hi and welcome to the Neil Ashton podcast.
In each episode,
we explained some of the fascinating ways that science and engineering
are changing the world around us.
We talk to leading engineers from elite level sports like cycling and Formula One
to some of the world's top academics.
To understand how fluid dynamics, machine learning and supercomputing
are bringing in a new era of discovery.
We also hear some of their life stories, their career advice
and lessons they've learned on the way that I hope will be helpful to you too.
So sit back and enjoy this episode.
Welcome back to the Neil Ashton podcast.
So
really excited. Actually, this is one of the interviews I was
planning to do when I created this podcast.
In a sense, these are the sort of individuals that I really wanted to speak to
and for you to hear from, because I think they're that blend of engineers.
But they've been in such privileged positions,
such unique positions that they sort of give you an insight into a world that
very few of us get get to ever see.
So, Pat, uh, I worked with him on the Formula One sort of next gen car programme.
That was the 2022 change in rules.
Uh, and so for a couple of years, I you know, I worked quite closely with him,
and I had a huge amount of respect for his
technical knowledge,
but also his leadership and and just the kindness that he has towards individual He,
uh, he works with and very much a
sort of, um, future thinker. I think there's a
a bit of a trend in Formula One that sometimes people can be a little
bit conservative and and sort of not always adapt the sort of latest methods.
Um, which is I know a bit ironic to say that, but but but it is true.
It's quite a conservative business.
Uh, whereas Pat's always, uh, thinking about the future, which,
which I really like.
Um,
now,
we actually did this interview a few days before he announced
that he was actually leaving Formula One after seven years,
uh, as their CTO
and actually has moved over.
Now it's executive engineering consultant to Andretti.
Uh, this happened a few days afterwards, so we don't discuss it, uh, in the talk,
but it's kind of interesting.
Uh, to know that after after doing this this interview,
um,
we we go through lots of topics, as with any of the guests I've had.
You know, I, I feel we could have spoke for many more hours.
Uh, but we start from the early days.
What motivated him to get into engineering into Formula One?
Um, I love hearing the sort of
the stories and the way that Formula One has evolved,
you know, particularly the way the paddock was. And you know,
not this, uh, amazing show that it is today,
Uh, but something, you know, more like a Formula two or Formula Three.
of course. When when he started
his time moving through, um, Toleman to Benetton to Renault,
of course, with Michael Schumacher being the race engineer
and then sort of discussing,
rising through the ranks and almost a reluctance in a way
to go into these very managerial positions because he was such a
an engineer.
Um, of course.
He then went on to have time at Virgin, then Williams for a few years.
Uh and then, of course, we formed new one,
and we talk about some of the some of that project of of changing the rules.
And we talk a little bit about his vision for the future where he would like,
uh, the sport to go.
So, I, I think he's someone who,
um I think people can learn a lot from He's had an amazing career.
And it's not over yet. Not at all. He is super ambitious
and still has so much energy.
So, yeah, I really, uh, hope you enjoy this, uh, this episode with Pat Symonds.
Um, we've known each other a little bit,
and I can't think of many people who have done as much as you have.
Um,
but was this all planned? Did you have some grand vision when you were 1516?
That you would be winning world championships and being technical directors?
Did you always want to be an engineer?
Yeah, I think it was 12. Actually, not 15 or 16. And it's interesting because, um,
many years ago, someone asked me,
Was there a point where you really decided what you wanted to do?
And I said, no, not really. You know, I. I grew up.
My my father was, uh, an engineering officer in the Air Force,
and, uh,
he loved cars. He loved racing.
He loved aircraft.
Uh, and so I sort of grew up in that engineering environment.
And that was every weekend, sort of helping him take his car to bits,
pull it back together, et cetera, et cetera.
But, um
and therefore I thought, you know, I want to get involved with this,
and I want to design cars.
And that was certainly
when I was, uh,
by 1112, You know, knowing this and
my father used to take me to races. We lived up in Norfolk, so we'd go to Snetterton,
Uh, quite often.
And, uh,
I think you know, the the real turning point to me
was, uh, good Friday 1967. Believe it or not, there was a,
uh, a race, uh, at snetterton that day and been to many races before.
But this particular one, it was an international,
uh, all the top drivers were there. It was the first race of, uh, a new formula two,
formula.
And there were GT for in the support races and all these wonderful cars,
and I thought, Yeah, this is something I want to get involved in.
And, uh, yeah, I was I was quite focused. Now,
of course, I didn't think I'd get into racing the way I did,
but that's perhaps another story.
But I certainly decided that I wanted to design cars
and
B that I wanted to work for Ford because Ford were,
you know, they were everything in motorsport in those days.
And,
you know, that was such a great motorsport history,
Uh, and so
worked my way through school and,
uh uh, applied for an undergraduate apprenticeship with Ford,
which I was lucky enough to get.
And that really set me going.
No
mechanical, definitely. And, uh,
in fact,
when I I did my my Ford undergraduate apprenticeship,
I actually did an H and D first rather than a degree, because
my a level results hadn't been quite what I needed them to be.
Um
and so I did my HND in mechanical engineering and then, uh, I. I
did a master's in automotive engineering,
So I had that sort of background of, uh of mechanical
and then went on to do automotive and
my sort of specialisation was vehicle dynamics. Then,
uh, of course, this was in the days long before there were any
motorsport engineering type courses, of which there there are many now,
but, um,
yeah, that that was my
My aim was to to
go and work for Ford and design road cars.
But
in actual fact, by the time I I graduated, it was in the
in the mid seventies. In fact, when I finished my HND,
um
I looked at what was going on at Ford,
and it wasn't a great time in the British motor industry.
It wasn't a great time in Britain, to be honest, but, uh,
Ford were were really in a bit of a transition.
And
Ford in the USA had sort of decided that
that Germany would do the cars and Britain would
do trucks and vans and things like that.
Uh, and that didn't appeal to me much.
And in addition,
they'd very much gone into this sort
of component engineering very specialised thing.
So you know, you you could be the guy who who knew more about
tooth cam belts than anyone in the world.
But you never really got to to design the whole vehicle. So it wasn't
that appealing and that that's actually why I went
and did my masters to sort of hope that,
uh, the industry would
would pick up a little bit.
But at the end of that, it it still wasn't looking good.
And I went to Cranfield,
and, uh,
when I was at Cranfield there,
there was actually an advertisement appeared on
the notice board in in the university
and, uh, looking for someone to help a
little company called Royale,
uh, who wanted to do a Formula two.
Carl and I thought, Well, I'll go and play and see what happens.
And so I went and did that.
And I met Rory Byrne, who became quite a big part of my my life later on.
And, uh,
I got the job.
Uh, I thought, that's great, you know?
And then I found out what motor racing's really like.
Because, of course, as soon as I got the job and, uh,
I decided I wasn't working for Ford anymore,
the
sponsorship money that was going to build this Formula two car disappeared. So
absolutely. And so the job disappeared.
And but by this time, you know,
I got the bug and I so I just wrote to everyone I could think of and
said you know, I was graduating and I wanted a
job.
And I actually got a job with Hawke, who were
a competitor of Royale making Formula Fords, Formula Ford, two thousands,
uh, down in south end,
and
I went to work there,
and, uh,
it was a bit of an eye opener, actually, because, uh,
I arrived and there was a little porter cabin and I said, OK,
this is where you're working.
And I walked in there and there was no one else there.
So I realised then, you know, I was the designer.
There was no one else straight out of the university.
And it's like, Oh, OK, where do I start?
And
I started by by sort of saying, Well, look, you know,
I've learned
a lot of engineering. I've learned a lot about vehicle dynamics. Let's let's see
what we need to do with the with these cars.
And it started off with the Formula Ford car,
and, um,
they ran on on Dunlop tyres. So
I got a hold of Dunlop and I said, I need some tyre data and they said, Oh, well,
I've never been asked for that before,
but yeah, we can we can get some.
So I got some very basic tyre data. And I did, uh, you know, a
few calculations because
I didn't have a computer or anything like that.
In fact, actually, when I was in south end, uh, working for Hawke,
I actually enrolled at local technical college on a welding course.
And I did that because, yeah, I wanted to learn too well, but also,
it meant I could use a computer.
Uh, and so I, I wrote a suspension geometry programme. And,
uh,
it was that
attitude of when you'd done a masters. You'd gone,
you know, was was motorsport at that time,
predominantly people who hadn't almost gone through that path.
It was more sort of old school. Yeah,
a a absolutely, um,
I. I was very lucky in a way, because I was one of the
the first sort of academics. You know, who who who got involved now that that's
that sounds a bit grand. Because, of course, there are a lot of people
around people like Patrick, Colin Chapman, they, they
they had degrees, a lot of very, very clever people as well.
But there was still an awful lot of people who
who were the sort of traditional engineers self taught, particularly track side.
Um,
but
yeah, I I I'd actually done automotive engineering. I I
I'd specialised in vehicle dynamics, but I'd done all the other modules as well.
Uh, and so yeah, I.
I started to apply that sort of thing,
and and the cars were actually very successful.
In fact,
the first race I attended
in a professional capacity
was the form of the Ford Festival in 1976.
And, uh, we finished 1st, 2nd and 3rd in that, and I thought, Oh, OK.
This is easy
how wrong I was. I mean, it's anything but easy.
Um,
but yeah, uh, I I did
the formula Ford car there, the form of Ford 2000. I did a Formula Three car,
um,
which
was run by Jan Lammers,
in the European Championship.
Uh, it wasn't terribly successful car, to be honest, it was,
uh it was a bit overweight, and it took a lot to get the the weight off the car,
but you know it it it was competitive. So it was a
great way to start.
Uh, and then things progressed, I guess because Uh
uh.
Hawk was it was a fantastic place to work because, you know, we had a big machine shop,
big fabrication shop.
We were doing everything,
um,
but it, like
so many times in motorsport, you know, finances were strained. And
after the paycheck bounced a couple of times, you sort of think, Oh,
I wonder if there's something else around now
at this time,
it's funny because it goes back to that advertisement at Cranfield because
Rory Byrne was chief designer at Royale
and he was, uh, going to Toleman.
He was leaving Royale Toleman were going to
build their own cars in Formula Two championship.
Rory knew all the Toleman people,
so he went off to do that.
And he recommended to Alan Cornock,
who owned Royale, that perhaps I was the guy to take his place. So that's what I did.
I moved to
Royale and did a few years there, which were
very, very successful, actually. Formula for
Formula 2000, we didn't
do anything beyond that,
but, um,
we set a record for the number of races won in a year. Uh,
we built a Formula Ford 2000 car that I think the first time
it got beaten was sort of end of August of that season.
It was
It was a really good time.
And
ultimately it led to
When Toleman decided to go from Formula Two to Formula One,
they asked me to join them on the Formula One programme.
So it's interesting, because in those early days in in 76 when I graduated,
um,
and I I said, Right, I'm gonna do a
three year programme. I'm gonna three years in motorsport. Then I'll go back to a
proper job. And
I'm on year 47.
Yeah, that's that's kind of
were you watching form one at that time?
Were you sort of a big fan of the sport or were you?
Do you know what I mean? Were you always obsessed with P
on, even while you weren't in it?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. No. Always a big fan. You know, the the bedroom wall had all the
pictures of the
latest 49 things like that, you know, going back to the the sort of sixties.
So, yeah, Al, always a big fan of of racing. Um,
even when I was at school,
we formed
a
motor racing club and we used to go off to races.
In fact, quite an interesting story was that, um
when I was at school at
the end of one summer term.
You know that last week when you're sort of talking about things you're going to do
and
one of our our teachers said, OK, what are you guys going to do when you leave school?
And one of my friends said I'm gonna be a racing driver,
So I thought, Well, II, I say I'm gonna design racing cars.
So I said, I'm going to design racing cars and and we got laughed at,
um,
but actually, the joke turned around because that guy was
a chap called John Village
and, uh,
in
probably, I don't know, 1979 1980.
I designed the car that he won the European
Championship in. So, uh,
we did actually achieve what we what we said we were going to do.
That's that's amazing.
You know, I was just gonna ask you before we maybe, um, move on a little bit.
You know, during those times when you were starting. I think now,
if you were to join a company and you didn't know something. You could just google it.
You could look online. You could
when you were put into that situation
and you didn't know how to do it.
And it sounds like a very practical question. But what? What
What did you have to do at that time? Was it going to the local library? Was it?
How did you get that information?
Yeah, I mean, it really was difficult.
Uh, and, uh, it it is amazing what you can Google, and and
you know how that can sometimes mislead you, but yeah,
you You did just that you went to your local library
and and you looked it up. You know,
all your stress calculations came from Machinery's handbook, and,
you know, there were well thumbed copies of that and, yeah,
that was an expensive sort of book, but you had to have it because that was your
basis for all the formulas and things. But of course, you had all your college votes
and referred to those a lot.
So then, Tom And what what was the progression like
there? So they were then trying to get into Formula One, right? That was those times.
So what was that experience? How did you move?
Yeah, it
again, You know, very, very different then the teams now are huge,
and they take on a lot of graduates.
And, uh,
there's a lot of progression through the teams and what have you.
But when I joined Toleman,
I was employee number 20.
So there were 20 of us. We had an ambition to go
Formula One racing.
And
we had a
a lot more ambition than we had ability, I would say
so.
Toleman had had just come off the back of a very, very successful Formula two season.
They built their own cars,
Um, brought Pirelli into the sport dominated Formula two season,
Uh, in 1980. And so they decided
in one
to go Formula One racing.
And
I think the sort of people involved
Ted Toleman, who
died just recently,
uh,
Alex Hawkridge, who was the
what we'd now call the team Principal
Rory Byrne, Chief designer.
Very, very ambitious people
and
lateral thinkers.
So
when they went into Formula One, they said, OK,
we're not gonna just follow the
the route of building a car, putting a Cosworth DFV in the back,
bolting on Goodyear tyres and
running around with the rest of them. We're we're gonna
look at where things are going, and we're going to
do it differently.
So I guess the first decision was they needed a turbocharged engine.
There were
not many turbocharged engines around at the time, so they said right,
been successful with Hart in Formula Two.
So we're going to turbocharge the four cylinder
engine.
Um,
it's something you'd hardly dream of doing these days
with with this sort of knowledge you have of
how complex the combustion is on
those engines.
Um, they decided that they would bring Pirelli to Formula One. But
even then, you know, not do it the simple way.
But everyone was running 13 inch wheels then
and
we thought, Well, you know,
why are we on 13 inch wheels? It would be much better if we could get onto a 16, uh,
inch wheel. We can get bigger brakes in there. All these sort of things,
even the
the monocoque. We decided not to do a carbon monocoque.
We would do an aluminium monocoque aluminium honeycomb.
But whereas most people were sort of taking sheets of aluminium honeycomb,
they were
routing out a little bit folding it
and and glueing it together.
We we actually made the monocoque in the same way that you would make a carbon
monologue.
So
we first developed the skins. Then we
used film glue honeycomb,
uh, or put it in a an autoclave and built it as if it was a carbon monocoque. So,
you know, trying to do everything right.
And it was an absolute disaster. You know, the car, The car was just dreadful.
It was so slow.
Um,
in fact, in 1981
most races we didn't even qualify for because in in
in those days, it wasn't like today where it's
where you only have 20 cars, you know, we had
an awful lot of cars and not many spaces on the grid. So we used to have qualifying,
uh, to get
into qualifying, if you see what I mean.
In fact, sometimes it was even pre qualifying to allow you into practise.
So it was a pretty disastrous year.
Um,
and and
I think from memory, we only qualified for a couple of couple of races.
But what was it like, though?
I'm just trying to bring it to the current time.
So you said you were obsessed with Formula One really into Formula One.
You'd been in Formula Two before.
Do you remember those moments when you first went to,
like your first Formula One race as an actual
part of the team? You know, when you go into the paddock was
or had it become almost normal by then?
Well,
yeah, that's interesting, because in 81
which was the first year Toleman were in Formula One,
I didn't actually race engineer,
uh,
the Formula One cars that year.
Uh, we had done a deal with Lola whereby they were going to produce the Formula Two car
and because my job was sort of set up the
wind tunnel model and all this sort of stuff because
the first Formula One car had been built without a wind tunnel model, even,
um,
set up all the R and D facilities and things like that.
I didn't have time to go to the Formula One races,
but I did actually have to do the the support on the Formula two races.
So
that year I was running Stefan Johansson in the Formula Two car,
um,
and
really supporting Formula One at
a at a distance.
So the first Formula One race I I went to, um
was actually the first race in 1982 in, uh
in Brazil.
And
it's, you know, it's one of those.
It's sort of serendipity, Really. We
we went there. We were still using the 81 car.
Um,
we've done
some modifications to it,
uh, which we hope will make it a bit more competitive. We had
just got the car in the wind tunnel at the end of
the previous year.
So we hoped, you know, we we were going to at least be
qualifying.
Uh, went to Brazil. We didn't qualify.
And so there was a bit of a meeting on the Sunday
and Ted Toleman and Alex Hawkridge said, Right, we’re going to change things.
Um,
Rory
and John Gentry. Who's the other engineers? Slash designer.
Uh, it was decided they were going to stay back in the UK,
and they were going to design a totally new car
and I was going to run the team.
So
my first sort of
really
proper Formula One race, and by race two, I was sort of in charge So it was.
It was really being thrown in the deep end, which is actually,
there's nothing wrong with that.
It it
What was it like?
Was there a bit of a
cos I can imagine the more established maybe teams or the people,
and you come in there.
I'm just trying to get a sense of what it was like in the paddock or the people around,
you know?
Was it? Well, it
Firstly, it's very, very different. Yeah, the teams were much smaller. I.
I said that when we started in Formula One, I was employee number 20.
By the time we went racing, we were only
in the sixties or something like that.
In fact, I I've actually got an organisation chart,
uh, somewhere from that year. And I think there are about 63 people in it, and
that includes everyone. You know, That's the,
um, the receptionist, the
truck driver, everything.
Um
so the teams were quite small.
They were nowhere near as professional as they are now.
Uh,
there's a lot more sort of camaraderie.
The people were pretty friendly and and of course, we weren't a threat, you know.
In fact, we were a joke. So it it it wasn't as if people, um,
were against us.
There was a bit of friction because this was the time when there was
what was known as the FISA–FOCA war. So FISA was
the predecessor of the FIA.
Um they were supporting the sort of manufacturers, the Ferrari Renault,
Um, people like that were in the the
FISA camp.
FOCA
was a Formula One constructors association which
Bernie was just sort of taking over.
And these were all the people who were running
essentially the the the sort of, um,
the cars with the DFV in the back. So, you know, you could go and buy a DFV.
You could buy a a
Hewland gearbox and, you know, you could build your monocoque
and go go racing, which is what a lot of British teams were doing.
So there was a bit of a split between that,
and we were on the the FISA
side and we'd gone with the turbo engine and everything,
which was one of the differentiators.
So there was a little bit of friction in that respect, but but still,
you know it it it was ok, but it It,
You know, the
the professionalism I'd see in a formula Ford team today was
above what we had in Formula One in those days.
You you
you worked under an awning that was side of the truck. You
you didn't have motor homes or anything like that. Um,
you didn't have these fancy pit wall stands. You had to,
you know, you just stood by the pit wall with a stopwatch and and things. So it was a
totally different world.
So then, um, how did that, then? Progress on.
So was that now in Witney that where was the
It was in Witney. That's right, Witney in Oxfordshire.
Um,
yeah, we We had, uh,
3000 square feet when we started, and then we took over about another 2000.
So, you know, tiny little units and
that was everything. You know, that was manufacturing. That was
the race team that was R and D. It was inspection. It was buying.
It was all cramped in there.
Um, I mean, over the years,
we took on different units in in Witney and
sort of expanded around there until we built the
the new factory at Enstone But by that time, you know, Toleman had become Benetton,
and there was a bit more money in in things.
I had a broader question to us at that point, though, if you look now,
even though Formula One is arguably one of the biggest sports in the world
tonnes of money
there is an unusual location of teams
in
50 mile radius of where we are now.
Do you know how that
started? Why that?
Yeah. People call it Motorsport Valley,
and people have studied it. People have written about it. Um,
the Motorsport Industry Association,
the MIA actually coined the phrase Motorsport Valley,
and I think it really started.
Um,
from March now. March were,
uh I guess going back to the seventies, even sixties. Maybe they they, um
They were the largest
racing car manufacturer in the world.
So if you wanted a Formula three car, a Formula two car sports car, you went to march,
they made these cars.
And
I think that then,
um,
that really spawned, uh,
a lot of subcontractors around people who knew
the sort of standards that were needed.
People left march and they started up on on their own
um
so it
it sort of grew organically if you like. So
then if you if you wanted to build a racing car, well, actually,
you might as well be in in sort of
Oxfordshire and Northamptonshire and that sort of area.
Um, because that's where the skilled workers were and it was easier to get them and
and these things, then
they grow
said organically. It's actually virally.
They they they grow because, you know, one generates another
and, um,
it's still true today.
I think that, uh, you know,
if you if you want to build racing cars and you want the right people,
you want to be in that area,
Um,
I mean, many years later, when I was doing consultancy work for
Marussia—
well, Manor—
when they entered Formula One, they were based up in Yorkshire,
and so when they took me on as a consultant,
the first thing I did was move them down
to Oxfordshire because then you could get the,
uh, the employees that you wanted.
Yeah, it wasn't an example. Maybe I'm
mis, uh, misremembering this, but
I thought there was an issue with Caterham.
Something about they were in Norfolk but they
were struggling to recruit people and they moved
up. Am I
right on that
one? Yeah, that's right. Um, yeah, they were. They were
originally did start up in Norfolk. Of course.
Lotus had been up in Norfolk in the old days, but, um, that was really pre
Motorsport Valley.
Uh, yeah. And Caterham moved down to Leafield,
um, just
three miles from Witney, actually, and and Oxford,
Uh, and,
uh,
yeah, suddenly it became a lot easier.
And, you know, even the
even Ferrari
have had a UK base
for for many, many years. And, uh,
yeah,
uh, the sort of
people know about the Guildford Technical Centre when
John Barnard was there and a lot of the
work was done done there.
But in fact, they've had a research group based in Oxford for many, many years.
I just find it interesting just how this centre or thing,
and any team that's tried to almost go away
doesn't really seem
to
even like has,
you know, it's Banbury Way, isn't it? Has
are in Banbury.
Yeah, it's true. And and it goes beyond that, you know, even the FIA based in Geneva,
They find it difficult to recruit the experienced
FON people. And, uh,
of course now a number of them are actually UK based.
So the aerodynamic group that you and I worked with, um,
when they moved from
Formula One from Formula One management to the FIA.
Uh, they didn't go to Geneva. They stayed in the UK.
Mhm.
Do you think? I mean, um, O
on a kind of related note, a little bit, You know,
the expansion of Formula One into the US,
arguably things like drive to survive and others.
Now, I work for an American company. I remember
in 2020 Not many people really knew about Formula One.
I would speak to my colleagues in the West Coast.
It was kind of like, Yeah, we can't know about it, but it wasn't
fast forward to now,
and they're obsessed with it, you know? They're really into it.
The logical conclusion, Uh, logical thing of that, I guess, is around teams
Do you think there will ever be an opportunity
where Formula One teams can be more
based out of the US? Or do you think there's a just a fundamental challenge,
you know, beyond has,
you know, really being successful.
I don't think we can be complacent in the UK.
Um
you know that that large
racing car manufacturing base that we had has
more or less gone?
Um,
the largest manufacturer of racing cars now is
Dallara in Italy.
Um, a lot of the sort of formula regional cars are made in France. Um,
so
we shouldn't ever be complacent about it.
But I, I would say at
the moment it's still quite difficult for the teams that aren't UK based.
Um, you know, S
in in Switzerland.
Um, Toro Rosso, who are in Italy and Italy, has its own little
Motorsport Valley.
But even they are moving,
uh, their design group over to the UK. In fact, have moved a
lot of their aero people to the UK.
Um,
just because, you know, that's where the talent pool is.
Um,
so
can it go global? I mean, it's a global sport,
but,
uh,
I see no reason why it couldn't be, uh, have teams in the USA because
USA has a good racing heritage. And again, they they have this sort of subcontract,
uh, base. You know, supplier, base and supply chain is good there,
so absolutely no reason why it couldn't happen.
Uh,
these days, out of the 24 races,
the
only a third of them really are in Europe. So there's no
there's no logistic reason for it.
Um,
and
race cars don't really come back to base between races anymore,
Uh, because the the schedule is so hectic.
So, uh, I.
I don't think the geographical location matters much in terms of logistics
a little bit in terms of supply chain, but there's a good supply chain in Italy.
There's a good supply chain in the USA,
Um,
so it then comes down to the, you know, the talent pool.
Yeah, I just I don't know if you've noticed that quite a few of my
friends or friends of friends
have
almost left Formula One some of them,
and moved to work at places like Tesla who
have gone out to California.
And there's there's actually a lot If you look at these Tesla's rivian.
There's an amazing Formula One
sort of, uh, group of people who moved over there.
And that's why part of me was wondering, would a Formula One team ever actually
base out of there?
Yeah, I think that's a slightly different thing, because, um
uh for example, Peter Jones, who used to work with us,
went to work for Ford in California as an AERODYNAMICIST.
And
I think part of the reason we're seeing a bit of a migration now is that is the cost cap,
which was introduced into Formula One.
So there was a time preco
cap when Formula One wasn't sustainable and teams were were
going broke. Teams were
living on the breadline,
um, really struggling to be competitive, et cetera.
Part of the reason for that was that actually,
you could earn a damn good salary in Formula One.
and engineers were getting paid much more than they get paid.
Working for
these sort of exotic car companies or even people
like Dyson Dyson were taking a lot of aerodynamicists
recently,
the Costa
came along, and
there was a bit of a shift in the profile of Of the teams,
the
the sort of more expensive guys were
harder to justify to have so many of them.
You know, a lot of graduates are coming in on much lower
salaries. You could have
a lot of graduates working for the price of one of these more senior engineers. So,
uh, I think a lot of the senior engineers said, OK, you know,
we've had our time in Formula One.
We'll move on to other things. So I, I would say it's more to do with the
the cost cap than anything else.
Yeah, which I guess
in some ways it's good of graduate students that they're getting a chance
to go to, sort of get more easily in, or there's more desire to have them.
Yeah, I
think I think that's true. You know,
there was always a place for the graduates because the teams are expanding so much.
Um,
yeah, going back to my my sort of experience when when we were at Benetton and
we were working out of
these sort of ever expanding industrial units in Witney. Then we
we built the the new factory at ends,
the factory that Alpine are in now,
Um,
and I remember when we built that
going into the design office and thinking, How on earth are we going to fill this?
You know, it is just enormous.
And I guess at that time we were about 250 people
at
Benetton
and
I've been over there
recently quite often, actually.
And, um,
firstly, you'd hardly recognise that that old design office,
because it's been pushed in every direction.
There are so many new buildings
there.
Uh, and of course, the teams are,
uh, are employing around 1000 people.
So in that expansion, there was always plenty of room for the graduates.
Um,
of course it did. Sort of Asymptote it
at a point where you know, they they didn't need to grow anymore,
Couldn't afford to grow anymore, Didn't want to grow anymore.
Um, because it gets very, very difficult to manage these these big teams.
Um,
but I guess
I guess now, you know, the graduates can get in for a different reason.
Probably.
It's a little bit more difficult for them to to rise up through the food chain.
Uh, and it'll be interesting to see in
in 10 years time just what the the scene looks like.
Yeah, I guess. Um,
you know myself and probably others have
of our generation in some ways are slightly jealous
of your generation that
you probably had it harder
in a way cos there was less people,
but it seemed because there was less people.
It was
if you ha, if you have a talent,
you can take on more responsibility. And there was more
ability to to become a leader of a team Where I guess now,
you know, as you say,
if you've got that many people statistically the chance of a
graduate making it all the way up to a technical director.
Yeah, I think that's probably
true. Up to a point. But
I think the biggest difference is that
when I started, you had to be a multidisciplinary engineer.
You know, I. I studied mechanical engineering, automotive engineering.
I specialised in vehicle dynamics.
Uh, you know, I did the other courses. I did structures.
I did engines and transmissions and things like that, but but
not of a great deal.
But when I went into the workplace,
I really did have to
teach myself, Um, you know, from that
day, walking into that
porter cabin in 1976 and realising there was a drawing board there
and no one else and I had to just get on with it,
uh, right through to you know, my time in Formula One.
so with Toleman
OK, we need to go. Wind tunnel testing. How do we do it?
I don't know. Let's go and find out. So you
go and find out
now. I remember in those days, actually, um, I'd said earlier we didn't really have
access to computing facilities.
And I remember in the early eighties, uh, while we were in America,
I bought
my first computer, which was a
Hewlett Packard. An HP 85 1st sort of little desktop.
Um
01 of the very first desktops. This is pre PC.
You know, people
might think there wasn't a world before,
uh, before IBM came along with with personal computers, but
it was and it it was, um
it was a device that had its own little screen on it. Little thermal printer on it.
It had, uh, 32 K
of memory, which I expanded to 64.
I got this thing back to the UK, and I thought, What am I going to do with it? So
I'd written a suspension programme
while I was at at at Hawk. So I put that on it,
um, programming in basic, because that was the only language on it
and decided to mechanise the wind tunnel. Now,
if I'd known what I was doing, I would never have done it.
But it seemed like the right thing to do because, you know,
we had a manual balance on on the winter.
Um,
but it had some load cells and put some load cells on it.
And then I got an I triple E interface that I could plug into the
into the HP 85. And I could start reading, uh, these load cells and things like that.
And this was in the days when you know you you were programming.
You come across a problem, you could phone up Hewlett Packard and say, Hey,
I've got this problem and they say, Oh, try this.
Try that. You know, it was a different world,
But
the fact was that, you know, I was able to learn that,
um,
later on, you know, when
when
aerodynamics was really becoming the thing,
I had to sort of teach myself aerodynamics.
I was one of the early adopters of electronics on the cars, um,
building data acquisition systems. I wasn't an electronics engineer.
I was a mechanical engineer,
but I appreciated how
I could exploit electronics.
So I needed to learn a bit about them and I needed to employ some people. And so
I really, you know,
right through my career, I've had to learn
new things.
And,
you know, II, I do talk about, you know, my my my hobby being knowledge acquisition.
Because I just
love learning new things. And I think that's what keeps you going.
Unfortunately, in Formula One these days,
um,
we have some really, really highly qualified, really clever people,
but sometimes very specialised.
So when you talk about this sort of progression and how do you get
to be a technical director or chief technical officer or something like that?
Uh,
there are some people, you know, I. I could name them
straight away, who
I think absolutely
have the intellect to do it.
They have the engineering ability to do it. What they don't have is the bandwidth.
And there are plenty of people who
know they're subject to the nth degree,
but they don't necessarily know how to make a car go fast.
And
I know you're an aerodynamicist,
so I'll try not to be too rude about aerodynamicist.
But,
you know, there, there is a thing with aerodynamicist where
all that matters to them is that the best number they can get in the wind tunnel
and
one of the things that I I lecture to students is I try and
lecture in the application
of what they're learning into the real world. So
a single number
getting a C_L of 5.5 on your car.
That's not what matters. What matters is
getting a map that you can use, uh,
so that the car can be set up so that the car has good characteristics,
where wherever it is
again. And I'm not getting an aerodynamicist.
But, you know, I've had I've had people, in fact,
even quite recently, who have come along.
And they said, Look, we've got this swing profile. It's absolutely fantastic.
It will produce X Newtons of load
and you look at it and you say OK, so
what structure are you going to put in there
to support this X Newtons of load and they go, Oh, yeah, it's a bit thin, isn't it?
Yeah, it is a bit thin,
so you know you need
if you want to get to a technical director level. If you want to get to a CTO level,
you need to
know
how to make the compromises. And you do that by
by understanding the the total car. You need to know what gives you performance
and,
you know, for for any
engineering problem,
which in our case is a set of Formula One regulations, there is a singular answer.
We never, ever get to that singular answer.
But the guy who is most successful is the one who knows how to compromise.
He knows which compromises to make he knows,
and that that compromise might be a financial one. It might be a, um,
a pure engineering one.
it might be a resource one human resource, you know, just knowing
how to bring everything together,
but fully understanding what gives you performance on the car on the track,
under every condition.
Well, that's one.
I really would love your insight in this.
So maybe using examples from, you know, the Benetton days,
Um,
I always say to people,
it seems
all in a way
that you can have a team doing amazing
for several years
and then
do terrible
and I often wonder, is this a
something just to do with not fully understanding just the
immense complexity of turbulent flow over a car and all.
It's just not a solving problem.
Is it a people problem? Like why?
Why is Formula One not just, uh,
sorted? We know how to design a car where some teams come out, so it's it's awful. Now,
how could that happen?
Do you have
time? Yeah, I know exactly what you're getting out and been through it and
it both ways. You know, I think when I went to Williams,
Williams had been
ninth in the championship. I attending teams for a few years. And
I remember Frank saying to me when I went there, he said,
I want you to turn the nine upside down.
What?
You've got to aim at six.
And
yeah, I did.
I did the normal sort of 100 day thing, you know, 100 days of looking at it all.
And I thought, I think we can do a bit better than that.
And
and I realised that, you know, I had a lot of very clever people there,
some very good people,
but
they weren't working as a team.
They didn't know what the objective was.
And there was this terrible culture there, um,
I guess two aspects to the culture that there was
that this is the way we've always done it,
which,
you know, you can't
have in any business, I don't think, and particularly something
as fast moving as Formula One.
And there was also a terrible blame culture there.
So there were these little silos who, you know, there.
There hadn't been good performance there for a long while.
And each little silo was blaming the other silo,
and
it actually didn't take much
to sort that out. And,
you know, my my first full year there, we
didn't go from ninth to sixth. We went from ninth to third and
beat Ferrari that year.
Um, and in the years I was there, we finished
third twice and fourth once. I can't remember.
Maybe fifth once, but, you know, we we we were successful.
And then
after I left, you know, the team
did go down again because I think those sort of
lessons that I tried to instil in people just disappeared.
Um
I mean, there can be other reasons, you know, it can be lack of money.
And if I take the Benetton in years,
um,
the last years of Benetton and before we were bought by Renault, we were really
existing on a shoestring and trying to
to really compete in a way we'd won a
couple of world championships in the mid nineties.
By the end of the nineties, we were
really struggling to pay our bills. You know, this was in the days when
engine bills were just horrific. They were
they were higher then than they are now,
25 years later.
So
those sort of things can affect it.
But I think fundamentally
there. There are a number of factors that you need to get right
to win championships. You know,
you've got to have the engine, right. You've got to have the tyres, right.
You've got to have the chassis right
in. That
is the aerodynamics, which is probably the most important bit.
You gotta have the driver, right? And you gotta have the team, right,
because the team is often underestimated.
And
of those six factors, you know,
if you've got four of them good and two of them mediocre, Yeah,
you probably win some races,
but if you're going to win the championship.
You've gotta have all six of them together.
And,
you know, you've really got to set out what are your objectives?
Where are you going? To invest? Um, you know, in terms of performance on the car,
for every dollar that you spend on aerodynamics, you get a much,
much bigger return than almost anything else.
But that doesn't mean you can ignore everything else. Because
if you have fantastic aerodynamics
on the terrible chassis with a
a team that can't do a pit stop and don't know anything about strategy and
et cetera, et cetera,
you're not going to get anywhere.
So one of the things I was interested was so as being a technical director,
what would a a day or a week look like? You know? How much could you
delegate? How much was it about? How did you manage that? Cos you were an engineer.
Did you?
Did you do project management qualification? Did you try and learn about?
Because I'm always amazed at how do you manage a team of I guess egos and lots of
people. Do you know what I mean? Did you just It's not easy and
uh,
I first became technical director at Benetton,
and I'd been chief engineer for several years
and
Ross Brawn was technical director,
and Ross decided he was going to go to Ferrari.
Michael Schumacher had moved to Ferrari, Ross was going to Ferrari,
and
Ross suggested to Flavio Briatore around the team that I should be
technical director
and my first reaction was, I don't want to be a technical director, you know,
I've got the best job in the world.
I'm chief engineer, you know, I can play with engineering.
I have a passion for engineering that's equal to my passion for for motorsport,
maybe even greater.
I absolutely love engineering,
and I thought, Why do I want to get into being technical director?
But they did a lot of persuading,
and
eventually I did it and and I don't regret it for a minute
because it it opened up a whole new avenue in my life.
Um, lots of interesting things,
but the first thing I found
and
it didn't get any better it got
perhaps more and more relevant.
You see, you can't
do all your engineering
that you like doing.
You have to manage people
in fact, actually,
years later, when I was at Williams, I always used to say that
sort of six o'clock,
I used to close the door of my office and I used to turn into an engineer.
Uh, because then people knew if my door was closed, don't come and disturb me.
And I said it was really urgent.
And then I could go through all the reports, and I could,
you know, start to sort of analyse things that we've been doing.
But it it's not easy. Um, the teams are very large. You you you are managing.
You're managing huge budgets and you're managing huge human resources.
The budgets I never found difficult
to to manage. Um,
don't particularly enjoy doing that bit of it, but
it was never difficult to me. It was just like
being at home with a lot more zeros on the end.
Um,
but, you know,
allocating was
the the financial resources where they needed to be wasn't too difficult.
People are are difficult because
I always think I, I like awkward people.
Um,
I like people who are individuals. I like people who challenge.
I like people who are
really, you know, can be a bit of a pain in the arse to to to manage,
because they are the ones who produce results.
My my ideal sort of employee is someone who does challenge, does
question does think laterally.
But then, once a decision is made,
absolutely just joins the flow and says, Right, we're go,
We're going in this direction
But getting there can be difficult and
each person is is difficult,
uh, is different rather not difficult.
Um,
and you have to learn how to to
manage each one of those individuals.
It's not easy.
Um,
I wouldn't say it's my forte,
but it's something I think I've managed to do quite well.
I. I think I spot good talent.
Um,
an awful lot of people in the pit lane now
in senior positions, not just in the pit landing factories.
They are people who have worked for me in the past. So
I do think that I spot good talent and I do think I nurture good talent.
Um,
I think sometimes I'm a little bit soft. Um,
you know, Williams, I sort of invented this phrase that
it's not who you hire. It's who you fire,
Um, because sometimes you. Actually,
if you want to change culture, you need to get rid of some of the bad apples.
Um,
but yeah,
the the management side of it is far more
challenging to me than the engineering side of it.
And do you think that
is in some ways, what explains some of the differences between the teams?
Do you Do you think it is almost, uh,
the leadership the way that they prioritise decisions?
Hiring, firing? Do you think that actually could steer
I? I think that's a large part of it. But I, I think the other thing is continuity.
Um,
one of the nice things we had at Benetton and was good continuity. You know,
team that had been together for a long while. We re
we reproduced it actually at Renault
in the mid two thousands, where we had a team that had been together a long while.
You get to that point where you know who you can trust,
what you can leave alone because
someone else will be dealing with it. You almost know how the other guy's thinking,
which helps a lot in a in a
rapid fire sort of situation. Middle of the race. You know,
things like that.
Um,
And I think, you know, sometimes if a team has good continuity,
we've seen it in Red Bull over the last few years.
Um,
maybe we might see that change a little bit. We saw it in Mercedes.
Uh, people do underestimate that aspect of it.
Um,
but yeah. II, I think you know you.
You cant be on top forever.
Uh, it's a natural cycle in sports, whether whether it's
motorsport, whether it's Formula One,
whether it's football, you know, you do see these cycles and things.
It is interesting, though, isn't it? You always think,
Could they have done something different
to have stayed one year better?
Was it because that person left which made that person leave,
which meant that you know what I mean.
It was It was the one critical moment where all the cards collapsed.
The chain reaction and what What started the chain reaction?
Yeah, it is interesting. I think you know it. Um
I guess at Benetton, I think when Michael left, yeah,
that did start a chain reaction because a number of people did go to Ferrari
with him.
Um,
maybe you could say the same at
at Renault when
Alonso left. So is it the driver? That's the key.
I mean, I find that quite difficult to
to argue, but
But you do worry.
When I was at Lotus,
there was a time when
Kimmy
rekan,
I think, was there, and he was James.
James Allison was
technical director,
and it was looking like on the up, you know, maybe there would be a chance.
And, you know, I was quite junior, so I didn't know what was going on, but then
we didn't get paid.
Uh, I
think
all the drivers left. I can't remember. I mean, James
Allison left, and then
I think
Jared left.
Oh, Mike, Um,
G was
a
Mercedes
Elliot.
And there was this ripple effect of
people going, going,
going Maybe because other people knew other people as well wanted
them to go with them.
I know technically, some of that you can't do, but it happens anyway.
And it was just that ripple. And then the funding got worse.
The performance got worse, and
and you just
Yeah, I always find that interesting.
Yeah. I mean, it's a relatively incestuous industry.
People do know each other. You do tend to
to get together.
I mean, you know, even when I moved out of the teams and I left Williams,
uh, I went to work for Formula One management,
and I was asked to set up a technical team.
Um,
most of those people were people I'd worked with,
people I knew people I trusted people who I thought, you know,
had the right attributes to
move from a big team to a small team.
Um,
what was that like then? So going,
maybe fast forwarding. So you were
You were in the sport for a long time. You took a bit of a break.
You did some consulting work.
How did the call come to join Formula One on the other side of the fence? I guess.
You know,
prior to working at Formula One, I was working at Williams
and we had quite a falling out
there.
Um,
we've been very successful.
Um,
you know, the most successful time Williams have had
for 20 years
and
have had since then?
Uh,
but I was quite ambitious, um,
and also realistic.
So as I said, we'd had very good championship results in the three years. I was there,
Uh,
I had a plan.
I always have a plan.
Um,
I normally work with a three year plan, and I try and roll that every six months.
I look at it
so
no, no, A plan for where the company is going.
Um
and so I'd sort of presented that plan When I first went to Williams,
Uh,
I had support for it
in 2014. We finished third in the championship. Everyone was elated,
and I said, OK, now we've got to move to the second step and I said, no,
we can't afford to do it.
Um,
we need to consolidate.
And I said, OK, right. I understand that
we can live with that.
We'll delay by by the end of 2015.
It was the same again,
uh, and
we finished.
I think we finished third again. Uh,
and
so, you know, there was a sort of why do we need to do anything? And I said,
we need to do things because,
to be honest, Williams was 20 years behind the times in in so many areas,
and it it culminated in
in 2016, where I just couldn't go on any further. And Ross, at that time, who I
maintain in contact with Ross is a good friend. He was talking about,
uh,
going to Formula One because Liberty were taking over from
from CVC and Bernie Ecclestone.
Um, Ross wanted
a technical department in Formula One. There never had been one.
Um,
he wanted to change from the sort of knee jerk reaction
of how regulations were made to put some science into it.
So it was It was perfect timing. Really, Uh, I.
I was arguing with Williams. He was saying, Here's something that's
really interesting, totally different, really small team,
but back to doing engineering
and not managing and thoroughly enjoyed it.
Was that refreshing? Almost. Was it a sense of
going back to the old days of having just a small group of people? Was it
very, very much so. And
you know, Neil, because you were part of that group. But
at that time, you know,
we used to do our weekly arrow reviews, and they were really
they were really challenging, weren't they? They were really
interactive, you know,
we would really go through things in detail and look at it and you know, that
that little group of people yourself included
produced the set of regulations that
culminated in the 2022 car
where we'd set out to make a car that could follow another car much more closely.
And
we were remarkably successful at it. I think the results were much better than I
ever dreamt they would be when we started the project.
But we did it because we were a small focus group. We were
evidence based decision making, which is, you know, one of my,
uh, mantras on on everything. Um,
we weren't driven by anything else. We we had no
agenda. We had no one on our back. We just got on with it and did it.
Almost felt like a start up in that it was very quick
for decisions to be made.
You know,
like the advantage of having a small group of people almost felt like
a skunk works or something where you can very quickly iterate like now
I don't know if you have it in, um,
when you deal in sort of bigger organisations just to try and get a meeting organised
can take forever
because you've got so many people you know these
people away when you've only got four or five people
very easy to just
have a call.
It's absolutely true. And it's so applicable in other areas. Um,
you
Formula One is my
main work at the moment, but I
do other things and, uh,
been doing some consultancy for a very, very large PLC
who
wanted to know how to innovate.
And
as a result of discussions with them, that's exactly what they're doing.
So they're trying to make the little skunk works
that that really
handles. Uh, R and D.
There's a lot to be said for that.
Yeah, definitely. Um,
yeah, looking, maybe a bit more to the future.
So one of the things I guess we started talking about,
I'm sure you've thought about it before as well. But
in those rules, change
was
the role of,
as you said, keeping the sport to be in the future, not 20 years behind us. And,
well, there's a mentality of just doing the same as you've always done it.
Because that has led to you success. And one of them
is obviously the wind tunnels,
the simulation, the high-performance computing.
Where do you see
the sport going? Oh, there's obviously some,
um, announcements made in the past about
wind tunnels and the ambition to
reduce them.
You know, wh wh where do you see the sport going or where would you like to see the
Bruno?
I think that they
the first thing we've got to remember is it is a sport,
and therefore it's an entertainment.
And
we engineers love playing with it because, you know,
it's it's it's engineering at the forefront.
Uh, and we need to keep an aspect of that because, you know,
that is part of the mystique of Formula One.
Uh, one of the things I found when I went to work for Formula One management was that
a remarkable number of people are interested in
the technical side much more than I thought,
Uh, which is quite gratifying as an engineer.
But I, I think that what we need to do is we need to stay on the forefront. And if you take
aerodynamics, for example,
CFD,
we absolutely were at the forefront.
Uh, when we started CFD programmes,
I guess in the nineties, um, we were really pushing the vendors,
the software vendors and saying, Look, we need this,
We need the turbulence models improved.
We need this, we need
the other. And we were really, really pushing.
And I believe that we made a fundamental difference and that
I was
quote as one of the
the areas where motorsport contributes because a lot of people think, well,
motorsport might give us better engines or better brakes or something on our cars.
But of course we have a much wider influence in that.
And
I think that the
the work we did in CFD
in those early days on turbulence models
I know
had a fundamental effect on building wind farms.
Because, of course, if you want to model
a wind turbine, it's not a terribly difficult thing to do.
But if you want to model
a
farm of wind turbines, each one working in the turbulent wake of another one,
you really need to get into these turbulence models that
have been really pushed by the Formula One guys because
unfortunately, we have a very, very
an aerodynamic device that we try and race
and with a lot of turbulence and therefore you know,
those sort of things and they they led to the wake steering that you see on,
uh,
on wind farms these days and things like that. So
we need to keep at the forefront.
And unfortunately,
because we're always trying to just contain costs to a sensible level,
CFD computational fluid dynamics is one of the areas
where perhaps we've allowed things to fall behind.
And it was one of the great things of going to do the the project at FOM because
we didn't have the constraints of regulation
so we could move to the these much more sophisticated models. And if you remember,
our our sort of gold standard was a a
fully turbulent model of two cars
incur flow.
And you know that is computationally
pretty damn intensive
and not the sort of thing that teams want to do because of the the resource it takes up.
So we've got to make sure that we do align things with that.
Um,
there's a
a move
to,
I'd say, get rid of wind tunnels.
It's perhaps going a little bit far, but certainly to reduce the use.
And over the years we have been reducing
their use because they are expensive machines to run. They use a lot of electricity.
But we mustn't lose sight of the fact that CFD
actually uses quite a lot of electricity as well.
And, um,
you know, as we're trying to decarbonise the sport, we need to be very aware of this.
Now I think one of the areas everyone's talking about one
of the areas we got to promote is AI.
And now
and
it's not new.
Uh, believe it or not. In the late
19 nineties, when I was technical director at Benetton and I started the programme
to look at how we could use neural networks
to
improve the vehicle handling.
And
in those days we built our own data acquisition systems,
and
I designed our total data acquisition system to be,
uh,
if you like, database
based so that you could interrogate it.
And we started working with Sheffield University on
a a neural network system that would,
uh,
be able to interrogate
how the car was set up,
what the data from the car was saying
relating that to the drivers. So we actually had to then get the drivers to be
objective rather than subjective, which is perhaps the most difficult bit.
And
yeah, we were years ahead of our time.
In fact,
we were so far ahead of our time that actually the project in the end failed because
we didn't have the computing power that we needed.
And also, of course, in those days you couldn't go and buy
ML APIs to plug into your stuff. You had to write it all.
It is amazing. Actually, I, um
I don't know the exact details on this, but
that time you mentioned
could well be the time that has now become quite famous. As
why is AI/ML suddenly popular now, when these methods
and there were there was this sort of winter, they call it where
So I you were probably at that time where, yes, the theories had been done.
But because the GPU and the computing power wasn't there,
it sort of didn't look attractive almost to her.
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, in
fact, it wasn't even running on GP
US
and GPU.
I guess they were GPU chips. But, you know, they were they were very, very primitive.
And certainly
they were what they said on the tin, you know, they were graphics processing unit.
That's what they were made for.
Um,
so the idea that a GPU could do something
different
really wasn't around. We were trying to run these on the standard
Intel 80 series type processes, and
it was difficult. It was more than difficult.
Um,
so you know, we were trying to take something from technology
TRL technology readiness level three up to
eight or something in that That really difficult
area.
Uh, and we simply didn't have it.
Whereas now?
Yeah, you know it. It's accepted. Practise it. The
the computing power is there. The knowledge is there.
You can go to someone like AWS. And you can buy buy the modules.
You know that will help you get there.
But,
um,
yeah, we started this conversation by saying we'll
CFD will these sort of techniques take over from wind tunnels
and
again
in the
the project to produce the 2022 car. We started looking at quite a lot of ML. And, uh,
in fact, now
we know that it is
if we can look at the wake one metre behind the car
using ML techniques, we can predict the weight 40 metres behind the car,
and that's a really valuable thing.
But a lot of these techniques
are quite intensive.
And and,
you know, I've spoken about this, and we We've spoken about the fact that,
um
I think that
a lot of people think that the
the intense time with any
ML type system is the training.
And, yes, it is intense,
but the utilisation is also intense.
Uh, and you know, some of the the the figures that we we've seen of
just doing a simple Google search or an AI-driven Google search where,
um,
from memory, it sort of
less than one watt hour.
It's about 0.2 watt hours to do a standard Google search,
and it's anywhere between seven and nine watt hours
to do an AI-driven Google search. You know, these things become significant.
Um,
yeah, we
we we have these huge data centres now
which are consuming enormous amounts of power.
Uh, we really need to think about it very holistically.
AI is fantastic. It
it allows us to do many things. Yes, there are concerns. There are.
We need to be careful.
Um,
and we need to recognise those those those those sort
of things because it is very much black box.
And that worries me a lot.
But
equally it is the way of the future.
Yeah,
And do you, um
do you see any, Uh,
if you were to watch Formula One in 2040 do you have a sense of what you would
see? Have you looked out that far to imagine the
my my job's to look out that far And I find it very, very difficult
because at
the moment, Formula One is very much tied
up with the motor manufacturers.
And in fact,
when we were
doing the 2026 regulations, my initial thought
was that
we wouldn't have
the car manufacturers with us. Everyone was talking about
electrification, battery, electric vehicles.
That's where they're going.
So I thought,
it's going to be hard.
But in actual fact,
not only have the people who were involved stayed,
but we've got new people coming in.
We've got Audi coming in.
Uh, we've got Ford coming in. We have Porsche wanting to come in.
They didn't actually make it. We've now got General Motors wanting to come in,
so it makes me think Well, OK, so
that's 2026 28.
What on earth are we going to do? 2040?
Are we going to get to a point where actually our programme on sustainable fuels,
Um,
which is a programme I'm very proud of that
we're doing in Formula One that I initiated.
Um,
is that going to be something that saves the internal combustion engine?
Um,
or
are we in fact, going to get battery technologies that really make
a and
battery infrastructure charging infrastructure that makes
battery electric vehicles almost universal?
In which case will the motor manufacturers want to still be with us?
Because that makes a very, very fundamental difference to
to how we go about our racing.
Um,
it doesn't kill
racing a any more than,
you know, they ran the Grand National at the weekend. Um,
but no one went there on a horse, did they? They drove there.
So
racing will always be there.
And
maybe if we look at 2040 if everything is battery electric vehicles, uh, you know,
even on the the heavy stuff.
Maybe by then,
uh, which will require some big breakthroughs.
Maybe we're providing.
We're running sustainably, and we're running with a sustainable fuel.
Whether that be a liquid
hydrocarbon fuel or a,
um,
a synthesised liquid hydrocarbon fuel or whether it's
hydrogen or or whatever it might be?
Maybe we just, you know, divorce ourselves from from
everyday transport in the same way that
horse racing has from
It does seem that way that potentially there is, um,
almost like a nostalgia. At that point of maybe there's
a desire to
see racing or things that are not.
I think fans would be very, very pleased if we
went back to
high revving
V tens V twelves.
Uh,
we constantly get that feedback because obviously in in my role now,
we we do a lot of fan surveys, so we constantly get that,
uh, motor manufacturers want us to be pushing battery chemistry.
Um,
inverter technology
to some extent, motor technology,
um,
hybridization,
highly efficient internal combustion engines,
um,
that sort of thing. But
actually,
uh, if they were not part of the scene,
then I guess we would go about things differently.
So
really, really difficult looking out that far.
So final question for you, you said
that it's actually more engineering the motorsport in some ways that drives you.
Do you have any
sort of bucket list things or desires that you I mean,
it's done pretty much everything I can imagine.
But is there anything else you like? I really That's one thing I'd love to work on.
Or do
I think there is. In fact, I suspect there's more than one.
But
as I said, you know, I started
really is a
mechanical engineer
was taught some automotive. I had to learn an awful lot more automotive, you know,
tyres, uh, a
subject I find fascinating.
And I was taught very basic tyre models,
whereas now I've really got into thermal tyre models and things like that.
Aerodynamics.
Very
much self taught electronics, very much self taught.
Um,
but I do find this whole area of AI and ML really
interesting, and it's certainly an area I want to keep on top of, As I say,
I was an early adopter too early,
and
I see
incredible possibilities,
and I see incredible pitfalls,
and I guess one of the things that worries me.
I'll give you a simple example. Let's say,
let's imagine Yeah, I I've
got a huge expanse of land and I've got a lovely little stream running through it.
And I think, Oh, I need a bridge across that
that that stream.
And
to be honest, if I want to walk across that bridge,
I know I can put down a couple of bits of four
by two timber and a couple of planks on top of it.
It'll be fine.
And then I think, Oh, actually, maybe I want to drive a tractor across it.
Oh, II, I better calculate it. But
that's fine.
Yeah, it's It's an easy calculation to do to to look at what I need on that bridge.
And then I think,
Well, actually, there are a few different ways I could do this.
So maybe, rather than just doing a hand calculation,
I'll write a computer programme
and
I write a computer programme and it looks at the various options
of the sections of wood or steel that I could use and
et cetera, et cetera, and I build my bridge and I drive my tractor over it
and it falls in the stream.
So I think I, I go back and I look at my computer programme and say, Oh
yeah, sorry, I made a mistake there.
That's fine I'm in control of it.
If I use an AI system to do that
and the bridge falls down,
it's a black box.
Where did it get the information?
That was wrong.
They call it hallucinating when it starts to make it
up its own things.
And
yeah, that's a real concern because there is so much of a culture now
of believing what's on the Internet,
believing what comes out of a computer
with AI being trained or ML being trained
so much and
just on what's on the Internet.
It's not all true,
and some of the inferences that can be
drawn from what's out there
are really worrying
and
there's no way of checking it. I can't go back and look at my code
and say, Oh, yeah, hang on.
I missed out a decimal point in that, that
that line of code.
So
I have that caution I.
I don't have the worries about it taking over the world that that some might have.
I have the worries
a of it being misused by bad actors because unfortunately
that's what happens so often.
We've seen it with the Internet and we
should learn from the Internet because the Internet
was badly regulated
and we should learn from that. And we should make sure that
any form of
AI, particularly when we get to AGI—you know, artificial general intelligence.
We've got to make sure we're regulating it.
So, um
yeah, that's the bit I would like to get
just a small
just a last
a
year
or
two.
Great.
Thanks So
much for
joining really enjoyed this talk. And
thanks again,
it's a pleasure
that