This is the first part of the story of the graduate assessment process I went through to get into a Formula 1 Racing team.

The guys turned up at the fancy conference centre in their ill-fitting suits that had been owned since the limo ride at the high school graduation ball, accompanied by a freshly purchased ‘non-iron’ shirt and tie combo from the local high street fashion retailer. The girls turned up in a mixture of business skirts with a blouse or the brave few had gone for a power suit.

The event was an evening meal and overnight stay preceding a graduate assessment centre for a Formula 1 team, a small number of candidates had been picked to attend this final round of interviews after a number of grueling assessment exercises which had whittled down the 1500 applicants. The atmosphere was a mixture of excitement and nervousness with a large dose of unadulterated arrogance. These 15 individuals had succeeded at beating off the masses, in their minds they were already strutting down the pit lane soaking up the glamour and fame that F1 is renowned for. These individuals were the cream of the crop, the hotshots, they wouldn’t look out of place as candidates of ‘The Apprentice’, you all know the sort, the ones that had focused on this exact job since applying to go to university years ago.

How do I know all of this? Because the 16^th individual was me, granted, I was wearing a particularly ill-fitting suit with a shirt and tie combo straight out of a retailer synonymous with offering students a 10% discount. Only the highest grade of non-iron polyester blend would have sufficed for me. But the difference with me was that I had no idea how I had managed to get this far, not only because of the somewhat temperamental nature of my 1991 VW Polo (aka The Silver Fox) which amazingly completed the 200 mile trip without incident, but also because I wasn’t top of any of my classes. I had spent more time playing sport and working (drinking) in the campus bar than I had done studying in the library. In fact I was even a member of an infamous (at least university-wide) drinking club which was founded during my first year but, for legal reasons, I took absolutely no part in founding…none whatsoever! Initiation into the club involved downing a bottle of wine (always go for a room temperature Sauvignon Blanc if you’re wondering), a brisk run around the quad followed by 10 pints in the campus bar.

I’ll briefly tell you about my application process to give you a flavour of why I thought I didn’t quite belong in this arena. Picture the scene, it was one of the rare occasions I visited the library, a global email had been sent to my university address from the campus work placement officer, advertising a graduate scheme at a prestigious Formula 1 team. At the time I was half way through my final year of an engineering degree, with no idea what I wanted to do after I finished. I filled in the attached application form there and then and promptly attached the form to the reply, pressed send and then promptly forgot all about it, mainly because I was late for rugby training.

During university, for extra income I would do the odd day here and there for an education company where I would go and deliver workshops at schools all over the country. We used to use sports gadgets and exercise machines to teach lessons in Engineering, Maths, Science as well as teaching team building skills, we usually got very little information on what each school wanted so it was always a test of your initiative when you turned up and had to somehow link a rowing machine to Geography or something equally as ridiculous.

About six weeks after hitting send, I got a phone call whilst working at a school from a recruitment team employed by the F1 team, it took me a while to realise what had happened, they must have misread my application and had mistakenly invited me to the first stage of the assessment process, a half day session with a series of aptitude tests and a team building exercise. When I turned up to the session I had resigned myself to the fact that I was there to make up numbers and as a result I was going to try and enjoy myself. Imagine my disbelief as someone started to explain the rules of the team building exercise, it couldn’t have been the exact same exercise that I myself had been teaching the previous day to a group of 15 year old students in Yorkshire, surely that would have been unfair to the other hotshot applicants, yet here was the facilitator of the session regurgitating my exact instructions from the day before. I had to quickly remove the wry smile that had appeared on my face.

It was at this point that I tried something new; I already knew the solution to the age old issue of building the tallest tower out of nothing but sheets of paper and a glue stick, so instead I tried to think of ways to influence the rest of the hotshots without coming across as a pompous know-it-all. The beauty of setting an engineering task to a bunch of engineers is that they are so focused on the result that the process in reaching it is often overlooked. This was no exception, the stronger characters bullied and jockeyed their way into prime position with loud voices, using sentences starting with “When I’ve done this before…” and “The best way to do this is…”

There were times during the exercise that I cringed, but remembering I was there to enjoy myself, I pretended that I was with the group of school children from the day before and tailored my language as if I was ‘teaching’ the rest of the candidates. I used sentences that started with “That’s a good idea, but have you thought about…” and “If we use that solution do we think it might cause this issue…” It started to click in my mind that the assessors weren’t looking for the most highly qualified candidate, of course they were searching for a base level of competence, which in F1 was pretty high, but they were also looking for personalities that they could see would fit well into an existing high performing team.

Was that brief enough? Probably not but hey, what are ya gonna do? Still awake?  Good…I’ll continue because building paper towers got me through to the fancy conference centre for the final round of the assessment centre.

The evening consisted of a 3 course meal with the senior management of the F1 team, I’d love to say that the conversation was free flowing and full of intelligent insight, but we all know I’d be lying. It was of course a whole lot of posturing for attention, a room full of that annoying eager kid in your class at junior school with their arm up trying to answer the teacher’s question “Me, me, me, oh please, ME, ME!” I have to admit it was a strange environment, one I’m glad I haven’t had to experience since, on the one hand everyone is desperately trying to be pleasant to everyone else but on the other hand, knowing full well you are competing with every single one of them.

As the meal drew to a close, it became clear that a few of the candidates were taking full advantage of the complimentary bar, purely to calm the nerves of course, and who would blame them, I mean we were all students at the time so who is going to pass up this sort of opportunity, maybe it was a test of social skills. We were told that nothing that evening was part of the assessment but let me tell you now, if you are ever in that situation, you are continuously being assessed, in this case informally.

So what is the socially acceptable level of alcoholism in a situation like this I hear you ask? Well on this occasion I used a little trick my dad once told me, “Son, if you don’t want to get too slaughtered, stick to bottles of Bud…no one can see how fast you’re drinking so you can nurse a few all night.” I have to admit, the old man had a point, so it was with great restraint that I watched much of the group sink a fair number of pints whilst listening to  claims of grandeur getting increasingly outlandish. I have used the bottled lager technique on a number of work/social events to good effect but I’ll talk about some of those at a later date.

That’s probably enough writing from me for one sitting…my fingers are beginning to ache. I will talk about what happened the following day soon…I promise.