Born in Denizli, 35-year-old Oltan İzmirli graduated from METU Mechanical Engineering Department in 2007 after Science High School. He started his career abroad and moved to England after living in Austria for 7 years. He is currently working in Formula 1, which he has dreamed of since his childhood. 6 months ago, İzmirli started to work as a design engineer in the team of Williams, one of the F1 teams.
Oltan İzmirli, who has always dreamed of working in Formula 1 since 2000, when he first started watching Formula 1, at the age of 15, said, “I knew that in order to realize this dream, I had to go to a good high school first and then to a good university. For this reason, I first won Denizli Erbakır Science High School and then METU Mechanical Engineering. Apart from that, I constantly followed the technical developments in Formula 1, read every resource I could find and tried to be informed about the technologies in my field.”
THERE ARE VERY STRICT TESTS
İzmirli describes his role in the Williams team as follows: “A Formula 1 team has two main teams, the racing team and the factory team. I work as a composite design engineer in the factory part of this. My team is designing the monocoque chassis (single body) of the vehicle. The chassis can be thought of as the most complex composite structure in the vehicle, the main skeleton of the vehicle. It undergoes rigorous tests as it needs to protect the pilot in the event of an accident. Since a heavy chassis will cost us lap time, my team’s main goal is to both design a chassis that is as light as possible and pass safety tests. Since everything in the vehicle is somehow connected to the chassis, we also need to be in constant communication with the other design teams.”
