dominated’ sort of reinforces the idea that motorsport is 99% men, which to me doesn’t feel true.

“Yes, there are definitely a lot more men than women, but I try to avoid using the term ‘male-dominated’ as it’s just sort of an ‘oh, you’re a woman in a male-dominated industry’, and I keep hearing that narrative.

“It reinforces the idea that there’s just one woman in this industry that’s full of men, and that’s not necessarily true.

“I’ve met lots of great female engineers, lots of great female mechanics, lots of great female hospitality staff, lots of great female team coordinators, and so I loathe to use the term ‘male-dominated’.

“That being said, yes, I have faced challenges. But what I try to do is focus on what I can control.

“I’ve mentioned this earlier, but the biggest thing that I’ve learned in the past three years of doing motorsport is to focus on what can I control, what can I do, what factors are within my control, and how can I best use them to do the best that I can in a given situation.

“Sometimes, especially in environments where I might be new or where people might not know me, I try to just put my head down, focus on my work, and show through actions, not words, that I can do what I do. More often than not, people are very supportive.

“I’ve made some great friends, taken the time to get to know everyone within a team to gain that development and understanding, and it’s just about proving to other people that you can, not to prove people wrong, but to prove to yourself that you can.

“And when you do that, people will begin to realise that you are capable of doing things.

“But yes, I’m very loath to use the term ‘male-dominated’. I think that’s not an accurate representation of where motorsport is at the moment.

“It’s changing, it’s evolving, and there are definitely a lot more women in the paddock in general.

“To continually refer to it as ‘male-dominated’ is something that I feel just reinforces the same narrative, so you’ll get more female engineers, mechanics, or support staff thinking, ‘oh, this isn’t for me.’

“So just focusing on what I can control and focusing on my work has been the best way to prove to people that I can. I always try to show through actions and not words.”

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Breaking the status quo

In an upcoming exclusive feature, we’re going to delve deeper into Nida Anis’ story.

She is breaking the status quo, opening doors for future generations, and making a difference in the world with her unwavering commitment towards her life mantra and advice for others.

“You can do anything you set your mind to and you are more capable than you think you are.”

Stay tuned for our upcoming exclusive interview in an unfiltered raw conversation with her at Silverstone, where you’ll hear from the motorsport protégé herself.

From childhood stories to life as a motorsport solo traveller, we shall dive into every aspect of her journey as a woman paving the way for future generations in the motorsport industry.

She is Nida Anis, a rising force to watch and here to stay.

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