this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2025
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I'm calling bullshit on this one. For two reasons:
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.
You mean people would make things up on the internet for clout?! Clutch my pearls!
You know what....
I don't even think you actually have any pearls!
Yeah, I brought up #1 last time this was posted.
As for #2, mechanics who get into F1 teams get in because they're elite mechanics. And, you don't become an elite mechanic without getting your hands dirty on a normal consumer-grade ICE car. Now, it's true that modern consumer-grade cars have lots of electronic systems that require special diagnostic tools. But it would be ridiculous to suggest that an F1 mechanic couldn't handle most of the standard maintenance tasks.
Now, what I could imagine is that an F1 mechanic might not want to spend their free time working on his own, or a relative's car. Part of that is not wanting to do in your free time what you do for work. Part of it is doing work for free. But, I imagine a big part of it is the pain of working on a badly put together piece of crap. A F1 car is a work of art. The engines only last about 8 races, which is less than 24 hours of running. An F1 engine isn't going to have any real buildup of gunk. Any loose parts will have been loosened from 2 hours of hard racing, not 5 years of sloppy maintenance. There will be massive amounts of documentation on every part in an F1 car, with engineers on call if you ever have questions. Working on a relative's car is probably like working on an old POS computer with an outdated OS with all kinds of pop-ups, etc.
OTOH, I imagine a lot of the F1 cars are sometimes a pain in the ass to work on. Everything is designed around performance, and nothing is designed around ease of maintenance. There are probably a lot more sharp edges you can cut yourself on, nothing that's easy to access like a dip stick or a washer fluid port. Plus, every time you're working on one it's with a big team in a high-stress environment. So, I would bet that sometimes an F1 mechanic would want to just slowly work on their own car at their own pace while listening to music or an audio book or something, rather than having the chief mechanic demanding updates etc.
So, in the end, I bet most F1 mechanics can fix most of the issues with their own cars or with relative's cars, but mostly they don't want to. They probably do fiddle around with their own cars sometimes when it's fun. But, if it feels too much like work, or it's frustrating, they'll just take it to a "normie" mechanic so they can enjoy their time away from the track.
Maybe he just meant mechanic in general? There have been several woman mechanics in F1
Thank you
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.
For sure, when it comes to other people’s stuff at least. I’m at a point where I’m about to heavily modify a guitar into a different instrument but for other people I’ll only do very simple jobs. Still, I do it all on my own stuff.
We don’t know how to setup a printer. We know how to google how to setup a printer. Big difference.
Being able to look something up is a skill.
There was a very brief window of time where we had very powerful tools that, to some of us, made that task very easy. That time I think is passing.
I mean, googling how to set up a printer is step 1 to setting up a printer.
Compared to 90% of people, you're ahead of the curve.
That bit about Marc Priestly should be familiar to anyone who has studied or worked in any job remotely related to computer science. “Oh you’re a computer scientist? Can you fix my printer?”
To be fair, printers are a bad example. They're fundamentally broken and no one can fix them.
At this point, they're either you plug them in and they work, or you're in for a fight.
Oh I know all about that. The printer we have at work seems to have a technician coming in to fix it every week!