Jennifer Isbell, Project Manager for National Field Service, and Roy Rodriguez, Level 3 Field Technician, stand by the Atlassian Williams Racing FW47 car. Rodriguez grew up watching motorsports and Isbell competed in drag racing, so the Day in the Life weekend put them back in familiar territory for a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
Jennifer Isbell, Project Manager for National Field Service at Komatsu, is used to life in the fast lane: She, her kids and her ex-husband all participated in drag racing at one point. The family named their team Sunken Treasure Racing, naming themselves after a Disneyland ride. She would reach speeds of around 108 miles per hour (173 km/h) on the track.
“It’s just a giggling feeling, a butterfly feeling, especially during qualifying races,” she says. “It’s intense, fast and focused.”
At the Formula 1 Crypto.com Miami Grand Prix 2025, Isbell got to step back into the racing world, if briefly, for the Day in the Life program, an opportunity for Komatsu employees to shadow the Atlassian Williams Racing pit crew team during the Friday practice races before a big race. Practices involve a series of drills and course runs, both for the race drivers Alex Albon and Carlos Sainz and for the 20+ person pit stop crew and a control booth team of about as many people.
It’s the last run for ensuring the car is ready for qualifying the next day, fine tuning it mechanically, but also practicing the coordination of a team where a tire change needs to happen in less than three seconds.
Speeds in Formula 1 are more than twice as fast as drag racing, and races go laps and laps instead of in heats.
“We were literally two feet away from the pit crew — we were really close to watching all of this, and you didn’t feel like you were out of place,” Isbell says. “It was really cool talking to everybody.”
Isbell was joined by colleague Roy Rodriguez, a Level 3 Field Technician. Rodriguez grew up watching F1 and remembered the Williams team from the 1990s, an era where Komatsu was a technical partner. Participating in Day in the Life was a time for Rodriguez to play catchup. He said he did an “extensive amount of research” prior to his trip to Miami.
“It was an eye-opener to see how involved everything is and how much the technology has advanced from the ‘90s all the way up to now with racing,” he says.
Day in the Life is a chance few Komatsu personnel get. It takes place at just eight out of 24 races worldwide. Only two employees per race are chosen to participate.
“It’s an experience you can’t really ask anybody else what it’s like, because not many people have done it,” Isbell says. When Rodriguez was selected, he says, “I was kind of trembling. My mind was blown, like, I got selected for this? Are you serious? I was super excited for it and thankful for the opportunity.”
After their supervisors informed them that they’d been selected, Isbell and Rodriguez did what research they could. But it could only go part of the way in preparing them for this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
“My expectations were not even close to what I experienced,” Rodriguez says. “My mind was blown. The whole atmosphere, the whole environment. Everyone is just full-bore going but still taking the time to meet with you. It was an amazing experience.
If I ever got the chance to do it again with Komatsu, I would 100% sign up for it.”
Isbell and Rodriguez monitor data coming in from the Atlassian Williams Racing car. The influx of machine data was one of the most familiar parts to both technicians, who’s day-to-day at Komatsu involves monitoring machine health and other factors.
What struck both Isbell and Rodriguez about the experience was the amount of data taken in during the practice, similar to their work at Komatsu. Machine telemetry and health information is constantly flowing in.
Despite their vast differences in weight and technical requirements, it felt to Rodriguez a bit like being out in the field. “With haul trucks, we do a lot of data collection — seeing if our scales are correct, if our tire pressure is correct with the suspensions, seeing if we need to tune something up slightly or bring it back down,” he says. “A lot of our pressure adjustments and everything are super fine-tuned, and I saw a lot of similarities with the Atlassian Williams Racing team after they collected all their data.”
The experience even got a little hands-on. They were able to move the car into the garage during practice, in addition to observing the delicate choreography of a motorsport technical team.
While shadowing the technicians only took place the Friday of that weekend, both stuck around for the actual Grand Prix that Sunday. The race proved to be a significant success for the Atlassian Williams Racing team, with Alex Albon securing a P5 finish and Carlos Sainz taking P9, earning the team a notable 12 points.
“The first thing I said to Roy was, ‘Why are there so many people here?,’ because we were spoiled on Friday, and it was almost a relaxed situation unless you needed to get somewhere,” Isbell says. “When you get into the regular grandstands, it’s more hustle and muscle. It’s more stressful outside of the paddock than inside it.”
They found that they also wished they had the headsets to tune in to the movements of the race, to get the behind-the-scenes play-by-play.
“The bigger race blew my mind … how everything’s coordinated between the team,” Rodriguez says. He kept one eye on the race, one glued to a radio with the race’s announcers, watching how teams might team up against another competitor.
“You can hear certain teams trying to stick with each other so they could bully other cars around, so they’re playing offense and defense at the same time, and to hear that and see it live at the exact same time was super intriguing,” he says.
At the end of the experience, both Day in the Life participants learned quite a few things from their time with the Atlassian Williams Racing team. For Isbell, some of it was the importance of the sponsors. Komatsu is the Principal Partner of Atlassian Williams Racing, a partnership that brings into focus the shared values between the company and the racing team, including fostering the next generation of talent and working collaboratively.
“It’s like two parts of racing is you’ve got fans and then you’ve got sponsors, and the racing can’t be successful without either one of them, but the role that sponsorship plays is everything,” Isbell says.
And Rodriguez got to see the spirit of collaboration up-close with the Atlassian Williams Racing team. “Instead of being a team, you could tell they are way more family-oriented. They all treat each other with respect. They all watch over each other, help each other out nonstop,” he says, even seeing the bond extend to the drivers coordinating with the mechanical and engineering team. “You could tell everyone’s just a tight-knit family. I’m stuck on these big projects for long periods of time, and we have the exact same attitude,” he says. “Seeing that coming from a racing environment, being like a jobsite … it was amazing.” This underlines the way that Komatsu and Atlassian Williams Racing fit together culturally, embodying similar ethos — ambition, perseverance, collaboration and authenticity. It left Isbell and Rodriguez excited for the rest of the F1 season — and in watching the partnership flourish in years to come.
