When Chris Aylett, chief executive of the Motorsport Industry Association, talks about world-beating technology in British motor racing and unique capabilities to drive innovation beyond motorsport, his knowledge is far from theoretical.
In his youth he raced Aston Martins and Chevron B8s, and later one of the most powerful sports cars of its day – the McLaren M8. In fact, he successfully raced his McLaren M8E at 190 miles an hour at the Nürburgring and later set up Steigenberger Supersports, his own race series in Europe.
It was more than a decade ago that the MIA chief executive first began to highlight the innovative potential in British motorsports by claiming the ultimate gas-guzzling activity could actually lead the green agenda. He was met either by indifference or disbelief. “From the very first, a race is usually won by the most innovative person whether it is steam or electric cars,” he explains. “I kept saying to them [the industry], you are experts in the efficient use of energy and lightweight materials. One day the world will want to pay you for that knowledge.”
In parallel with a motorsport campaign on efficient energy use, the MIA executive launched international conferences devoted to low emissions.
Almost unnoticed, at least initially, by the mainstream automotive sector, a cluster of engineering companies have grown up in the UK to service the booming Formula 1 and motorsport industry.
Although there is no precise geography, many are in the South Midlands and Oxford probably marks the epicentre. The racing started on disused airfields after the last war, and then began turning into a major international business with the advent of satellite television and the attendant sponsorship and advertising revenue. Aylett christened the developing engineering cluster – Motorsport Valley.
Already there is evidence of innovation spreading beyond motorsport to areas such as defence
Professor Michael Porter, a leading authority on competitive strategy at Harvard, once told the MIA chief executive: “You have one of the world’s leading engineering clusters in Britain and strangely enough you don’t seem to realise it.”
The companies in Motorsport Valley are small, intensely competitive and are forced to be innovative on a race-by-race, almost Darwinian, basis.
“We only race prototypes in F1. We never really race a manufactured car and 80 per cent of a car changes throughout a 20-race series. It is an endless innovative process,” says Aylett, who adds that millions can be spent to shave fractions of a second off performance times.
The MIA looked at motorsport R&D spending and found remarkable results. “The pharmaceutical industry spends 15 to 18 per cent of sales on R&D. I couldn’t find a motorsport company which was spending less than twice that,” he says.
Any F1 team in the Motorsport Valley cluster would typically have 300 to 400 suppliers within 50 miles of its base and the innovative pressure goes down the supply chain to affect everything from electronics and lubricants to composite materials.
If a company fails, its engineers regroup in a new company or join another team nearby without ever having to move house.
Already there is evidence of innovation spreading beyond motorsport to areas such as defence. F1 and rally engineers were involved in designing the Foxhound military vehicle deployed in Afghanistan in record time. The Foxhound’s engine can be changed in 40 minutes and it can drive on three wheels.
Martin Whitmarsh, chief executive of the McLaren Group, says the fact that motorsport, and particularly F1, has innovation at its core, is making a difference. “The UK leads the world in high-performance motorsport engineering and this concentration of talent is having an important economic impact as teams choose to locate here, suppliers flourish and our most talented engineers realise that there is an exciting career available to them,” says Mr Whitmarsh.
McLaren Applied Technologies, recently described as one of the 40 most innovative companies in the world, has already moved beyond motorsport to designing control electronic systems for aircraft and improving the energy efficiency of data centres.
Aylett sees the recent announcement of a £1-billion joint industry-government initiative to set up an Advanced Propulsion Centre to create ultra-low-emission engines as, in part, recognition of the innovative role of motorsport engineering.
“We are going through one of the most exciting watershed periods in human transportation because we have now got car manufacturers with perhaps 10 or 15 alternative methods of moving you from A to B,” the MIA executive says. “Do I see all of them appearing on a racetrack? Absolutely, just as they have done for 100 years,” he adds.
In recent years he has been taking a travelling band of leading motorsport engineers to meet engineers at both mainstream car manufacturers and in other sectors. Usually there is a dramatic meeting of minds.
The travelling circus has set up camp, usually in sports halls, everywhere from car-makers Bentley, Nissan and Jaguar Land Rover to aeronautics specialist Lockheed Martin.
“Every time I take this group to another new sector, such as defence and marine, I am amazed that Britain has these outstanding clusters of innovative capability such as motorsport,” he says. In each case it’s engineers with problems meeting engineers who like solving problems.
The government, the MIA executive believes, could do more to bring the man with the problem and the man with the solution together.
But what sort of car does Chris Aylett drive now? “I’m afraid it’s only a Six Series BMW – rather boring. Not like the old days,” he says.
