I’m calling bullshit on this one. For two reasons:

AFAIK there has never been a female chief mechanic on an F1 team. F1 is so starved of women in leading roles it would probably hit the news.

F1 cars are so vastly different from Road cars, I doubt it would even be of any help. Marc Priestly, a former McLaren F1 Mechanic, describes in hia autobiography how any time a relative asked him to look after his car he would tell them he doesn’t know shit about roadcars and how he has to bring hia car to an actual mechanic aswell.

Now it might be that OOP misremembered the actual role of the person or the racing series they worked in, and the person might just have had an interest im roadcars outside of their work.

Definitely if real bro misremembered. I’m an architectural technologist but people will still often say I’m an architect.

I don’t know why this Marc Priestly fellow would not understand the basics of working on a road car. They’re incredibly uncomplicated and if he couldn’t figure them out I’d be surprised(and maybe a little worried). Most likely is that it’s the same reason a lot of mechanics have shitty cars; they spend all day working vehicles and don’t have the time and energy to work on their own.

He probably would have been able to figure it out, he just didn’t put in the time. What Inwant to say is if you work on F1 cars doesn’t necessarily mean younknow how to work on road cars.

As someone who works on road cars because mechanics are expensive and I have the tools, I’d still amazed if someone didn’t understand them but did understand F1 cars. Maybe they don’t want to, like I said before, but they’re seriously not complicated for the most part. For a certain list of jobs I’ll take my car to a trusted mechanic but that’s usually because they have the tools and I don’t have the time, otherwise it’s pretty easy to just follow the instructions.

Another consideration is that expertise in a domain highlights ignorance. I’ve known experts who refuse to dabble outside their expertise because they’re keenly aware of how much they don’t know and feel they’d be doing a disservice to the requester if they agreed to help out. Better to leave it to the right experts.

That’s a certain kind of person. I’m not like that. I don’t mind breaking things so long as their mine or it’s agreed to up front. Some people are more anxious about these things though. I’d guess none of us know the fellow, so it’s all speculative anyway, but it’s possible this angle is the source of refusal.