Sósanna Ní Dhubháin attending French Grand Prix as Aston Martin’s Reliability Engineer

Sósanna Ní Dhubháin has confirmed that she will attend the French Grand Prix marking her first appearance as an engineer at a Formula One Grand Prix.

The Tyrone native who has strong West Kerry roots, works as a Senior Composite Designer at Aston Martin Cognizant F1 Team.

She has attended various test sessions with the team but the June 18 Grand Prix will her first time attending a Grand Prix as a member of the official backup team.

“Very excited and extremely petrified at the same time to be travelling to my 1st race with Aston Martin F1 Team as reliability engineer at the French GP,” she said in a social media post this week.

She confirmed the news shortly after the chaotic Azerbaijan Grand Prix where team driver and former World Champion Sebastien Vettel took a deserved second place – the best result so far this season for the Aston Martin Team.

“It was very hard to watch not knowing which way it would go but very thankful the car made it to the chequered flag in one piece,” she said “The team did a great job today with the strategy and pit stops. It’s a very well-deserved result for all the hard work everyone back at Silverstone has put in over this year. I am very excited to be going to the next GP in France, as the team’s reliability engineer. Hopefully, next time around we will have two cars finishing and an even better result.”

• The French Grand Prix is traditionally a one-stop race, partly due to low degradation but also because of the heavy time-loss in the pits. Due to a pitlane speed-limit of 60km/h, drivers will lose roughly 24 seconds to a stop, which is three seconds more than last time out in Baku, and 20s at Monaco. 
   
• Another reason that the race is likely to be a one-stopper is due to the Pirelli compounds. The Italian manufacturer is bringing its mid-range C2, C3 and C4 tyres to France. It’s one step harder than the last two Grands Prix (Monaco and Baku), and the lack of tyre degradation means the quickest race strategy is a single stop. 
   
• There were just 29 overtakes following the first lap of the 2019 French Grand Prix, which was below the average for dry-weather races that year. With cars so evenly matched, little degradation and historically few race-defining interruptions (2018 had a four-lap Safety Car at the start and a late Virtual Safety Car), passing is difficult.