The Pace of Change in Automotive

I was reminded this week by Facebook's calendar tool: I took a photo 6 years ago (October 2012) checking into a hostel in San Francisco. After finishing my MBA at Oxford I had been thinking about going to San Francisco to see what all the hype was about and to get a different view point on the world of startups and to experience the pace of change that I had only read about.

The specific target was: to see how Silicon Valley viewed automotive and get a fresh viewpoint. I wanted to see if our eyes were blinkered in automotive and how this related to the relevance of what we were doing in motorsports in general. One thing that was reinforced to me after the economic crisis in 2008, was that if motorsports was not relevant, the we would have trouble finding partners for the future: relevance is key.

My first trip to San Francisco I met companies into car sharing, stayed in my first AirBnb, funky new coffee shops and learned how "the valley is like Linkedin on Steroids".

On that trip, we wrote our first pitch about mobility: in fact on the plane on the way home! From that pitch we started the MobOx Foundation C.I.C. with Oxford University, Oxford County Council, Oxford Brookes and Zeta Automotive, which is going from strength to strength and now being run by Bindu Varkey.

I had worked with Oxford YASA Motors in fund raising after my MBA and had got my first taste of electric motors and in 2009 has started looking at electric motorsports ideas with the late David Hunt (James Hunt's brother). I even found the sketch we did that year!

Sketch: David Hunt and I sketching an idea about electric racing based on his trip to Hong Kong where he saw electric go karts for the first time!

I have been doing a number of public speaking events recently and have been trying to show how far things have come. It's been almost 10 years since we started looking at electric racing and its come a LONG WAY.

In 2012, we pitched our own concept to the FIA tender based around a Super Aguri F1 chassis, with low drag for high efficiency, downforce from a controlled floor and with some special ideas like "cross ply" for higher slip angles to mimic the days of Gilles Villeneuve in his Ferrari in the 1980's.

Photo: Original concept for electric racing that I pitched to the FIA in 2012: low drag, high efficiency and some special ideas like high slip angle "cross ply" tyres for added fun

Since that photo in San Francisco, I was lucky enough to be a founding Team Principal in the Formula E championship: it's amazing how many people thought we were crazy. Alejandro Agag did an incredible job of pulling together a diverse group of teams who really believed in the future at a time when most thought we were insane to be thinking about EV's. In fact one of the more famous parodies was from Top Gear with their world famous The Hammerhead Eagle i-Thrust, almost 10 years on there are a large number of awesome EV's coming onto the marketing from DS Automobiles, Audi, Jaguar, Hyundai and Renault just to name a few.

Photo: the founding Team Principals of Formula E with Alejandro Agag, cars just arrived in Donington

And that's only a start. During the operation of the Formula E teams we were approached to look at creating an autonomous test platform: and so StreetDrone was born. From humble beginnings through to cars on the road testing autonomously. The buzz word is now CASE: Connected, Autonomous, Shared and Electric and these 4 areas are driving the relevance for the future. I hope that we can find ways of integrating the autonomous and connected elements into motorsports as the cars have been connected to the pits for a long time and electrification is now taking the world by storm with more automotive manufacturers than ever taking part in Season 5 of the Formula E championship with Porsche and Mercedes arriving in Season 6.

Photo: StreetDrone ONE at Millbrook Test Track in Bedfordshire, UK

I wrote an article about how the world of autonomy could take some of the ideas from motorsports in an article on StreetDone's website, and maybe we can do the same in motorsports adding things like autonomous driving in pit lane or following a safety car!

And to top it all off, we won a Drivers World Championship with Jean-Eric Vergne in Formula E with TECHEETAH: looking forward to seeing what the next 6 years bring!

Photo: Jean-Eric Vergne wins the ABB Formula E Driver World Championship, 2018