“You don’t have to be a boy to like fast cars”

“I’m an engineer, a problem-solver – basically I fix things,” says Ella as she speaks to MOTOR exclusively from McLaren’s HQ in Woking, UK.

“I grew up with two brothers and a dad who had a big impact on me in terms of how I felt about cars, as well as my understanding of how things are put together.

“My dad left school when he was 16 and he was what I would call a big ‘tinkerer’ – he took stuff apart and owned a lot of cars – and though I wasn’t immediately drawn to them, I was fascinated by what he was doing and it kind of instilled a really logical thought process in me.

“I would always ask so many questions, like: ‘why is that bit there?’ My mum, the poor thing, would be trying to prep for dinner and there would be a car part being passed around at the table!”

It was at school though that Ella says her passion for science really shone through. She loved chemistry and with the help of her dad as her inspiration, quickly got on a trajectory which has helped her to get where she is today.

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“I was fortunate enough that, at a young age thanks to my dad, I understood what it meant to be an engineer. Most of the time kids aren’t taught what an engineer is – you go to school and study science and then suddenly when you’re picking a degree you think: ‘Engineering? I don’t even know what that is.’

“I loved maths and physics, looking under microscopes at molecules and how they all fitted together. The fact I could look at something so small, it could be found in everything and you could make little changes that would affect the entire way a material looks and feels – it’s just incredible.”

During her four-year masters degree at The University of Manchester in the UK, Ella says she had the opportunity to undertake an industrial placement for 12 months – enter McLaren.

“At the time I had McLaren P1 poster on my bedroom wall – it’s just one of those cars I’d watched on Top Gear and thought it was really sexy and glamorous. So when I was writing all my applications for this placement I thought: ‘Why not McLaren?’

“I wrote a letter and sent in my cv, but unfortunately there wasn’t an opening for a materials engineer because the company didn’t really employ them at that point, it was more mechanical and automotive engineering-focused. But five months later I was suddenly invited for an interview.

“As a 19-year-old girl I was overwhelmed by everything, but they were very impressed with my car knowledge and decided to take a chance on me and gave me the 12 month placement.

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“I just loved McLaren, and as a young girl who really loved the glamorous side of supercars and what science can do in this environment, it just blew my mind. I saw an opportunity that McLaren was a very young car company and mainly built on mechanical engineers and automotive engineers, and there was an area missing.

“For instance, McLaren considered itself like the godfather of carbon fibre – having brought it to the roads with the likes of the old F1 road car, but it didn’t really have a dedicated person who understood it or could translate it to other engineering divisions in the company.

"During my placement I proved that I understood it and realised, much like any car company, that it had issues focused around material science. So I came up with one particular issue they were battling with and I said: 'Please if I take this back as a thesis topic and find a solution, can you give me job security?’ And they said yes and when I did it they created the materials engineering department just for me.

“It was quite a stressful year, but ever since I came back for the last three years I have been implementing those solutions and it has been so rewarding, I have been really lucky.”

A department of one, Ella works closely with the other engineering teams at McLaren and feeds into the design and product development processes on a daily basis.

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“My colleagues in the design studio will come to me when they are first speccing materials and ask, for example, if they need to make something two kilograms lighter, what material should they go for? Or following the technology roadmap, what kinds of materials should they be putting in cars in two to three years’ time?

“Then I also work on all stages of product development – right the way through to the customer cars in the field where they are having material issues. For instance, when cars are being sent to all different parts of the world, we need to know that the paint has the same colour lacquer resistance in Latvia as it does in Dubai – and that’s where my job comes in.

“I’m very fortunate that even though yes, I am a one-man-band (so to speak) and very busy, I get to touch the product at every stage of its development and that is quite rare here.”

Splitting her time between the lab doing experiments on the likes of development car components from the test track, technical reviews with other teams about issues such as the introduction of a new coating, and occasionally getting to drive the cars to replicate real world issues under a microscope – there’s never a dull moment.

Ella’s work can take her anywhere from a fuchsia pink 720S to a GT or all-carbon 765LT – but her absolute favourite car to work on was the Speedtail.

“The variety of my job is something I’m just obsessed with, and I’m very fortunate to be working on so many different things.

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“The first project I saw from start to finish was the 720S, so that will always have a special place in my heart. I still think the car is absolutely beautiful, it handles so well and is generally just a lovely all round car.

“The GT was great. It was just so different. We produce really fast cars on a daily, but this one had a distinctive flair. But my all time favourite has to be the Speedtail – it’s so flamboyant, so out there.

“The materials we used were just unbelievable, even the front badges were platinum gold and worth £10,000 pounds and there’s me in the lab thinking: ‘Ok, I have to chemically test a £10,000 badge, better be careful!’ It was a really surreal experience. We also used gold-plated heat shields and exhausts – I was working with the best of the best materials, I don’t think I’d get that anywhere else.

“Then there’s the challenges posed by electrification. People can get really funny about it when we talk about performance cars, but I think it is a really exciting turn of events in the industry.

“Already just working on the Artura, our high-performance hybrid, there are different lightweighting challenges – when you start introducing battery systems you’ve got to make a lightweight car even lighter. You’ve got to think out of the box.

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“I work really closely with the electronics team looking at grounding parts and how we’ve got to protect the battery and things like that. This is something I’ve never even touched upon before – but it's a very cool excuse for us to use some very exciting materials.”

Electrification isn’t the only challenge Ella is facing though, every day she’s tested in one very obvious way – proving herself in an overwhelmingly male industry.

“I went to an all girls school, so I actually didn’t know there was gender disparity in STEM until I got into my degree at uni and thought: ‘Oh gosh, there aren’t many girls here!’ I remember going into the building that housed all our labs, and the only toilet for a girl was on ground floor and we were on the 8th or 9th floor, so I had to go back to the ground every time. It’s something we all had bit of a laugh about. By the time I had finished my degree we’d moved to different building where there were more toilets, but it was something I had to be vocal about.

“Materials science is relatively ok in terms of gender equality, around 25-30 per cent of my classmates on that course were female, but when I moved into automotive and began working for McLaren it was completely different – there aren’t many women in this industry. Automotive is significantly behind other industries and has a way to catch up.

“I don’t know if it’s the association of men and cars, or whether if it’s that performance cars have a ‘masculine' energy, but I think electrification might change that and it might appeal to a greater audience. In the last four years there has been a significant improvement in the number of women coming into product development and engineering, and that’s really cool – but it is going to take time to change.

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Picture: McLaren Speedtail

“Cars are for everyone, not just for boys. If you want a diverse product you’ve got to have a diverse workforce, and to do that you need to expand the talent pool.”

But where some might see barriers in being a woman, Ella sees opportunities. As a STEM ambassador for McLaren, she gives talks at schools about her work – encouraging them and advising on how to get into the industry – and in 2020 won the Institute of Engineering and Technology’s Young Woman Engineer of the Year award.

“I often speak to young girls who want to get into this industry and they always ask what it’s like for women and I see it as my role to teach them that it isn’t always a bad thing.

“When I was younger and said I wanted to be an engineer so many people said: ‘Oh Ella, you don’t want to wear a boiler-suit every day or work in a garage for the rest of your life!’ There are heavy stigmas and stereotypes associated with engineering, but we have to change the narrative and not phrase it as a negative.

“You probably will find yourself being the only woman in the room, but why not let that motivate you? When I came here [to McLaren] I was so embarrassed to be female, especially when they’d address the room it would be ‘chaps’, ‘lads’ etc. But if you come in with the mindset that you’re going to prove to all of them you can do the job just as well or even better, or there’s spotlight on you so you’re going to use it – I think does wonders.

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“It is challenging, especially being a female engineer, fresh out of uni and the only materials scientist trying to tell people who have been doing the same thing, the same way for a long time why they should listen to you and change the materials they’re using – but science is science. I just went back with the data and told them how much we could save, and how much faster we could go and built my reputation based on data.

“I like to prove people wrong. I might not know all the ins and outs of a turbo for instance, so I’m just going to do what I do best. In the beginning I was a really tough, masculine version of myself and it wasn’t natural to me at all. I thought I had to be aggressive, non-emotional and be ruthless, but obviously people could see straight through that and I quickly learnt it wasn’t the only way to do things. You don’t have to change for anyone – embrace your individuality and be yourself.”

McLaren’s only female materials engineer, Ella Podmore, 25, lives in London, but originally hails from Oxford, UK.