Smarter, Faster – Life Lessons from F1

One of the things which make this job so enjoyable is getting to bring really inspiring people to the region to talk about great UK innovation. This week we’ve hosted Mike Gascoyne, long-time Formula One technical director, and current CTO of the Caterham Group, who generously agreed to visit Singapore and Malaysia to talk about UK science and engineering excellence

With the Singapore night race, the sexiest entry in the F1 calendar (sorry, Monaco) just a month away, this was an opportune time to use the sport to reach out to a variety of audiences. Mike was an excellent man for this mission, combining deep technical expertise with a wealth of highly entertaining and occasionally unrepeatable anecdotes about a life spent at the sharp end of F1.

Mike entered F1 almost by accident, answering an advert for a job as an aerodynamicist at McLaren, where his first drivers were the mediocre pairing of Alain Prost and Ayrton Senna. His career then took him from innovative Tyrell to the Toyota behemoth, via spells with ‘colourful’ characters like Eddie Jordan and Flavio Briatore.

His current employer, Caterham, is a classic British motoring brand now owned by high-profile Malaysian entrepreneur Tony Fernandes – and this region’s answer to Alan Sugar, having just starred in the first season of The Apprentice Asia.

We brought Mike along to several important local research contacts, including the National University of Singapore’s engineering department, the Singapore Science Center and the University of Newcastle Malaysia. He also spoke to the Singaporean press, Malaysia’s Top Gear equivalent, and the British Chambers of Commerce in Singapore and Malaysia.

At NUS, Mike met the students preparing the university’s entry in the global Formula Student competition. His main message to the team was about prioritisation – thinking is free, so all of the teams were able to come up with a list of a hundred things to improve about their car, but whilst a Ferrari or McLaren could do all of them, the Tyrells and Caterhams have to be smarter, working on the handful of issues that produce the greatest impact.

Mike also made some important points about the UK automotive industry. This is part of a broader story about the British economy and links to the recently published automotive industrial strategy, which underlines UK commitment to this sector. With a new vehicle rolling off a production line every 20 seconds the industry is making a significant contribution to UK economic growth.

Caterham is a good example of an F1 team translating their technical expertise into other sectors, having launched a composites arm to develop strong, lightweight structures for other applications (and an airline representative at one of the talks was very interested to hear about their plans to develop a much lighter aircraft seat). This has been something of a trend, with McLaren’s Applied Technologies arm using one of our events in June to announce a key collaboration in Singapore.

We thank Mike for his time, and will be backing Caterham at the Singapore GP.