From F1 To Supercars

Sam Michael served his apprenticeship under Mark Larkham and spent 21 years in Formula 1. He now offers mentoring to Triple Eight Race Engineering’s engineering group.

- Andrew Clarke

The motorsport world is full of dreamers. And then there are people like Sam Michael. From the moment he converted from a love of two wheels to four, his dream of moving to Formula 1 was set in motion. And not as a driver but as an engineer.

When he was young it was all motorbikes. He tinkered and he played with them, he liked what he could do with two wheels. Then around the age of 10 his family moved from Geraldton in Western Australia to Canberra and a few years later he was playing around with rally cars with Rick and Neal Bates.

“To be honest, I was completely into motorbikes, and then when I started working for Neal and Rick they would bang on about cars all the time,” says Michael.

“I was just not interested, though. Then one day Neal said, ‘Come out to get in the car’ and when I did I couldn’t believe what you could do in a car. I was probably about 14 at that point and then I was into cars.

“So I started in rallying, then when I went to study mechanical engineering at university in Sydney I got a job with Greg ‘Peewee’ Siddle and Mark Larkham working on open-wheelers.”

Here his passion changed yet again, but this time it took on its final form. From motorbikes to rallying, he was now firmly entrenched in the world and concept of open-wheeler cars and the purity of what was on offer. As an engineer he had found his nirvana and the next two decades were going to be filled with the hunt for speed.

“I knew 100 percent what I wanted to do when I was a young kid; I was crystal clear,” says Michael.