Our latest Role Call is with Formula 1 photographer Michael Potts.
Potts is an accredited freelance photographer who has covered F1 since 2018, documenting some of the sport’s most iconic moments trackside.
In that time, he has worked with some of F1’s most prominent publications and photo agencies, including Getty Images, Sutton and RacingNews365, along with companies including Nike and Alfa Romeo.
Role Call is Sector’s series spotlighting the people whose job titles do not always reveal the influence they have on the sport, and Michael is the latest to take our Q&A.
Sector: How did you get into Formula 1?
Michael: I started off as a fan. My first race was the 2004 Monaco Grand Prix, and I took my camera and went to shoot from the stands. I absolutely loved taking pictures, but I never thought that there would be a career path to actually working in F1.
In 2017, I got an F1 experience ticket for Monaco and got some shots from the balcony, which were quite nice. Then someone at a magazine in Bulgaria saw them, liked them, and offered me an opportunity to photograph for them the following year during testing and a couple of races. That’s kind of how I got into it. But it took a long time of photographing from the stands to get something good enough to impress a publication.
So my first race as a professional was Baku 2018, and we had that big crash between Verstappen and Ricciardo. It was one other photographer who captured it, and me.
Sector: Did you always want to work in F1?
Michael: I kind of spent all my energy trying to get into F1. I had these great shots, and I didn’t really know what to do with them. Luckily, I made friends with Mark Sutton and sold him the images, so they got really good circulation. That kickstarted everything and was my first foray into the editorial side.
That led to working with RacingNews365 in 2022; now I work freelance and with a few editorial agencies, including Getty, covering different parts of the race weekend. So I can split my day into different assignments for different clients.
Sector: What are the top three skills that matter most in your job that people wouldn’t expect?
Michael: The obvious one would be knowing how to take a picture. It’s staggering, but you see a lot of people who become accredited photographers, and they don’t understand shutter speed, composition, depth of field, and things like that. They sometimes lack the basic elements of photography. Normally I’d gloss over being able to take a picture, but it’s a skill, and you need to be able to do it before you can think about working in photography.
Then there is knowledge of everyone. You need to know what’s happening in F1; what’s likely to happen and when. You can get a lot of that from the schedule, but you also need to understand how the race weekend unfolds, where the celebrations are, which corners at any given track might have overtaking, and where on a track collisions might happen.
All that helps you build a strong body of work for the weekend. It’s all very well showing up and taking pretty pictures, but if they just end up on your Instagram, that’s not being an F1 photographer. You’ve got to be able to sell your pictures and live off your creative work, and I think that part is the part that people don’t understand how difficult and complex it is.
Sector: What does a good day look like for you?
Michael: I have an expectation of what I want to get out of the day at the start, and at the end of the day, just ticking as many of those boxes as possible is a sign of a good day. If I can get anything above that, then that starts becoming a great day. So I get the driver celebrating, looking straight into the camera with a bit of drama around him. All of a sudden, that shot’s elevated, and it’s something special. A bad day would be missing something from my list.
Sector: Have you ever worked with a team directly to get spy shots of another car?
Michael: Some photographers work for teams, and it’s a really hard job that requires a high level of consistency and understanding of how the cars work. You need to know which bits you’re supposed to be looking at, and you need dedication. They’re often the ones who arrive first and leave last because they’re waiting for the teams to pack up, and they want to get shots of that too.
I’ve done it for some publications, and it’s an interesting process because, depending on the circuit, they can change quite a lot from one race to the next. For example, from Monaco to Barcelona, it’s a completely different car. We have this show-and-tell on a Friday morning where the cars are placed in the pit lane, and if there are any changes, we get a document describing them. It’s easier to photograph them, especially for editorial, if you’re looking at changes to the car. So when Aston brought out their new B-Spec car this year, we could see all the pieces that had changed.
Sector: What advice would you give to someone who wants to work in F1 but doesn’t see where they fit in?
Michael: If you want to work and be successful in F1, do as much groundwork as you can and build your portfolio and experience. WRC and WEC are two championships where you get really good access. You can structure a weekend as if you were shooting as a pro. There’s a proximity to the drivers that you don’t have in F1 attending as a fan, so both are really good series to go and photograph, and they’re generally a little bit more loose about the rules on types of cameras and things like that.
Then on the other side, you’re coming into F1 mainly as an editorial photographer. The expectation is that your images will be used to talk about F1 and the sport to a wider audience. So work as an editorial photographer. Go to your local regional newspaper and work for them, shooting press and news photography in your area. You get used to the idea of working to deadlines, taking photographs that editors can use, naming, tagging, doing all that sort of stuff, so that your photography is at a high standard before you try and get into F1.
Sector: If you were starting again tomorrow, what would you do differently?
Michael: I would definitely go down the route of photographing for a local race club, and see where I could fit in and add value.
You need to build a published body of work. The best way to do that is to go into junior categories, work with a local series, and understand cars and what it means to work at a racetrack. That means knowing where it’s safe to go and how to anticipate what could be a risk. In F1, there is an expectation that you are a professional motorsport photographer at that point, and it’s not always the case for some people.
