In F1 The Movie, Kerry Condon’s Kate wants to prove people wrong. She tells daredevil racer Sonny Hayes (Brad Pitt) as much. There’s her ex-husband who’s, well, her ex because he didn’t believe in her skills or ambitions. There’s also the former boss at a prestigious job who likely thought a woman couldn’t cut it as an engineer. And then there’s every single person she’s crossed paths with in the male-dominated world of Formula 1 racing who may not have known what to make of a woman working as the technical director for a team. But that desire—as strong as it may be—isn’t the only thing driving Kate. 

“It’s a general thing in terms of wanting to be successful in her career. I think anyone can relate to that. She has a winner’s attitude, and that’s kind of what the sport is about—winning is her way to success,” Condon tells ELLE Canada. “But I don’t think Kate has a chip on her shoulder to prove everyone wrong. Collectively, it’s a team; it’s not just her against the world.” 

Finding a way to win is the only thing on Kate’s mind in F1 The Movie, which is in theatres on June 27 and follows once-promising racer Sonny who returns to Formula 1 as a last ditch effort to save his friend’s (Javier Bardem) failing team, APXGP, by racing alongside prodigious rookie Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris). As technical director, Kate is responsible for designing and setting up APXGP’s car, so, when we meet her, she’s taking the fact that the team hasn’t notched a single point in two and a half seasons quite personally. 

She’s also struggling figuring out how to communicate with Joshua. F1 drivers are supposed to note their preferences and areas that the car can improve to their technical director, but as a rookie, the young racer has yet to figure out how to efficiently pinpoint and verbalize those nuances. So when Sonny—a rogue has-been decades older than the rest of his competition—arrives, she thinks things have gone from bad to worse. But when he quickly identifies something Kate can do to improve the car, it’s like you can see the creative spark return in her eyes. And as the two grow closer (both professionally and personally), it becomes easy to see why Kate is the perfect technical director for APXGP. 

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“To get to that level you have to be extremely bright and you have to be extremely qualified,” says Condon, who you’ll also recognize from her Oscar-nominated turn in The Banshees of Inisherin. “Kate is extremely ambitious, determined and driven. Getting to F1 isn’t enough. She wants to win the championship with the car and the team that she’s with.” 

How do embody that winning mindset was something Condon says she picked up by talking to women who actually work in F1, like Bernadette “Bernie” Collins, an Irish strategy analyst for Sky Sports and F1TV who previously worked on the Aston Martin team, and Ruth Buscombe, a British strategy engineer turned TV presenter. Condon met with the women to learn as much as she could about the sport—things like technical details Kate would know like the back of her hand, what she would jot down in her notebook and where she’d sit on the pit wall—but also learned a lot about how to inhibit the world from them. While in both F1 The Movie and our real world, the sport is predominantly male on and off the track (though this is slowly changing), the film’s script does not go out of its way to emphasize Kate’s gender in relation to her job. Kate is there because she’s clever and talented, and being one of the few women in a field is nothing new to her. According to Condon, the same is true for women like Collins and Buscombe. 

Warner Bros. Pictures / Apple Original Films

“They were very normal about it. They were like, ‘We just did engineering in college and that was mostly men, so [F1] is no different,” the Irish actress says. “They don’t really see themselves as the only female. They just pivoted into this world and became part of a team—they’re not separate or different. They do their jobs collectively.” 

Still, while being a woman in F1 isn’t a defining trait for Kate, it isn’t lost on Condon that playing a role as crucial to a team like technical director in a big, splashy movie could have a huge impact on any young girl or woman watching—whether they love F1 or know nothing about the it. “Hopefully, any girl who has a natural talent in maths or physics and has an interest in engineering [will see this] and could think that the sport is a possibility for them,” she says. “It’s a really unique job where you get to travel the world for, like, 10 months of the year with a team that’s like a family. Hopefully, it will inspire them to think about F1 as a possible career move.”