I'm calling bullshit on this one. For two reasons:
- AFAIK there has never been a female chief mechanic on an F1 team. F1 is so starved of women in leading roles it would probably hit the news.
- F1 cars are so vastly different from Road cars, I doubt it would even be of any help. Marc Priestly, a former McLaren F1 Mechanic, describes in his autobiography how any time a relative asked him to look after his car he would tell them he doesn't know shit about roadcars and how he has to bring his car to an actual mechanic aswell.
Now it might be that OOP misremembered the actual role of the person or the racing series they worked in, and the person might just have had an interest im roadcars outside of their work.