M-Sport Member Spotlight​

Amie Birkett

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The Travel Office is an important department within the M-Sport team, and our WRC Project Manager Amie Birkett plays a crucial role in ensuring that logistics run smoothly, whether at home or at a rally. Below we take a closer look at Amie's experience in the Travel Office and her favourite aspects of the job as well as her new role.

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What does your role as a Travel Office Assistant entail? What is your normal day-to-day role?

In the Travel Office we book flights, accommodation, transfers and car hire for all the WRC rallies which is the biggest task. Then we have a variety of other smaller rallies and events such as BRC, BTCC, GT3, tests and customer requests to name a few. My day to day role mainly involves booking hire cars for WRC, booking accommodation for trial’s and new starters, booking travel for contractors coming to Dovenby and my biggest project is coordinating the BRC rounds which includes putting entries in, booking all travel for staff and coordinating the rally logistics with the help of staff from across departments.

 

What skills do you need and what’s involved in your role?

For my role you need a lot of organisation skills as there are so many different elements to work on across a variety of different projects. With working across different projects at the same time you have to be able to prioritise tasks based on who needs what information when, sometimes we get last minute requests which may require putting everything on hold, so I do try and work ahead of deadlines where possible to be able to pick up urgent requests quickly. Communication is another big skill to have, I work with a lot of different colleagues within the company, so I have to be able to give them all of the information they need for them to be able to give me the correct amount of staffing.

 

How did you come to work here? What were you up to before this role and has it always been in travel?

Before I came to M-Sport, I worked at the University of Central Lancashire in Preston as an Events Coordinator, in that role I organised large scale events within the University such as Graduation ceremonies, Open Days and the Lancashire Science Festival. Prior to that I have always worked in corporate events across the UK, which have all had elements of travel be that getting staff to and from events in the UK and across Europe and also shipping out event equipment across the UK and Europe.

I wanted a change from corporate events, I have seen it all and I felt at a standstill, so applied for the role at M-Sport as it would be a new learning experience for me. I had never worked in motorsport before and I had no knowledge of rallying whatsoever, so I knew I would be taking a big challenge if I got the role and I am really pleased I did. One thing I have enjoyed is learning a lot, and going out and working on the events makes it easier to learn as I see it happen in real time.

 

You have been attending the BRC rallies, how has that been?

I really enjoy working on the BRC rallies! When Rich came to our office to ask who would like to work on BRC, I didn’t hesitate in saying yes, although I probably slightly underestimated how much work it would involve, but I don’t regret it and being able to coordinate the travel alongside the sporting elements means that I have full vision of what happens. The team that work with me on BRC have been extremely helpful and welcoming, I couldn’t ask for a better team to work with, we have such a laugh when we go to the rallies, Fella and I have an ongoing battle with tortilla wraps! We obviously do a lot of hard work as well, but we do have fun at the same time, which is important when your working so closely with the same people all weekend.

 

You attended your first WRC Rally in Croatia, how did you find that and what were you doing? Would you want to do every WRC event in the future?

WRC Croatia was great! I knew it was going to be very different to BRC in terms of size and intensity, but I do thrive in fast paced environments, so it was great for me to be able to go out there to learn what happens, who does what and how our work in the office works on the ground.

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I got involved in a variety of different tasks and I went to see a lot of different things to see how it all operates. I went to media interviews with drivers, a remote tyre fitting zone and re-group out on the coast, and I helped Georgina with crew jobs as well. My job in the office doesn’t stop, so I still worked on things that I would in the office, and I also worked with my colleague Charles in making changes to travel arrangements whilst at the rally. We needed to get a hire van changed on event, which meant we had to find a new one, we needed to swap some transfers around for when the team where returning home etc, so it was good to see how our operations in the travel office can change on event and what happens in that situation.

It was also nice to be able to go out some nights and explore the city and go for food, it didn’t happen too often as the days at the Service Park usually start early and finish late and I favoured sleep over exploring! But when I had the time, I went out for dinner and saw Zagreb outside of the Service Park.

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I definitely wouldn’t say no to going to other WRC events, but this would depend on office workloads, who else is out of the office and how it aligns with BRC rallies as well, I am not quite ready to give up BRC yet as I do enjoy working on that project and I want to be able to keep improving on my work within BRC and get my knowledge fully up to scratch. But I would never say never.

 

What is your favourite part about your job?

The variety. I don’t enjoy being in a role where everyday is the same and you do the same tasks, which is partly why I left my job prior to this. So coming into this role, people may think we just book travel for staff going out to WRC but there is a lot more to it than that, and being able to actually work on rallies makes it so much more exciting and I can see how our work transpires into real life and see where things can be improved. There is definitely a lot of variety in the travel office, one day I could be booking the Premier Inn at Cockermouth and then be pulled onto a customer request to fly an engineer out to Barbados, so it definitely keeps me on my toes.

 

Do you have any hobbies outside of work?

I travel a lot, although I have slowed down a bit this year, last year I went on 12 holidays, of which 2 were to Portugal as that is my favourite place to go. I also like to make the most of being back home now and going out into the Lake District with friends on walks or on the boat. I quite often go to my friends farm in Caldbeck and I have been helping her with lambing, quite an experience to say the least!

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