S4E1 Caroline Sabourin

The Longest Day Podcast

Welcome to our fourth Season’s first episode!
Listen to Leah’s conversation with Caroline Sabourin who enjoys a 30-year career in organising Motorsports events globally while running a Sports Car Championship of 60 international teams. Caroline’s longest day was in 2000 when during the Australian Grand Prix, at the final race, one of the cars went sideways and was thrown in the air by another car, causing significant damage to other cars that had to crash into the wall. At Race Control, she and Tim Bamford, the Australian Grand Prix Chief Executive, took the hardest decision of her career which was to cancel the race. Against this in the background was that she and her colleagues had to underwrite the cost of the loss of TV rights if anything went wrong with the race. It was a huge undertaking but because it was so special they went ahead with it. Motorsport is life for Caroline. She counts it as a blessing to have been raised in the sport even if it is one where “something goes wrong, generally it goes stupendously wrong.” But she was brought up to remain calm in the middle of a problem and deal with it. She’s a believer that anything is achievable and its corollary that “the only limitation is the belief in yourself.” On all the billboards in the race, the saying advertised was “Make every second count” – a saying she lives by.