Growing up on an Outer Hebrides farm put Isla Mackenzie in pole position for a career in Formula 1 motorsport. Here, she speaks about her incredible journey to the starting grid and the lessons learned that continue to keep her firing on all cylinders…
One of Isla Mackenzie’s earliest memories is “tinkering with grandpa” on some broken piece of machinery on the family’s dairy farm on the Isle of Lewis. She started off driving a child’s size quad bike and soon graduated to the real thing, along with tractors. At a young age she was whizzing around the fields in a pick-up.
“All farm kids are resilient, hardy and hardworking,” says Isla, adding how lucky she was to have such an outdoorsy upbringing. As she got older, the tinkering notched up a level to swapping engines around, always with the aim of producing as much power as possible. Although she eventually went on to study Motorsport Design Engineering in Glasgow, Isla followed a more traditional pathway to start with.
“Because I was from a farm and knew about animals, I started out doing zoology at Aberdeen but I only lasted three months,” recalls Isla.
“Expectations back then, with me coming from a rural area, were traditional. In some ways it was a great relief to finally say that it wasn’t for me and I went to the local college to do engineering, which is what my brother had done. I was the only girl in the class and switched in the second year to the motorsport course at Glasgow.”
Isla and her two dogs
While at university Isla continued to swap her spanners for high-octane stints behind the steering wheel, racing drift cars. She secured her first job in Formula 1 with Williams in 2017 and worked in their Research & Development department, testing and developing the cars and their individual components. She then moved to Mercedes High Performance Powertrains where she tested and developed the Formula 1 power units before moving to the main Mercedes-AMG PETRONAS Formula 1 team in Brackley, Northamptonshire, where she now works perfecting parts for the cars that Lewis Hamilton and George Russell drive at Grand Prix races around the world.
Last year Isla’s dream to be a professional racing driver was followed in a BBC documentary called Fast Track to Glory, which showed her moving through the ranks from karts to single seaters with IMC Motorsports.
SEEDS FOR SUCCESS SOWN BACK ON THE FARM
There have been – and continue to be – plenty of barriers along the way and 30-year-old Isla is convinced the seeds of her drive to succeed were sown back at home on the farm.
“There is no mollycoddling on a farm, whatever goes wrong you have to get up and get on with the jobs,” recalls Isla. “100% that farming background has helped me on difficult days. Grandpa would be in the house to wake us up if we missed getting up for our turn to do the 4am start for the milk run.”
FARMSTRONG SCOTLAND
However, Isla is the first to admit that there are occasions when hard work and determination simply aren’t enough, which is why she took her foot off the throttle long enough to be interviewed for the Farmstrong Scotland podcast, BletherTogether.
In it, she confides in Sarah Stephen – host of the series of interviews in support of the Farmstrong wellbeing movement, where people from the agricultural community share their stories – that worries about the financial side of her dream to race cars has got her feeling down in the past.
“I really admire the work that Farmstrong is doing, and it was a pleasure to speak to Sarah for the podcast,” says Isla. “Interestingly enough, I was on holiday with my mum in Anglesey when we did the interview and it was during the mandatory two-week summer break that all Formula 1 teams must observe.”
This article extract was taken from the November 2024 edition of The Country Smallholder. To read the article in full, you can buy the issue here.
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