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Transcript

Sam Michael · Rusty's Garage

• 0:02
  A listener production.
• 0:14
  I'm automotive commentator and journalist Greg Rust and this is Rusty's Garage.
• 0:28
  This one takes place in Southbank, Melbourne, near the Convention and Exhibition Centre, just before the Confederation of Australian Motorsports annual Gala Awards.
• 0:39
  In addition to the many national titles being awarded for all sorts of categories, there is a special guest.
• 0:46
  But he spent most of his career in the pit lane, using his engineering talents and tactical skills honed by some of the best teams to help those doing the driving.
• 0:57
  His is a modern-day Aussie motor racing story that hasn't been widely told, but one the industry is rightly very proud of.
• 1:06
  Sam Michael always had a fascination with mechanical things and applied an incredible work ethic he seemed to have from a very young age to make it all the way to Formula One.
• 1:19
  I spent a lot of my youth on motorcycles actually because they're accessible to a young kid.
• 1:23
  You can be young and pull a motorbike apart.
• 1:26
  I used to pull apart generators and pumps on my parents' property, put them back together again, make stuff work.
• 1:33
  So right from young age I was always into that sort of stuff.
• 1:37
  I knew I wanted to do something to do with mechanics.
• 1:40
  Were the bikes two-stroke and what were the bikes back then?
• 1:43
  Yeah, actually my very first bike was a Honda, it was a four-stroke actually, it was an XR75.
• 1:52
  And then that was the only bike I sort of learned to ride on that and very quickly moved on to two strokes.
• 1:57
  And they were YZ80s and then moved on to 125 two strokes, then 250 two strokes.
• 2:04
  And I raced those bikes as well.
• 2:06
  And I was an average rider.
• 2:08
  I was never going to be a pro or anything, but I was decent.
• 2:12
  I could win the odd race here and there.
• 2:14
  But again, my main focus, my main interest was in the technology and stripping the bike apart and putting it back together.
• 2:20
  You were born in WA, raised in Canberra, so I'm trying to think from a racing point of view, was it sort of dirt track at Fairbairn Park or was it motocross?
• 2:27
  What was it?
• 2:28
  Yeah, that's exactly it.
• 2:29
  I mean, actually, when I first started, Fairbairn Park used to have a short circuit track, so I started on a short circuit.
• 2:36
  I only did that for about a year.
• 2:37
  I wasn't that interested in sliders and...
• 2:40
  and going sideways I was very interested in motocross and supercross so I moved up to the motocross club and pretty much spent all my time there and raced raced in all sorts of places through through New South Wales and up and down the coast following different championships as and when I could when I was at school scabbing lifts off other motocross guys who had their license it was before I could drive anywhere but yeah that was all my you know spent most of my early youth doing that.
• 3:06
  You had a period where you worked for and did some work experience for Neil Bates in Canberra, rally legend in this country.
• 3:15
  First of all, you both shared the same teacher.
• 3:19
  And I don't think this teacher was all that keen on either of you pursuing kind of motorsport, but you showed them, didn't you?
• 3:26
  Yeah, that's a good, God, good, you've definitely got some inside knowledge.
• 3:29
  You must have got that from Neil.
• 3:31
  Yeah, I think the first Neil, when I went to work for Neil, I was completely motorcycle obsessed.
• 3:39
  I wasn't that interested in cars.
• 3:42
  And then when I first started working for him, he took me for a ride in his rally car, and that was before his Toyota days.
• 3:47
  So he was still racing Datsun 1600s.
• 3:50
  He was quite young.
• 3:52
  And he took me for a ride in this car and we were going, you know, sideways and flat around corners and stuff.
• 3:58
  And I had no concept that you could do that in a car.
• 4:01
  So when we first went around the first corner and he went sort of full lock sideways, I thought, well, that's it.
• 4:06
  We're just going to roll into these trees.
• 4:08
  We're finished.
• 4:09
  And then he just didn't back off and the car went round and I thought, wow, how did it do that?
• 4:12
  I was actually fascinated.
• 4:14
  I pretty much became hooked on cars from that point.
• 4:17
  And I always remember that first rally drive with Neil.
• 4:20
  And I still kept an interest in bikes for another two or three years, but it definitely sparked my interest in cars.
• 4:26
  The 1600 is a cult thing in rallying in this country.
• 4:30
  What was it, sort of two-litre twin webbers?
• 4:31
  Can you remember much about the car from a technical point of view?
• 4:33
  Yeah, it was, I think Neil's might have even been, they might have been a 2.4.
• 4:38
  Yeah, I think they, from memory, but Neil, correct me if I'm wrong, but yeah, it had all the twin, I think, 48 mil Webbers and extractors and all the sort of go-fast bits and I think it was a two-and-a-quarter-inch exhaust system.
• 4:51
  And so I can vaguely remember all those things because we used to, I had my own 1600s as well after that.
• 4:57
  But it was a...
• 4:59
  Yeah, it was early days and it was, I think it was a great time and that car was very pivotal.
• 5:06
  It was, I think the world of rallying was split between Mazda Rotaries and Datsun 1600s and it was a bit like being left wing or right wing.
• 5:15
  You were one or the other and you didn't cross boundaries.
• 5:18
  So it was like a war out there, so yeah.
• 5:20
  He recounts a really good story.
• 5:22
  So he's now an icon for Toyota and has been forever.
• 5:26
  Back then, I think it was a VW workshop.
• 5:29
  And he said to you, one of the first jobs, which is probably a bit like how they test all youngsters that come in to work in motorsport.
• 5:37
  He said, one of the first jobs they told you to do as a work experience person was clean the workshop.
• 5:44
  And they went off to go and do some things and they thought you'd just be there with the broom and you'd be bored out of your brains.
• 5:50
  He came back and I think you had just about emptied the workshop and you were high pressure hosing the whole thing.
• 5:56
  And he said, man, this is like a window into the dedication of this bloke.
• 6:00
  We've got to keep him.
• 6:01
  Is that your recollection?
• 6:02
  Yeah, you're right, actually.
• 6:03
  I do remember that.
• 6:04
  And after I cleaned it, he said, it feels like we can't work in here anymore because we don't want to make it dirty again.
• 6:12
  So I do remember that.
• 6:13
  And I remember him telling me off for cleaning up too quickly because he was in the middle of doing a service and he must have stopped to talk to a customer or something.
• 6:22
  And I saw his tools and put his tools away.
• 6:25
  And he came back and said, my tools are gone.
• 6:27
  Yeah.
• 6:27
  And I said, where are they?
• 6:28
  He said, where are they?
• 6:29
  I said, they're back in your toolbox where they should be.
• 6:31
  And he said, yeah, but I haven't finished a job.
• 6:32
  And I was saying, yeah, but they should be in their toolbox when you're not using them.
• 6:35
  So I always remember that.
• 6:37
  I was in a very early memory.
• 6:38
  Yeah, that was a place called the Big League Exchange.
• 6:42
  It's a garage in Fishwick, which still exists.
• 6:44
  Neil's gone on and does other things now, but that's where we first worked together.
• 6:48
  It was clear that that's what your work ethic was like.
• 6:51
  Had you always had that, and obviously you've carried it through your career, but did you always have that in school and things like that?
• 6:58
  Was that your way?
• 7:00
  It was, and I think when I probably developed that method...
• 7:04
  through when I was working on motorcycles myself before I worked for, for Neil in the, in the early years.
• 7:09
  So I used to have a meticulously laid out workshop.
• 7:11
  I was into cleanliness and making sure that you had quality control.
• 7:15
  It was that I, I think I just, I just gained that organically.
• 7:18
  It didn't come from my, my sort of family's farming background because farmers tend to be the opposite.
• 7:23
  They're sort of, you know, a pair of pliers and a bit of wire will be used to fix anything.
• 7:26
  So, um, always used to, used to be joking with my father and other people to, um,
• 7:32
  To stop using adjustable wrenches and pliers to undo bolts, because that's pretty much what a lot of farmers do.
• 7:37
  So I was into the precision engineering straight away and using the right tools for the job.
• 7:43
  I think that mindset, though, of keeping things clean and precise pretty much works as a methodology all the way through to Formula One.
• 7:56
  And it's why when you go into a Formula One workshop, it looks like a medical workshop.
• 8:01
  You could have your dinner off the floor almost.
• 8:03
  And it's because when you keep things like that, you keep quality control.
• 8:08
  and you find things very quickly that are wrong.
• 8:11
  If you have mess and clutter everywhere in your life and in your workspace, when things are going wrong and your car's not fast enough or it's not reliable enough, it's very difficult to find where the problems are.
• 8:22
  So that sort of systematic method, it starts with physical things, put your tools away, keep the floor clean, but it actually applies to all the work processes.
• 8:30
  So I found that very useful as I went on through life.
• 8:33
  But a lot of that...
• 8:35
  If I look back on it, really, it was just that part came to me instinctively.
• 8:39
  I learned a lot of things from all the people that I worked with, but that was something that I just sort of felt was right at the beginning.
• 8:45
  I remember very many years later, in fact, only five or six years ago, I can remember standing with Ron Dennis, and Ron Dennis was probably the epitome of that cleanliness and standard.
• 8:56
  And I heard him talking to one of the mechanics who was working for me, and he was talking to him about...
• 9:02
  It was probably a nut or a bolt you'd seen in the corner of the garage that was out of place.
• 9:06
  And his whole methodology was don't make mess in the first place because then you massively reduce your workload to clean things up.
• 9:15
  So, you know, Ron's probably the epitome of that mentality.
• 9:19
  You would study at the University of New South Wales, which we'll get to here as we chant your career.
• 9:24
  But obviously you're a young man at this point.
• 9:26
  You acquire your first car at some point.
• 9:28
  What was that first car?
• 9:29
  How did it come about?
• 9:31
  Oh, my first car was a Datsun 1600.
• 9:32
  Yeah, and that came through understanding those cars through working with Neil and his brother Rick and another guy called Peter.
• 9:42
  And those three guys were crazy about Datsuns.
• 9:46
  And so I sort of became entrenched in that mentality when I came working for them.
• 9:50
  So I probably had three Datsun 1600s throughout the course of five or six years.
• 9:55
  and did them all up and sold them on and everything else.
• 9:58
  But, yeah, definitely that was my first car.
• 10:02
  So tell me about the degree at uni and tell me about the thesis because the thesis, I think, focused on data systems, data acquisition, didn't it, which would have been, you know, we're talking 25 years ago.
• 10:12
  I mean, that was a big emerging thing, wasn't it?
• 10:16
  Yeah, that's right.
• 10:17
  So I went to high school in Canberra and went to Sydney to go to UNSW to study mechanical engineering.
• 10:23
  And when I got into my thesis years, by then I'd probably been working with another group called Greg Siddle and Mark Larkham for probably about 12 months at that point.
• 10:34
  I was heavily into open wheelers by then.
• 10:36
  So I'd pretty much decided that I wanted to go to Formula One.
• 10:40
  As I left school and went into university, I didn't do it the other way around.
• 10:44
  We can talk a bit about that in a minute, but yeah, on my final thesis, it incorporated two things.
• 10:49
  One was just to do a full lap time simulation for an open wheeler using tyre models and downforce models.
• 10:57
  When I look back at it, it's quite simplistic, but it's got a lot of the true first order things in there.
• 11:02
  Remember, this is early 90s when we're doing this.
• 11:05
  And what I did is I put a data system on Mark's Raynard open wheeler car, and I was
• 11:11
  so that I could measure data and correlate that against the model.
• 11:14
  So my whole thesis was about modelling something on a computer and using, you know, from first principles, measuring that data on the track and getting, understanding why, how to correlate something.
• 11:24
  So that was quite a key thing to helping me get into Formula 1 as well.
• 11:28
  quite cool because you've you've blended something you were hugely passionate about I want to just just peel that back a little bit if I can firstly I mean Larco is such a character now in the supercars broadcasts and what was he like to work with back then and how did that introduction come about did you just turn up at a formula Holden thing and make a pest of yourself how did you how did you get in the door I think you even knocked on scape store and that didn't come to pass is that right
• 11:53
  Yeah, I knocked on quite a few doors.
• 11:56
  The advantage that Mark had is he was in Sydney and I was studying in Sydney and there wasn't many.
• 12:00
  Most racing teams are Queensland or Melbourne.
• 12:05
  So I sent that to Mark and I can't remember whether I sent it straight to Mark or Pee Wee at the time, but they both got it, had an interview with them and I joined them.
• 12:14
  It was part-time obviously and full-time during the holidays.
• 12:17
  doing weekends, that sort of stuff, in my last couple of years of university.
• 12:21
  So I was persistent.
• 12:23
  I wasn't after money, even though they sort of would pay all my sort of expenses and things.
• 12:28
  But it didn't really matter to me.
• 12:29
  I wasn't there for the money.
• 12:30
  I was there to really learn.
• 12:32
  And I really wanted to learn about open wheelers.
• 12:34
  And in Australia, that at the time, it was a category called Formula Holden or Formula Brabham.
• 12:39
  And they were two-year-old Formula 3000 cars.
• 12:41
  So they were a good car to work on and understand aero and suspension and all the things I wanted to learn about to go and do Formula 1.
• 12:49
  So, yeah, it was good.
• 12:51
  And I think, I mean, Mark's a, he's such a funny character.
• 12:55
  So he's extremely dedicated and driven, but he has a very good balance with lifestyle and humour.
• 13:01
  We think...
• 13:02
  We think very similarly, so we got on because of that.
• 13:07
  And he struck that balance very well between humour and getting the job done.
• 13:12
  He used to play this trick.
• 13:14
  And I would go whenever I'd...
• 13:16
  Sometimes I was a bit of an errand boy at that time, so I'd have to go out and drive out somewhere to get parts and come back.
• 13:21
  And he used to have this nickname for vanilla slices because he had this sort of addiction to those thick sort of custard slice things.
• 13:30
  And I remember being in Pee-wee's office in Parramatta and Pee-wee was on the phone to Mark and I was passing through, he must have been there to pick something up, and Pee-wee's on the phone and he said, oh, hang on, Sam, Mark said, can you pick up those two engine mounts?
• 13:46
  And I smiled and said, yeah, no problem.
• 13:48
  And then Pee Wee was like looking at me like, why is that funny?
• 13:50
  You know what?
• 13:51
  I go, no, don't worry about it.
• 13:52
  Don't worry about it.
• 13:52
  What he meant was, can you stop at the bakery and get two vanilla slices on the way back?
• 13:56
  So that was a typical sort of ML joke.
• 13:58
  I love it.
• 13:59
  I love it.
• 13:59
  That was, that period, Larko lived in Sydney's northwest at the time.
• 14:05
  And ironically, mate, it was only a few Ks from where I grew up.
• 14:09
  So I would often drive past that.
• 14:12
  I mean, he would, you guys would tuck the little transporter come trailer thing down the side passage.
• 14:19
  So were you literally working at times out of the backyard there?
• 14:22
  Yeah, I was, when Mark was living in, I can't remember the name of that suburb.
• 14:25
  I reckon it was Carlingford.
• 14:26
  Carlingford, that's it, yeah.
• 14:27
  So, yeah, I was working in Carlingford.
• 14:29
  I wasn't the only one.
• 14:30
  There was obviously Bruce Carey and Dave Moore and Murray Yee and Steve Knott, who's sadly not with us anymore, but there was lots of other people that helped get that show on the road and Adam as well who worked with Mark.
• 14:44
  But, yeah, it was a good team.
• 14:46
  Everyone was pretty focused on what they wanted to do.
• 14:49
  Mark was making sure that costs were under control and spending all the money in the right places through running it out of his garage in his backyard.
• 14:56
  Fortunately, it was big enough to do that.
• 14:58
  But yeah, so he ran from there right until when I left.
• 15:02
  He was still there actually when I left to Europe to go and do Formula One.
• 15:05
  And then I think he moved about a year later when he went into touring cars.
• 15:08
  We'll get to Greg Siddle in a moment because he's a guy in Australian motorsport, in behind the scenes, I mean, just legendary and great international connections.
• 15:18
  But just to finish the Larco chapter, Neil Bates tells me that he feels you made quite
• 15:25
  an impact there on that Formula Holden program.
• 15:27
  I know you'll say you were a part of the team, but did it all kind of come together?
• 15:33
  You're doing your thesis on the data side, Larko's, you know, going from strength to strength as a racer.
• 15:40
  Did what you...
• 15:42
  what you learned, what you brought to the table in that area, did that really help that whole operation?
• 15:46
  It probably, it was using the simulation.
• 15:50
  I was too inexperienced to use it to make the car go faster at that time, although I learned very quickly.
• 15:57
  I would say Bruce Carey, who came from England to help run the car,
• 16:01
  He used to come out to run it.
• 16:02
  He had been used to some simple data systems inside Europe because he was working in Formula 3 at the time.
• 16:08
  So he taught me a lot of the things to look for.
• 16:11
  He said, no, this is what you want to use it for.
• 16:14
  To be honest, back then, even just using it for getting gear ratios right was still pretty key and getting wing levels right, which was one of the focuses of my thesis.
• 16:24
  So it was very rudimentary compared to what I was doing in Formula 1 just a year or two later.
• 16:29
  But at the time, it was really, really important.
• 16:33
  They were great cars too.
• 16:34
  They were fastest cars, I think, in the country at the time.
• 16:35
  Did you ever drive it in the paddock area or anything like that?
• 16:38
  No, no way.
• 16:40
  I've never driven a Formula 1 car and haven't driven a 3,000.
• 16:44
  I've driven a Formula 3 car in, where was it, Thruxton or somewhere in Britain.
• 16:49
  And the implications of crashing one of those things are far too great.
• 16:53
  And I also know where my skill set is.
• 16:55
  I sort of...
• 16:56
  I looked very early, probably when I was about 15 or 16, and I mentioned I was interested in the engineering anyway, but I thought statistically the chance of making it as an engineer, which is still very low, but they're about 1,000 to one better than a driver, just because there's more people.
• 17:10
  So if you look simply in Formula One, there's about 600 people in a team now.
• 17:15
  So that's, let's say roughly 5,000 or 6,000 over the whole grid.
• 17:18
  Well, there's 22 drivers on the grid or something, so that ratio is even worse now.
• 17:23
  Teams are 10 times what they are used to be when I started in Formula One as well.
• 17:26
  A big team back then was probably 80 or 90 people.
• 17:30
  Let's talk about that foray into F1.
• 17:33
  It happens in 1993 from memory with Lotus.
• 17:36
  You mentioned Pee Wee before, Greg Siddle.
• 17:39
  What?
• 17:39
  Was he involved in helping to start those discussions?
• 17:42
  How did the entree into Formula One come about, or was it just you, again, being persistent and knocking on doors?
• 17:50
  It's a factor of both, but one thing I'll say for sure, there's no way I would have got into the...
• 17:54
  uh opened the doors that i couldn't open the doors that peewee opened for me so he gave me direct introductions initially to um peter collins and peter writer lotus and that's where i went for 12 months and then lotus pulled out of f1 uh he then helped me again uh with an introduction to eddie jordan and gary anderson
• 18:12
  And I went straight to Jordan's after Lotus.
• 18:16
  So definitely in those early days for the introductions to Lotus and then for Jordan, Pee Wee was absolutely fundamental to getting me across and into there.
• 18:26
  And, yeah, and it's because he knows everyone in F1 and everyone knows him.
• 18:33
  He'd still, you know, he knows everyone from Ron Dennis to Bernie to Frank and Eddie and he just knows everybody.
• 18:41
  And I think that goes back to the time that he spent in Europe in the late 70s and early 80s.
• 18:46
  It goes back to his working relationships with people like Nelson Piquet and Roberto Moreno.
• 18:50
  And although those guys have moved on, they touched and interacted with other people in the business.
• 18:56
  And obviously they weren't PeeWee's only connections in there.
• 18:59
  He worked for teams and ran drivers himself over there for a long time.
• 19:04
  So that's the first part of it.
• 19:07
  The second part is PeeWee wouldn't have done that if he didn't think that I had the background and the credibility to be able to do that.
• 19:14
  Of course, I didn't have any pedigree in Formula One at all at that time, but he could see the potential.
• 19:19
  So he was prepared to put those contacts on the line and say, this guy is good enough to make it.
• 19:24
  He didn't really know if I could make it then, you know, really, but he had a good instinct that I could.
• 19:29
  And so therefore he backed me.
• 19:31
  And it's probably some of the...
• 19:34
  developing those relationships is really important because you can be a really clever engineer, but if you don't have those people skills and get people like that to make the right introduction for you, you probably won't make the right decisions.
• 19:46
  Well, there's lots of different ways to Formula One as well, but that was the way I got into Formula One.
• 19:51
  and it worked very well for me.
• 19:53
  But once I was in there, I felt as though once people like that had backed you, and that goes right back to people like Neil and Mark and even Peewee, these are guys that have supported you and said, do this and do that, and given you direction.
• 20:04
  Once you make it in there, you feel like you owe something back to them to make it and to not let them down, especially Peewee, because you'd open these doors and use contacts and friendships to say, give this young guy a go.
• 20:17
  He's just a ripper human being.
• 20:19
  Yeah, and he's still doing it now.
• 20:20
  So he's still...
• 20:21
  I had a coffee with Pee Wee about a week ago because he lives in Sydney, and he's still saying...
• 20:28
  He's particularly focused on drivers probably rather than engineers, but he still has the odd engineer come through, but he still sort of...
• 20:35
  If he sees someone, he's there to help them.
• 20:37
  And, yeah, he's done a lot for Australian motorsport.
• 20:40
  Cast your mind back.
• 20:42
  Where were you for the first F1 experience?
• 20:45
  And what did a young man that had grown up fundamentally in Canberra and around a bit of rallying and Formula Holden, what did you think when you first started to work in that arena?
• 20:56
  Well, my first memory of hearing a Grand Prix car was 91 Grand Prix Adelaide.
• 21:02
  And I was there with Mark and Peewee because there was a support race with the Raynard.
• 21:09
  And I remember hearing the sound of the cars when they went out for practice.
• 21:13
  And I just remember thinking, that's it.
• 21:15
  That's me.
• 21:16
  I'm done.
• 21:18
  This is what I'm doing.
• 21:18
  There's no question.
• 21:19
  I was already pretty sure before then, but once I heard the noise,
• 21:23
  and the cars revving and the practice, oh, that was it.
• 21:26
  I remember walking up and down the pit lane and there was two things, I have two memories of it.
• 21:30
  One, it was the active suspension cars, if you remember the Williams, sitting there and moving up and down by itself while it was bleeding the active system and all the mechanics have gone to dinner.
• 21:42
  So there's no one else in the garage and you've got this car just pitching and rolling and yawing and moving for about half an hour while it's bleeding all the hydraulic system out.
• 21:50
  And that was so impressive to see that.
• 21:52
  And then you'd go down to the bottom team, I think it was probably LaRousse or Monardi at the time, and their place looked like a hospital as well.
• 22:00
  I remember thinking, that's the guys at the back of the grid, and look at their garage.
• 22:03
  I'd work in there as well, I don't care how I get in.
• 22:08
  I've got to get in there.
• 22:09
  That was my memory, it was Adelaide.
• 22:10
  So you get in...
• 22:12
  What happens?
• 22:13
  Are you living in a tiny flat somewhere?
• 22:15
  Tell me about those early days.
• 22:17
  Well, I went to the last Grand Prix in 93, which is when I finished my degree and left.
• 22:24
  I went to the 93 Adelaide Grand Prix.
• 22:25
  Remember, Adelaide was at the end of the year.
• 22:27
  It was November or maybe even October in those days, I can't remember.
• 22:32
  I had an interview with Peter Wright from Lotus, and he said to me, well, I've got a job as a junior simulation engineer.
• 22:39
  We're behind on sim.
• 22:40
  You've clearly done some stuff with your thesis.
• 22:42
  Again, I said that was fundamental.
• 22:43
  I turned up there with a copy of it to show him.
• 22:47
  And he said, if you come to England, I'll give you a job.
• 22:49
  Anyway, about two weeks later, I was on a plane to Europe.
• 22:53
  I got a one-way ticket.
• 22:54
  It was about 350 bucks for the Aeroflot.
• 22:56
  So it took me about two and a half days to get there because we went to stop somewhere in Asia like Singapore or Hong Kong or something.
• 23:03
  And then we went to Moscow.
• 23:05
  And it was meant to be just a quick turnaround, fuel, and go.
• 23:07
  And the pilot came on, obviously, in Russian first and then English, and said, we're parked here for 17 hours.
• 23:12
  And so we'll see you in 17 hours.
• 23:15
  And my memory of that has got nothing to do with motor racing, but it's part of the journey of getting there.
• 23:19
  I remember taking US$20 and cashing it in, and I thought, I'm going to go to Moscow and go and have a look, because I'm probably never going to come back here, especially back then.
• 23:27
  It was early 90s, so the wall had just come down in Berlin and everything.
• 23:31
  I remember thinking I'll never get back here again.
• 23:34
  Cashed in $20, saw the Red Square, the Kremlin, all the stuff, and spent eight hours in the city and came back.
• 23:41
  Cashed back in the rush of money that I had, and it was the rubles, and I got $18 back.
• 23:45
  So the whole day cost me $2.
• 23:48
  So especially as a student, I didn't have any money.
• 23:50
  So I arrived in...
• 23:52
  London, caught the train up to Norwich.
• 23:56
  I think I literally had about $100 in my pocket at that point.
• 24:00
  And I saw Peter Wright at the train station.
• 24:03
  So the chances of that, I get off the train and I'm going to go into his office the next morning.
• 24:07
  And he recognised me, but I only met him for like...
• 24:11
  30 minutes in Adelaide two weeks earlier and he said oh hi um you know it's like it's you and I went yeah hi it's uh Sam I've I've come to get a job and he looked at me and said yeah I didn't think you'd actually turn up he goes well you better come to work then he goes come and see me tomorrow morning and I said well great that's what I was planning to do so turn up and that was it started work for him straight away
• 24:31
  And that's how it began, really.
• 24:33
  I think you've got to get to Europe, really.
• 24:35
  You can't manage it from Australia, even now.
• 24:38
  The world's a much smaller place now with air travel, internet connections and everything else from a communications point of view.
• 24:45
  But you've really just got to get to Europe and England in particular.
• 24:49
  Although Formula One's in Italy and Switzerland as well, the heart of it's still England.
• 24:54
  Who were the drivers back then?
• 24:55
  I'm trying to remember the car.
• 24:56
  Was it the 107?
• 24:57
  What was it that you were?
• 24:58
  Yeah, it was a good memory.
• 25:00
  It was a 107.
• 25:01
  And then during the year that I was there, it was the 109 and then maybe a 109B.
• 25:06
  So when I first turned up, remember, I'd also specialised in mechatronics and active control systems at university.
• 25:14
  And the day I graduated, they banned active suspension from Formula One.
• 25:18
  So that was a bit of a pain because I remember thinking, oh, I thought I was going to go and work on active stuff.
• 25:23
  But fortunately, over the coming years, there's lots of other active things to do like diffs and power steering and brake systems that we spent lots of time on.
• 25:31
  But yeah, the 109 was the car for 94, which was the first full season that I was there.
• 25:39
  And yeah, that was run out of Lotus.
• 25:41
  And it was a small team and they were really struggling financially.
• 25:45
  It was a perfect place to do your apprenticeship because you could do everything.
• 25:49
  So I went everywhere from R&D labs, test team, race team, wind tunnel, pretty much because you were so resource limited.
• 25:58
  If you showed an interest in something, remember I was working seven days a week back then as well.
• 26:03
  So it was a sort of, I was completely committed to making Formula One work.
• 26:08
  And I thought, I would turn up expecting and thinking, I've got so much work to do, and I need to work very hard to make sure that I make it.
• 26:18
  And I've always found that that's a pretty good ethos to have in life, especially motor racing.
• 26:22
  It's probably an overused and almost cliched line, but really, mate, you are living the dream because, okay, there's some financial struggles for them, but you have this entree to everything, don't you?
• 26:35
  And you make the most of it.
• 26:37
  Yeah, that's right.
• 26:38
  And you've got to take those opportunities where they come.
• 26:41
  Formula One's not like that now.
• 26:42
  So you can't, I think Lotus was something like 50 people back then.
• 26:46
  And as I said, a big team like Williams or McLaren who were winning at that time, they were maybe 80 or 90.
• 26:52
  And a big budget team to win a championship was £10 million.
• 26:57
  So it's not like that anymore.
• 27:00
  The smallest team in Formula One will still be spending £50 million, £60 million a year, and they'll be nowhere, you know, on the back of the grid.
• 27:06
  But more importantly, everything's segregated.
• 27:09
  So to make sure you get proper systems in control and because it's so intricate and complex now, you've got to make sure that people are focused on their area.
• 27:19
  And if you look at the people in Formula One now,
• 27:22
  Probably Adrian's probably one of the last guys in there who's grown up in that previous world.
• 27:31
  If you go in now, imagine a brand new young Adrian Newey going in and starting Formula One, he would never be able to build up the database that he's built.
• 27:42
  So I think anyone who started Formula One up until probably the late 90s has a big advantage over the people who start now and that'll be generational.
• 27:51
  it'll only ever change when all those people leave Formula One, which they'll probably go for another 10 or 20 years, I guess.
• 27:57
  But it's... And the new generation, if you look at where a top technical director or sporting director or someone who's at the pinnacle in Formula One in two decades, they won't have had the same background.
• 28:08
  They'll have a... And by the way, it won't necessarily be worse, because they'll have a lot of advantages, probably more so around communication skills, I hope.
• 28:15
  You mentioned about the fact that, you know, 12 months later,
• 28:19
  Lotus is off the grid and the financial issues and so on.
• 28:24
  Was that a little bit risky for you at the point of, can I find another opportunity here?
• 28:29
  Or were things with Jordan already starting to tick away before the doors shut there?
• 28:33
  Um, yeah, no, they, that happened pretty quickly.
• 28:36
  So I had a, um, I was actually back in, I'd done that because back in those days you do Adelaide at the end of the year.
• 28:41
  So it was the end of 94.
• 28:42
  Uh, and then you'd try and stay here for a couple of weeks to catch up with your family.
• 28:46
  Um, cause it was a quiet time in F1 and then you'd go back.
• 28:48
  Um, so Lotus actually shut the doors while I was here in Australia.
• 28:52
  Um.
• 28:53
  And then I always remember ringing one of the engineers there.
• 28:55
  In fact, it's a guy called Jock Clear who's at Ferrari these days.
• 28:59
  I remember, because I worked with Jock, he was the main race engineer for Johnny Herbert and I was the data engineer.
• 29:03
  In fact, I was a data engineer on both cars.
• 29:06
  But I remember ringing Jock before I got on the plane and said, are you guys still good?
• 29:09
  He said, yeah, yeah, it's sweet, mate, it's sweet, it's all good.
• 29:11
  You know, we're all here working.
• 29:13
  And then I landed like three days later and everyone's gone.
• 29:15
  So it was empty.
• 29:16
  So it happened really quickly.
• 29:19
  Um, so that time I called, um, again, called on Peewee for contacts, uh, got in touch with Gary Anderson.
• 29:26
  Um, and I got, I got a job with him straight away.
• 29:28
  Uh, so he, I think I started, I think by then it was mid-December and he said, just come the start on the 1st of January.
• 29:34
  They didn't have any simulations.
• 29:35
  So he was quite keen for me to help out there.
• 29:37
  So I went straight in and, um, design and build a simulation system for them.
• 29:41
  And then from there moved on to R and D and then race engineering.
• 29:44
  You popped up with Johnny Herbert, which got my ears pricked up.
• 29:47
  I mean, he's a bit of a character of the broadcast now of the coverage of Formula One.
• 29:51
  What was he like to work with back then?
• 29:53
  Oh, he was good, actually.
• 29:54
  He had a good sense of humour.
• 29:56
  He had this funny thing where he'd always come around the garage trying to kiss you all the time.
• 30:05
  Which was always, when I was a young guy, I was a bit confronted by it.
• 30:10
  And the more you were confronted by it, the more he used to enjoy it.
• 30:12
  So that was always Johnny's joke, but I still know Johnny very well.
• 30:15
  So he's such a great character.
• 30:20
  In fact, the last year of Formula One that I did, we went down to the Taj Mahal together.
• 30:25
  after the Indian Grand Prix.
• 30:28
  And yeah, he's still got exactly the same humour.
• 30:31
  He hasn't really changed.
• 30:32
  The chapter with Jordan I'm interested in for a couple of reasons.
• 30:36
  Am I correct in saying, in addition to what you outlined before as the job description, they also kind of commissioned you or got you to work on a seven-post rig?
• 30:45
  Is that correct?
• 30:47
  And for people that don't know what that is, how significant was that back then for Jordan?
• 30:52
  Yeah, that's exactly right.
• 30:54
  So after a year of doing simulation and data engineering on the race team, maybe it was two years from memory, because I think it was around 96 that I started that R&D work.
• 31:03
  We didn't – at Jordan, there was no R&D.
• 31:05
  So it was pretty much what the race engineers had the time to do in their spare time.
• 31:10
  So I went to Gary and Anderson and said, can I set up our research and development?
• 31:14
  He agreed and backed me to do that.
• 31:16
  It was really good.
• 31:17
  So I had a small team, just one or two technicians, and then pretty soon after an engineer or two.
• 31:26
  We had a remit was reducing friction and suspension.
• 31:30
  It was all on the mechanical side because you obviously had R&D in aerodynamics already.
• 31:35
  But reducing friction, optimising damping, active control systems like power steering and diffs and just doing all the testing and prototyping for that stuff.
• 31:44
  So it was a really great time.
• 31:45
  I really enjoyed it.
• 31:46
  And yes, part of that was installing a seven-post rig.
• 31:49
  A seven-post rig holds the chassis and plays the suspension movement back to it from the track.
• 31:55
  And the reason why it's got seven posts is there's four, one for each tyre.
• 31:58
  The other three posts are for aerodynamics and for rolling and pitching the car.
• 32:03
  So at that time, it was only really Williams were the main ones that had that equipment.
• 32:08
  There was a couple of people renting rigs from Dave Williams and Anthony Best at the time, but Williams was the only one that was really investing in it.
• 32:18
  So we agreed to buy a rig from a group called Servo Test.
• 32:22
  So Eddie Jordan did a deal for us on that and installed that into Jordan.
• 32:26
  At that time, it was state-of-the-art.
• 32:30
  It was, Formula One was an interesting period then because it was still separated by people that had equipment and people that didn't.
• 32:37
  So there were some teams didn't have wind tunnels, they were still renting them.
• 32:40
  And there were some people didn't have gearbox dynos or seven-post rigs or CFD computing was really early stages.
• 32:46
  You could only really do stuff around ducting.
• 32:48
  or a really simple flow around rear wing profiles.
• 32:53
  It wasn't complex.
• 32:55
  So back then, if you had something versus someone not having something, you had a huge advantage because you didn't need to be the smartest person at that point.
• 33:03
  And keep in mind that everyone in Formula 1 is pretty smart, so you're into the last sort of thin end of the wedge, if you like.
• 33:11
  But it was before the times where now you've got to be really smart because everyone's got everything.
• 33:19
  So having equipment versus not is not a differentiator anymore.
• 33:23
  Everyone's got everything.
• 33:24
  Even the smallest teams have the best CFD, wind tunnel, seven-post rig, et cetera, et cetera.
• 33:29
  But back then it was good.
• 33:31
  It was a good step in performance.
• 33:32
  And it probably lifted the team.
• 33:35
  Just having the R&D lifted the team quite a bit.
• 33:37
  It was an aspirational thing too.
• 33:39
  Eddie is a huge character of the sport and has been for a long time, from crazy teak shirts to some of the stuff that he's said in the broadcast in more recent time.
• 33:48
  Back then, of course, he's team owner.
• 33:51
  What's he like to work with during that period?
• 33:54
  He was fantastic at that period because he was investing everything back into the company.
• 34:00
  He was, you know, Eddie's a character as well.
• 34:04
  He was doing things correctly for himself and the team.
• 34:07
  But he had a huge amount of energy and he really wanted to take on the big guys.
• 34:13
  And probably the pinnacle was 99 for Jordan when a lot of things came together.
• 34:18
  And the team didn't win the championship, but the team was definitely battling for the championship right up until the last minute.
• 34:24
  It was the same year that Schumacher broke his leg, but at the same time, the car was genuinely fast, genuinely winning races, was beating McLaren and Ferrari on equal terms.
• 34:34
  Not throughout the whole year, which is why they didn't win the constructors or the drivers, but I think in the drivers we came third.
• 34:41
  with Frensen, and it was definitely their pinnacle.
• 34:45
  Eddie was great to work for at that time.
• 34:46
  He was, again, always making sure he had a good balance between competitiveness and humour, really supportive of young engineers like myself and Dino Tozo and a lot of the other.
• 34:58
  There was a myriad of young guys there and people.
• 35:02
  that he really threw his energy behind.
• 35:05
  But he had, in terms of balance, I remember being with Eddie on one of these boats down in the Med off the coast of Sotogrande.
• 35:13
  And he took me out.
• 35:14
  And the only reason why I was there is because we used to test down in Jerez, which is right down in southern Spain.
• 35:19
  And we finished on the Friday and he said, come out on my boat on the weekend.
• 35:22
  So one of my mates flew down, Vanessa, my wife came,
• 35:25
  down and spent the weekend there as well.
• 35:28
  I remember sitting on the deck of his boat as we were pulling out.
• 35:30
  He said, you know what, Sam?
• 35:32
  And he had a few rock styles on board and everything else, which I won't mention.
• 35:35
  But he said, you know what, Sam?
• 35:37
  He goes, 50% of people end up in jail and the rest of us end up here.
• 35:41
  What a great outlook.
• 35:43
  What a great outlook.
• 35:44
  You mentioned Heinz Harold Frensen there.
• 35:46
  I mean, Ralph Schumacher was part of the mix back then in terms of the drivers that you got to work with too, wasn't he?
• 35:52
  Yeah, that's right.
• 35:52
  It was probably, I think, because I spent those first couple of years with people like, at Jordan, it was Eddie Irvine and Rubens Barrichello.
• 36:01
  Um, and then there was Fischer Keller and Ralph Schumacher.
• 36:04
  When Fischer Keller and Ralph Schumacher first came on board, yeah, so it was 97.
• 36:07
  I was, I wasn't racing.
• 36:09
  That was when I took a year out to, to set up the, I went to the odd race, but took a year out to get R&D established.
• 36:14
  And then I started, uh, racing engineering, engineering again in 98, um, and then, uh,
• 36:19
  So I was Ralph Schumacher's engineer for a year then, and then he left and went to Williams, and then I became Francine's engineer for 99 and 2000.
• 36:27
  It was a fantastic time because I was learning a lot as a race engineer as well.
• 36:31
  They were young guys.
• 36:32
  I was young as well.
• 36:33
  So we sort of got on well, understood each other, and everyone always felt like they had something to prove.
• 36:43
  Ralph Schumacher grew up in the shadow of his brother, Michael Schumacher, so he desperately wanted to win to prove that's what he could do.
• 36:50
  Heinz Harald had been rejected from Williams and the other mobs throughout the previous season, so he came to Jordan with a huge amount of energy to win, which he did.
• 37:01
  So it was a great time.
• 37:03
  It was a fantastic...
• 37:04
  It's one of the most memorable times I've had in Formula 1 was those couple of years.
• 37:08
  For some people, it's the want to make a difference away from the limelight, to perhaps build something and just make their contribution that way.
• 37:15
  For others, it's to be at the racetrack, at the coalface of the action.
• 37:20
  Which...
• 37:21
  I mean, did you find you clicked another gear when you were at the racetrack with the team, either in a testing sense or certainly from the Grand Prix point of view?
• 37:29
  Yeah, I mean, to be honest, I enjoyed both parts of it.
• 37:31
  I really enjoyed research and development and the design side.
• 37:36
  But then there's nothing beats the competitive side of the coalface of the racetrack where you're out there and it can be brutal.
• 37:43
  So every two weeks, one of the things that drives continuous improvement in sport in particular, but F1 as well, is that if you don't keep changing and improving, you get measured very harshly every two weeks.
• 37:56
  So it's a bit like big companies can hide behind their accountants and books for 12 months before they have to report.
• 38:02
  That's every two weeks for a Formula One team.
• 38:05
  And if you're not ready, there's no more brutal place in the racetrack in front of hundreds of millions of people on TV seeing how good or bad you are.
• 38:15
  And I think the race team brings you that.
• 38:18
  That's the bit that all race teams, even when you're at the factory and the people that don't travel to the tracks, there's about 10% of people travel these days.
• 38:25
  So 600 people in a team, about 60 of them travel because of the staff limits.
• 38:30
  Maybe a few more if you include marketing and comms and catering and stuff.
• 38:33
  So even people that are basically at the factory, they have that competitive spirit.
• 38:38
  You don't have to walk around and tell people, hey, we have to go faster, we have to be more reliable.
• 38:43
  They all know that.
• 38:44
  They wouldn't be there.
• 38:45
  It doesn't mean that everyone knows exactly what to do because that's where all the skills come in, but you don't have the conversation of, oh, do we have to make things better?
• 38:52
  Well, of course you do.
• 38:52
  It's motor racing.
• 38:54
  So that becomes a lot sharper when you're at the racetrack.
• 38:58
  It's definitely a young person's game.
• 39:00
  I think from your sort of early 20s up to your late 30s, early 40s is the best time to be doing racing.
• 39:07
  Once you get beyond there, then I personally think it'd be hard to keep up.
• 39:12
  It's not that people aren't there into their 60s and 70s, but it'd be a hard game to keep up with everybody.
• 39:20
  And you want renewal, so you want to keep changing and bringing fresh ideas through.
• 39:25
  So it's enjoyable to be there.
• 39:28
  And I think I enjoyed both aspects of it.
• 39:31
  You had studied on the engineering side, but what's becoming clear as you go on this incredible growth curve is that it becomes about people and people management.
• 39:43
  Did that side of it come easily to you, or did you have to go off and learn stuff?
• 39:48
  How did you go with adapting to that side of it?
• 39:50
  Well, that's a really good point, Greg, because I'd say that's probably where I feel as though my biggest weakness was and probably had my most failures.
• 39:59
  Although you look and say, yeah, I became chief engineer and then technical director and sporting director and I sat on boards.
• 40:05
  If I'm actually looking critically about it, it's not the technical side that by that stage is important.
• 40:11
  It's all about people.
• 40:12
  So you've nailed it there.
• 40:14
  And here's the sort of rub.
• 40:17
  In a technically driven industry like motor racing and in particular Formula One, the people who get to the top are people who have technical credibility, not leadership or people skills.
• 40:26
  Because everyone's on this search for lap time, finding lap times, they're like drug addicts.
• 40:33
  So it's like a drug, getting a tenth quicker.
• 40:37
  Everyone on the team knows what that means.
• 40:39
  So therefore, if you don't have that technical credibility, you'll never get the leadership positions.
• 40:45
  Most of the people with technical co-people have never done leadership.
• 40:48
  So they don't understand people.
• 40:50
  And I would say I probably learned more about leadership and people in the last, let's say, four or five years of Formula One than I did in the rest of the sort of almost 15 to 20 that I did.
• 41:02
  So – and I learned a lot at McLaren.
• 41:06
  I probably learned more about people there that by the time I got to that, I thought, wow, if I'd really known this stuff, maybe everyone goes through that.
• 41:12
  But if I'm being self-critical, some of my biggest mistakes, they weren't actually technical, they were people-based.
• 41:18
  If I went back to when I became a technical director when I was,
• 41:22
  uh, 33, um, which was very young.
• 41:25
  Um, and I look at my maturity level then and the things that I thought and the way I thought you would get the most out of people, I think completely differently now.
• 41:34
  Uh, so, so I would say that, um, that's the, that's the area that is going to differentiate formula one and racing over the next 10 to 20 years.
• 41:43
  It's not going to be about, it's, it's not that you don't have good technical loads.
• 41:46
  You have to have them.
• 41:47
  That's a given, but, but,
• 41:48
  but you won't get them if you don't get those systems and people working.
• 41:52
  And understanding how people work and the fact that they're all different is a key part to that.
• 41:57
  So in itself it's not complex, but it's difficult for people to deal with, almost more than a technical problem.
• 42:03
  A technocrat would far rather sit...
• 42:06
  and understand the, you know, the principal flow mechanisms around the front wing and how it flows into the diffuser, then go and talk to a person about their job performance.
• 42:15
  You know, they'll get on a plane to Japan before they have to do that.
• 42:17
  They'll do anything to avoid it.
• 42:20
  So if you look at why engineering businesses are like that, it's because those people have the credibility, because they can sit in a room and talk about the technicals.
• 42:29
  And in some ways, my engineering side, I think, well, that's sort of a good thing.
• 42:34
  The skill then is being able to merge that with people that know how to lead and get the most out of people because it's not an individual sport anymore.
• 42:41
  With the exception, I've mentioned Adrian already, with the exception of someone like Adrian who's, when he goes, you won't have that anymore.
• 42:48
  And even Adrian's not a single man band anymore.
• 42:50
  He's got a big team of people around him.
• 42:52
  But it's all designed by structures and systems, not one individual sport.
• 42:59
  Same way, if you look at the maturity of something like a road car industry, it's very rare that you hear, oh, here's the designer who just designed the new Audi A4, or here's the guy who just designed the new Ferrari whatever.
• 43:13
  It's not that if you go searching for them, there will be a chief designer, but they're not seen as the pillar of that company, whereas that's very much been the history of Formula One.
• 43:22
  Colin Chapman, Gordon Murray, Patrick Head, Rory Byrne,
• 43:26
  Adrian Newey you know on it goes that if you notice the way Formula 1 is now that's definitely thinning out and it's becoming the team um so uh yeah so going full circle your question about people um
• 43:41
  It could learn a lot through... And by the way, I've seen the opposite.
• 43:44
  I've seen where teams have tried to bring in very good people with leadership skills but don't understand the technical product.
• 43:49
  They last five seconds because the engineers and the drivers, they don't give them time because they sort of look at them and think, well, if you don't know how a car works...
• 43:58
  and you don't understand tyres or you don't understand aero, then I don't have time for you, and I think your chances of success are less, so I'm going with this person as a turn to create.
• 44:08
  So in almost every instance I can think of, they failed.
• 44:12
  So that's getting the technical side, but getting the leadership skills, that's one of the biggest challenges for an engineer.
• 44:19
  And if I advise any young engineers going into university now, that's pretty much what I focus on,
• 44:26
  I tell them you've got to have the... You've got to be able to turn spanners.
• 44:28
  You've got to be able to understand Arrow to get your engineering degree.
• 44:30
  You've got to do all that.
• 44:31
  That's become a given.
• 44:32
  It's not a differentiator anymore.
• 44:34
  Your differentiator is going to be people.
• 44:36
  One of the things I actually tell young engineers to do, which I didn't do, I just studied...
• 44:39
  I studied pure mechanical engineering.
• 44:41
  I say I'd strongly recommend that you study engineering and history and actually combine an engineering degree with history.
• 44:48
  And do you know why?
• 44:49
  Because...
• 44:50
  90% of things I've learned about people come from history.
• 44:53
  And if you study history, pretty much, let's face it, 90% of history is about war and it's about mistakes and successes, what worked and what didn't work.
• 45:02
  So if you study it, for me it tells you far more about people and how they work.
• 45:07
  And also there's a fitting thing about war in Formula One because Formula One's a war.
• 45:12
  And most of the wars are not won through having bigger guns.
• 45:16
  They're won through people, systems and strategy.
• 45:19
  Yeah, so it's very applicable to F1.
• 45:23
  So I think...
• 45:24
  I don't have any regret that I didn't do that because my mindset when I was 18 or 19 was all about pistons and engines and tyres and, you know, bikes and cars.
• 45:34
  So I would have failed history terribly.
• 45:36
  But since that time, that's probably the thing that I think is the key to just getting people to start thinking about that.
• 45:42
  This stuff fascinates me, and we will come back to sort of cars and some of the key races and things in a moment, but I want to stay on this strand and add in, if you don't mind, another element.
• 45:55
  And I find it exhausting, but it is a part of the Formula One world, politics, right?
• 46:03
  I mean, books have been written about it.
• 46:04
  They've called Formula One the Piranha Club and all sorts of things.
• 46:07
  When you get to those kind of levels that you played at, mate, and you are invariably conscious of other people's agendas, and, I mean, you just want to get on with the business of winning, but it is a reality of what you deal with, isn't it?
• 46:21
  Yeah, and it's probably, you mentioned strategy just a minute ago, and Formula One's all about balancing strategy and tactics.
• 46:28
  Strategy is your medium's long-term plan, and tactics is what you do right then and there.
• 46:33
  And if you don't plan and think about those things, and I learned a lot of those lessons I learned from F1, I apply to my business now outside of F1, and it works extremely well.
• 46:43
  And that's about planning for things that you think could eventuate.
• 46:46
  And most of those things are political or they're to do with people and how they interact.
• 46:51
  And when you do those planning, when you do those plannings, it's a bit like when I was competing for Williams with my team against Ross Brawnen when he was the technical director at Ferrari.
• 47:01
  And it was pretty much Williams versus Ferrari for two or three years.
• 47:05
  And our strategies were the key to deciding those outcomes.
• 47:09
  And I remember Ross used to talk about planning for 90 to 100 different strategies.
• 47:14
  This is before the days of computer simulations and Monte Carlo Sims of running a million different races or 10 million different races because a computer can do that.
• 47:24
  But he used to talk about the fact that he'd have all these decision trees.
• 47:28
  That was the first I'd heard about that because I was operating very tactically.
• 47:31
  And I was actually quite, you know, I was very good tactically.
• 47:35
  I realised that I could respond very quickly on the pit wall.
• 47:38
  and make decisions through seeing stuff unraveling in front of me.
• 47:41
  But he was better strategically because he had this ability, and he'd been at it for longer than me, and he'd learned a lot from sports car racing about strategy.
• 47:51
  And tying those two things together was the first way of – the reason why that's important is a practical example of how you can also deal with politics.
• 48:00
  So when you're dealing with people, it's not a lot –
• 48:03
  trying to predict their outcome is a little bit similar to predicting a race outcome, especially when you throw in lots of different variables, cars stopping, weather, safety cars, et cetera.
• 48:13
  So if you can break it down and understand how people are going to think, then it can help you a great deal.
• 48:20
  I think that I learned a lot from different people inside Formula One on that front as well, which I'll talk about in a minute.
• 48:28
  But simply...
• 48:32
  Learning that people are prepared to do things and have different agendas that move away from your technical ideal was something that I learned in Formula 1 probably after four or five years.
• 48:42
  A lot of it came through technical things where you'd go and work.
• 48:46
  I always distinctly remember working on this fantastic four-wheel active braking system at Jordan.
• 48:54
  We'd just got it working really well and then it got banned.
• 48:58
  I remember I felt a real injustice about that.
• 49:02
  as an engineer.
• 49:03
  And then I realised that actually I'm not playing in the right game.
• 49:06
  I mean, there's people playing, they're prepared to get things banned for pure political reasons.
• 49:12
  And it woke me up really.
• 49:13
  It made me grow up and realise actually it's not all about just sitting there and doing the best technical job.
• 49:17
  It's a much bigger picture.
• 49:18
  And how those people interact, particularly, I mean, you've got politics within your own team of people, but the politics outside your team are even more brutal because people will do things against you to get competitive advantage, even if it means really brutalising, you know, ending up with a brutal result for your team.
• 49:35
  So I think, um, uh, that is almost a full-time job managing that and just understanding how the regulations are going, sponsorship, um, drivers, uh, teams, the money, money's a big impact to that as well.
• 49:50
  If you're getting more successful, you get more money, you've got more power.
• 49:53
  Um, all that stuff plays out, uh, in the world of formula one and people will do anything to, to, to move, move the dial against anyone, even if it's a little bit, um,
• 50:02
  and uh there's definitely a very uh there's lots of tricks that you have to play with that and a lot of them are very simple but probably the most important lesson was just realizing that you're in a war you're as close as it can come to a war um and people do incredible things in wars to win them uh so f1's f1 there's no no no departure from that
• 50:22
  mentors help along the way with lots of things in life.
• 50:26
  When you're at that point, when you get to Williams and it's Sir Frank or Patrick Head, or even you mentioned Ron Dennis before during your time at McLaren, who were the people that helped with all of that stuff as you grew up?
• 50:37
  Yeah, I think – so remember you can learn from people who are at times against you as well.
• 50:43
  So the most impressive adversary I'd say that you had against – not against but –
• 50:53
  that I learnt a lot from inside Formula 1 was Max Mosley because Max had this agenda for FIA and he wanted to make sure that he was always trying to help small teams.
• 51:03
  So you go from points where we were a massive budget sort of Williams team fighting against Ferrari for the championship and then we lost BMWs, lost our main sponsorship and our relationship with him just inverted because suddenly he always wanted to help the underdogs because that was his job I guess as FIA president.
• 51:21
  But I learned a lot through observing him and just seeing someone who's incredibly smart having to play all these personalities.
• 51:29
  So he's playing Bernie Eccleston, Ross Braun, Sean Todd, Frank, Ron.
• 51:36
  So he's having to balance Luca de Montezemolo.
• 51:39
  He's balancing all these characters that was incredibly complex.
• 51:43
  And at that time, there was the threat of a breakaway series of GDPR.
• 51:47
  you know, trying to shift from short life to long life engines.
• 51:51
  There was things where I remember having just brutal arguments with him about the engines and saying, how could we ever move from the current engine regulations where we were burning six engines every race weekend and BMW was making 220 engines a year for us to 10 engines a year.
• 52:07
  And I remember at the time also feeling that he was completely wrong and when I look back, he was 100% right because it was a...
• 52:15
  if that rule hadn't changed, Form 1 would be finished because it was just pricing itself out of existence.
• 52:20
  Can you imagine?
• 52:21
  I mean, I think the rules now are about four engines per driver per year, so that's eight engines a team and maybe a couple more for testing and dynoing.
• 52:28
  So if you added up a whole engine supply, it's probably 15 engines for a team, and we were making over 200.
• 52:33
  And they're all brand new.
• 52:35
  Use them once, chuck them away.
• 52:36
  They were doing 300 clicks.
• 52:37
  That was it.
• 52:38
  And now an F1 engine does 4,000 or 5,000 kilometres.
• 52:41
  So some of those foresights, so imagine the...
• 52:45
  the sort of ducking and diving that he had to do to get those regulations in place.
• 52:49
  And I was against him.
• 52:50
  The whole, everyone was, every engineer was there fighting and you can't do this.
• 52:53
  You're going to wreck F1.
• 52:55
  No, that didn't happen at all.
• 52:56
  So, so it, so going back to your point about mentors, I learned, I had a, uh, three or four good mentors I'll talk about in a minute, but I also learned a lot from people who at times were adversaries and at times were on your side because, because as I said, once Williams went in survival mode.
• 53:10
  he instantly saw as FIA, the sport can't lose Williams.
• 53:14
  And it wasn't just Williams, it was Sauber and it was Jordan and everyone else who went through that.
• 53:18
  So it's almost the regulator's job to do that, to make sure you protect the back end of the grid because the front end of the grid, they don't think about that because you're so competitive when you're winning.
• 53:28
  You think my job is to obliterate everyone.
• 53:31
  And if this sport gets obliterated in the process, that's not my problem.
• 53:34
  So if teams, because it's sort of not the team's problem,
• 53:38
  and therefore if teams don't think about it, you've got to have someone else thinking about it, and that needs to be the regulator.
• 53:43
  So I learned a lot from that.
• 53:44
  I'd say we mentioned Greg Siddle.
• 53:47
  Greg was definitely a mentor throughout and still is now, to be honest, so it's very important to have people like that that teach you a lot.
• 53:53
  Again, the mentors that I've had,
• 53:56
  They've been nothing to do with technical or sport, nothing to do with the technical content of Formula One.
• 54:00
  It's been about people and politics and strategy and thinking about how relationships work.
• 54:06
  I learned a lot from Adam Parr, who was the chief executive and then chairman at Williams.
• 54:11
  He probably taught me, besides Ross Braun, I'd say probably Ross Braun and Adam Parr, who coincidentally have written a book about strategy together.
• 54:19
  But I've learned everything that I got from Formula One from those two guys.
• 54:23
  Ross, I didn't work with Ross, even though we came close to working together probably three or four times over 15 years.
• 54:29
  But again, he was an adversary.
• 54:31
  And I learned a lot through just looking at how he beat me.
• 54:35
  And I beat him a few times as well, but he beat me a lot more.
• 54:39
  And Adam, because he studied, again, going back to the war thing, he'd studied Chinese history from war from 2,000, 3,000 years ago.
• 54:48
  And those lessons, can you imagine what the world's like 2,000 years ago?
• 54:51
  Those lessons are applicable in Formula One now.
• 54:54
  And so I just found that incredibly fascinating to understand how, and it's all about people and politics.
• 55:00
  So we started talking about politics and people about 20 minutes ago.
• 55:03
  I'm still going.
• 55:03
  That's all right.
• 55:04
  The petrol heads will be thinking, get back onto pistons and tyres.
• 55:09
  Winning is a big part of it, mate, and immensely satisfying.
• 55:13
  During your time at Jordan, am I right in saying the first ones came, that it was Manicor?
• 55:19
  It was a Spa, wasn't it?
• 55:19
  Yeah.
• 55:20
  Yeah, Spa.
• 55:22
  It was Spa 1-2 with Damon Hill and Ralph Schumacher in 98.
• 55:26
  Yeah, Manicor was 99 the following year.
• 55:29
  And then Monza.
• 55:30
  So I think we had three wins while I was there.
• 55:33
  How much did that mean to the young bloke from Canberra?
• 55:36
  Oh, that was brilliant.
• 55:36
  I mean, it was fantastic because it was, by then I'd been in Formula One for five years, four or five years.
• 55:42
  To be honest, I remember the first points that I'd scored with the team was with Jordan and it was in 95, I think, about halfway through the season, we scored one point in Barcelona.
• 55:51
  And I always remember leaving the car in the airport with Gary Anderson and Andy Green, who's the TD there now.
• 55:57
  Just saying that's the first time I've been with a team that scored a point.
• 56:00
  Because in Lotus, we didn't score any points.
• 56:02
  I remember back then, they only paid points to six plates.
• 56:04
  So scoring a point was a really big deal.
• 56:07
  But yeah, so the win was fantastic, particularly because of where the team had come from during that season.
• 56:12
  It had been a brutal first half that turned into a fantastic second half.
• 56:17
  And yeah, it was pretty much summed up everything you want to do.
• 56:23
  And I think this goes to a bigger point about winning.
• 56:27
  When you are winning, and that one's probably not a good example of this, but Williams is a better example when we were really dominant.
• 56:35
  But when you're – you don't learn as much when you're winning.
• 56:38
  And it's quite a – it's a cliched saying, but it really is true.
• 56:42
  I remember that, you know, you hear Michael Jordan saying, I didn't become a champion.
• 56:46
  I became a champion because of all the hoops I missed, not the ones I got.
• 56:51
  And he's absolutely right.
• 56:52
  When you're losing or when you're not winning, let's say, you don't know if you could be coming third or fourth, which is bad as coming 20th really once you're up at that end of the grid.
• 57:01
  That's when you're trying everything because you've got this huge pressure to win and you learn a lot more when you're just not winning compared to when you are winning.
• 57:10
  That didn't really apply to Jordans because Jordans, we never had a dominance.
• 57:15
  So we were disturbing McLaren and Ferrari at the time, but they were still winning the championships.
• 57:19
  Yeah.
• 57:20
  with us winning the odd race.
• 57:23
  But yeah, it was a fantastic feeling.
• 57:25
  And yeah, that feeling never goes away, I think.
• 57:28
  It's one of those things that bonds the team of people that were there together with you.
• 57:32
  Cars in that era are something that fans always remember very fondly, from the sound to the look to even some of the technical innovations at the time.
• 57:43
  It's probably hard for you guys because invariably,
• 57:47
  your answer may be influenced by the success of the car or something that you'd achieved.
• 57:52
  But is there one car that you really sort of have this soft spot for from your time in Formula One where you think, man, that either from a cutting edge technology point of view or its success is the one that you love?
• 58:05
  Um, yeah, I would say there's probably two or three, but if I have to say the 91 Jordan, um, which I think was actually called a 199, um, but the, the, the car that we raced in the 99 season, um, it was from a race engineering point of view, it was, um, it was a, it had great aerodynamics.
• 58:21
  It was Gary Anderson's last car, um, at Jordan.
• 58:24
  It, it was easy to set up.
• 58:25
  It just, it was almost like a race engineer's dream to, to, to operate on that car.
• 58:31
  Um, so that was, that was, that was a great one.
• 58:35
  I think the 2004 Williams, there was the second last BMW car, I think they finished at the end of 20... Yeah, that's right, 2005.
• 58:45
  That was a great car.
• 58:46
  Great memories and successes with that.
• 58:49
  It was a good one to work with.
• 58:51
  And then the first of the double diffuser cars in 2009, that was a great car.
• 58:56
  And I always remember going to the...
• 58:58
  Ultimately, I...
• 59:00
  We weren't successful with it, but for where we were at that time, it was a fantastic job.
• 59:05
  I always remember, I mean, we're jumping forward about 10, 15 years now, but I remember when we did the double diffuser, we were so nervous about it internally to know whether we'd get away with it.
• 59:17
  And when all the stuff came out in Paris and the courts and when everyone tried to get it banned, the thing that we worked back on is that the double diffuser was invented
• 59:25
  in two different places at one time.
• 59:27
  One was inside the Honda wind tunnel in Japan, and then that had transferred to Honda in, which became Braun, obviously, to Braun in Brackley, and in the Williams wind tunnel with our team.
• 59:39
  So...
• 59:40
  There was a small satellite Japanese group that came up with it, and there was the Williams Aranamsis.
• 59:46
  And now Toyota had it as well, but that's because a guy left Braun and went to Toyota and took it with him.
• 59:50
  So yes, they had a double diffuser, but we know where the origins came from.
• 59:54
  So there was three teams that started with it.
• 59:56
  I remember being particularly proud of the team that they did that.
• 59:58
  And it was a...
• 1:00:01
  In fact, and my memory of that car was Nico Rosberg doing his first Grand Prix.
• 1:00:06
  The first lap, he took his wing off and he started about, came around the second lap.
• 1:00:10
  I said he'd done a pit stop about, let's say, 30 seconds behind the back of the field.
• 1:00:14
  And from that point, he finished behind the race leader, 28 seconds or something.
• 1:00:20
  So he was, and he was purple.
• 1:00:22
  He had the fastest lap of the race and everything else.
• 1:00:24
  It was the...
• 1:00:24
  It was the 20,000 RPM Cosworth engine.
• 1:00:27
  So Cosworth had, you know, they were just this little British company by then just struggling to hang on and so, you know, sort of suited what Williams was at the time as well.
• 1:00:35
  And I remember that was a fantastic sort of time.
• 1:00:40
  But it was, yeah, that was my memory of that.
• 1:00:55
  Green motorcycles are often said to be bad luck as they blend into the landscape, making it difficult for other drivers to see.
• 1:01:03
  Unless you're on the racetrack, then traffic doesn't matter if you're in the lead.
• 1:01:08
  You work now in one of the hats you wear is invariably with safety.
• 1:01:14
  But, I mean, there's been so many.
• 1:01:16
  It's a sport that constantly navel gazes in the area of safety and innovation is mandatory to succeed, isn't it?
• 1:01:24
  I mean, if you want to win, you've got to evolve.
• 1:01:27
  What are the things that have stood out along the way, the key things that you think, man, that was a really clever thing or that's a really important safety thing in Formula One?
• 1:01:37
  Yeah, so it's a good point, Greg.
• 1:01:38
  So when I first, in the first year I was in Formula 1, Antony Sandler was killed.
• 1:01:42
  I joined the, I started joining technical working group meetings probably about four years later, four or five years later, not mainly part-time because I wasn't a chief engineer or technical director at that time.
• 1:01:53
  But I definitely joined and helped contribute to that group to improve safety over the 21 plus years that I was in, 21 years that I was in Formula 1.
• 1:02:04
  There was a lot of things.
• 1:02:06
  Probably the most significant was by the end of the 90s, we had cars that were around probably about 400 kilos, maybe 420 kilos from memory.
• 1:02:17
  And they were carrying about 60 to 70 kilos of tungsten ballast on the bottom of them.
• 1:02:22
  And so we sat down as a group and said, we're all carrying this because this is the era of lightweight.
• 1:02:27
  An engine was only 92 kilos or something.
• 1:02:29
  They were insane and they're pumping out 900 horsepower.
• 1:02:33
  And we looked at this group and said, what are we doing here?
• 1:02:35
  We're all building 420 kilo cars.
• 1:02:38
  Then we're all strapping 60 kilos of ballast to the bottom of them.
• 1:02:41
  What if we use that ballast for safety structures?
• 1:02:44
  So...
• 1:02:45
  There was an intense aero development from late 90s through the mid 2000s of transitioning that weight that Formula 1 had developed through iterative gains of weight reduction and turning it into safety.
• 1:02:59
  The culmination of that for me was Kubica's accident, Robert Kubica in Montreal.
• 1:03:03
  And if you look at that crash, although there was nothing left of the chassis by the end of it, you could see his legs.
• 1:03:09
  Five years earlier, there was no question in my mind that he would have been killed just because of the energy that that chassis had to absorb to save his life.
• 1:03:19
  And there was a few other examples, but that's the most graphic one.
• 1:03:23
  And I remember looking back at that and thinking...
• 1:03:26
  You know, you do all these things for safety, and if you see someone's life being saved because of it, then that's fantastic.
• 1:03:31
  That's what it's there for.
• 1:03:32
  And that continues in Formula 1 now.
• 1:03:34
  So a lot of that weight was used for things like Xylon panels, Kevlar stiffening on the side, stopping penetration to the chassis.
• 1:03:42
  And it wasn't just the chassis.
• 1:03:43
  It was everything else.
• 1:03:44
  It was increasing the sort of...
• 1:03:47
  deflections and soft starts on nose cones.
• 1:03:50
  There's probably 50 things that we worked on during that time, but the net result was improving the safety for the driver.
• 1:03:57
  The one thing that's always there in an open wheeler is the cockpit in that the driver's exposed.
• 1:04:02
  The hand, not the hands device, the...
• 1:04:06
  The Halo.
• 1:04:06
  Yeah, the Halo is probably...
• 1:04:08
  So I worked on the Halo before I left because that was in works for probably about six or seven years before it actually ended up on a car.
• 1:04:15
  And it had two guys, the current guys, and it also had that... Like a cockpit, didn't it?
• 1:04:20
  Yeah, exactly.
• 1:04:21
  GKN did a cockpit and stuff.
• 1:04:23
  And that didn't eventuate for other reasons because you couldn't get out.
• 1:04:26
  If the car went over in the gravel, you couldn't get out and all those sort of things.
• 1:04:29
  But yeah, those things are slowly getting better in Formula 1 as well.
• 1:04:34
  But it's still always going to be a dangerous sport because it's a racing car.
• 1:04:39
  And I wouldn't sit here and say that no one will ever be killed in a Formula 1 car again.
• 1:04:43
  They probably will be, just statistically.
• 1:04:46
  But the rate of accidents now, you've only got to listen and talk to someone like Jackie Stewart, and he'll tell you it was pretty regular to lose three or four friends a year in motor racing.
• 1:04:58
  And they'd die from Formula One and sports cars and Formula Two and all the other stuff that they'd do back then.
• 1:05:02
  But he said it was just normal for that to happen.
• 1:05:06
  It's now very abnormal for someone to be killed in Formula One.
• 1:05:10
  So, and I think the FIA Technical Working Group, which is led by Charlie Whiting and has been for probably 30 years, is fundamental to that.
• 1:05:20
  And that's probably one of the best things that that group's ever given back to motor racing.
• 1:05:24
  All right, it was a two-pronged question.
• 1:05:25
  I love to say, I mean, what you covered there was tremendous.
• 1:05:28
  What about the technical innovation?
• 1:05:30
  One that perhaps gave you
• 1:05:32
  an advantage or gave the sport something i mean it's it's something you work on all the time trying to find the advantage but what's the one that you sort of sit back and think man that was clever
• 1:05:42
  Seamless shift gearbox.
• 1:05:44
  That was very good.
• 1:05:45
  I think at that time, by mid-2000s, and this was just after all this engine and long-life engine transmission stuff, so it was a time of really big restrictions in Formula 1.
• 1:05:55
  And it got to the point where you thought, I remember looking and thinking, God, it's so stifling now, you can't really do anything in Formula 1.
• 1:06:02
  Over the next five years...
• 1:06:04
  seamless shift transmissions, inertia suspension systems, double diffusers, exhaust blown diffusers.
• 1:06:11
  And remember, exhaust blown diffusers were very complex because you had to understand how the airflow worked around the rear tyre wakes.
• 1:06:18
  And cross-link suspension, so you had warps of suspension where you're diagonally connecting all the four wheels to each other.
• 1:06:25
  I remember looking back five years later and thinking, God, how wrong was I?
• 1:06:28
  And we invented half those things as well at Williams, as well as other teams, other teams came up with things.
• 1:06:34
  And I remember thinking, God, it was I thinking that maybe it's getting too restrictive and it was the opposite.
• 1:06:40
  But probably the seamless shift stuff was very good because it not only saved gearbox lives, it was three or four tenths of a second straight away.
• 1:06:51
  It's something that can be applied to road cars.
• 1:06:53
  It is in a lot of high-end cars, but also even Volkswagens and that have it now.
• 1:06:59
  So that was a good technology.
• 1:07:01
  The inertia dampers, not only the inerters where you'd actually have a chassis inertia damper, but also the actual inert on the dampers themselves, they were really interesting, especially someone who'd come from a lot of work on seven-post rigs.
• 1:07:14
  The biggest two things that you'd try and do was reduce friction in your damping and reduce mass and reduce unsprung mass.
• 1:07:22
  Those were, you'd work on your damping curves and everything, but those two things trumped everything.
• 1:07:27
  you would work like crazy hours and effort to find a 1% reduction, load reduction, load oscillation on the tyres on those rigs in those days.
• 1:07:38
  Bolting on the inertia dampers, it was like 15%.
• 1:07:41
  So I knew as soon as I saw that, this is massive.
• 1:07:44
  And everyone else in Formula 1 realised that too.
• 1:07:48
  So that, yeah, there's those things that are really specific to Formula 1.
• 1:07:52
  I sort of leave out the aerodynamic ones because they're just really applicable to Formula 1.
• 1:07:56
  So they're fundamental, they're first order to winning, but they don't really have any knock-on flow to the rest of the world.
• 1:08:03
  Whereas some of those, a lot of the mechanical things, you can see some application down the road.
• 1:08:07
  So, yeah, I think one of my early lessons in that as well was around, because sometimes people ask you, you know, you go and invent something like an inertia damper or a seamless gearbox or whatever it is, why don't you patent it?
• 1:08:20
  I said, well, I'll tell you what the problem is in Formula 1 patenting, and one team learned this at their expense.
• 1:08:27
  And they painted it a certain damper.
• 1:08:29
  And those technical working group meetings, it's a majority rules, right?
• 1:08:32
  So everyone turned up and they said to this team, oh, we noticed that you've put out a patent on this suspension system and we'd like to all be able to use that suspension system in Formula One.
• 1:08:44
  And then the team said, no, we've got the patent and you can't.
• 1:08:47
  And then that person who, I won't name names because they're all still in Formula One, and that person who said that then immediately turned around to Charlie Whiting, who was chairing the TWG, and said, I'd like to propose that this suspension system is banned for next year.
• 1:09:02
  Is there a show of hands around the table?
• 1:09:03
  Nine out of ten, banned.
• 1:09:04
  That was it.
• 1:09:05
  Amazing.
• 1:09:06
  That happened in under five minutes.
• 1:09:08
  And I always remember thinking, in Formula One, you never patent anything because the moment you do, you publish it for everyone else and they'll want it.
• 1:09:15
  Whereas the game in Formula One is to do something and then keep it a secret as long as you can.
• 1:09:20
  Now with mechanical things...
• 1:09:22
  And by the way, there's only two ways the information is going to transfer.
• 1:09:24
  Someone leaves your team or you can physically see it.
• 1:09:28
  So it gets photographed and someone works it out from another team.
• 1:09:32
  And that's why all F1 teams almost have espionage units.
• 1:09:36
  Go and take as many photos as you – this is all legal, obviously, but take as many high-res photos and –
• 1:09:41
  There's people who have snapped things from a grandstand.
• 1:09:43
  So they'll sit there for hours at nighttime with a long-range zoom.
• 1:09:49
  They might be 100 meters away from Ferrari's garage or Red Bull's garage.
• 1:09:53
  And then a mechanic, I don't know, at 10, 22 at night, he's got a cover on something.
• 1:09:57
  And he lifts it up to get his spanner out of something.
• 1:09:59
  Click.
• 1:09:59
  And that's where the photo comes from.
• 1:10:01
  So they take it really seriously, making sure that they understand what everyone's doing.
• 1:10:05
  A couple of quotes on drivers because they're the front line, they're the stars in many regards.
• 1:10:10
  You mentioned Damon Hill before.
• 1:10:11
  Let's start with him during your time there at Jordan.
• 1:10:13
  He'd obviously come as, he'd been a world champion.
• 1:10:15
  His father is famous, arguably one of the all-time greats, his late dad.
• 1:10:21
  What was he like to work with?
• 1:10:22
  Oh, Damon was fantastic.
• 1:10:24
  I wasn't actually his race engineer.
• 1:10:26
  Dino Tozo was, so we were in competition with each other.
• 1:10:28
  And, in fact, I remember at the end of that first year in 1999, he sent me a Christmas present.
• 1:10:33
  And he sent me this Swiss watch and he wrote a little note on the bit of paper on the back and he said, Dear Sam, Happy Christmas.
• 1:10:40
  Thanks for all your efforts.
• 1:10:41
  And then he put a dot, dot, dot.
• 1:10:43
  Mind you, I can't remember you helping me at all.
• 1:10:45
  I think you were just trying to beat me all the time.
• 1:10:48
  From Damon.
• 1:10:50
  But he really lifted the game of the team.
• 1:10:52
  So he really brought a mentality around how to win, what was important to focus on winning.
• 1:10:58
  He realised the team was on that trajectory and that he could do it.
• 1:11:01
  I think if he hadn't felt that, it might have been a different story.
• 1:11:05
  But he could feel it, and he could feel he'd brought the team their first Grand Prix win at Spa.
• 1:11:09
  And he was fundamental to just really setting the benchmark.
• 1:11:13
  And I think that probably lifted it such that then you could attract the sponsors and everyone beyond that.
• 1:11:19
  And then flowed on into 99, which he was a part of as well.
• 1:11:23
  So, no, he was a great, great influence, especially from the technical side.
• 1:11:30
  He perhaps saw himself as not the most natural driver.
• 1:11:35
  Remember, they're all very good.
• 1:11:36
  So even the worst driver in Formula 1 is a lot better than you and me.
• 1:11:39
  But he probably looked at it and thought, I've got to work a lot harder to beat these.
• 1:11:43
  It's a bit like Nico Rosberg versus Lewis Hamilton.
• 1:11:46
  Nico Rosberg's like engineering level smart and he realised he had to be...
• 1:11:50
  So I'm jumping forward 20 years or 15 years.
• 1:11:53
  But he realised he had to be like that to beat Lewis and he did manage to achieve that.
• 1:11:57
  So Damon was probably a similar type of mould, just a very hard grafter, came to Formula 1 very late.
• 1:12:03
  drove Formula One cars until he was quite old compared to the current grid.
• 1:12:07
  So, yeah, he was very influential.
• 1:12:09
  I'm glad you brought up Nico Rosberg there because, I mean, he would go on to ultimately clinch a world championship with Mercedes.
• 1:12:16
  You get to work with him in the early years of his Formula One career.
• 1:12:20
  Most people are still staggered that at the very height of it, he wins the world title and just weeks later says, I'm done.
• 1:12:27
  You know, I'm not going to come back and defend this.
• 1:12:30
  Were you shocked by that or from what you saw on the outside looking in, do you understand that about him?
• 1:12:35
  No, I do.
• 1:12:36
  There's two things that made me think that about him.
• 1:12:38
  First of all, we used to have this aptitude test that we'd give to drivers at Williams.
• 1:12:43
  So we had two or three key things we'd use for weeding out young drivers.
• 1:12:46
  How long was that and what sort of stuff did they have to do?
• 1:12:49
  Oh, it was quite complicated.
• 1:12:50
  So it had about 35 questions in it and they had an hour to do it or something.
• 1:12:57
  And they started from really simple stuff to very complicated.
• 1:13:01
  And you'd almost expect them not to get the last couple of answers.
• 1:13:04
  You'd almost need an engineering degree to get the last ones.
• 1:13:07
  And that was done like that on purpose, to grade people and say, and also it wasn't necessarily, you've done really bad at that and therefore you don't get in.
• 1:13:14
  It was more, right,
• 1:13:19
  because as you know, in the grid, there's a huge variation in technical ability of the drivers.
• 1:13:24
  And there's some fantastic drivers that won more championships that may not be very good technically.
• 1:13:28
  So the team used that.
• 1:13:29
  So the first indication with Nico was the fact that he got accepted into University College in London to study engineering just before he decided to become a racing driver for Williams.
• 1:13:38
  In fact, he got accepted while he was racing in London.
• 1:13:40
  GP2 and testing as a Williams test driver.
• 1:13:44
  So I learned to know Nico very well then.
• 1:13:47
  And there was two people that got the highest two scorers on that test was actually Nick Heidfeld in a different time period and Nico Rosberg.
• 1:13:56
  So he definitely stood out on the understanding point.
• 1:14:00
  And interestingly, he got something like 31 out of 35.
• 1:14:03
  And the four that he got wrong, he was intent on understanding and making sure, right, what are these things that I need to know?
• 1:14:10
  And then the second thing is I look at what he's now done, going back to your question of him sort of leaving a few weeks after winning.
• 1:14:16
  He now involves – he's a startup tech investor.
• 1:14:20
  So he's pretty much in a very similar field to what I'm doing with machine learning and AI.
• 1:14:25
  But he's coming from a venture capital investment side.
• 1:14:28
  But he's identified –
• 1:14:31
  that the future of the world and the way it's all going is around machines and automation.
• 1:14:35
  And he's investing very heavily in that.
• 1:14:37
  He also invests in motor racing, in Formula E, and helping young drivers in F1 get to F1 and that sort of thing.
• 1:14:43
  So the fact that he hasn't just retired and...
• 1:14:46
  and he's sitting there doing nothing or cruising around in whatever boats he's got.
• 1:14:50
  He's actually working hard and he's doing the right things.
• 1:14:55
  And I've sort of expected Nico to do some of that.
• 1:14:57
  So it doesn't surprise me what it is.
• 1:15:00
  Interesting that the race that he won, the World Championship that won in Abu Dhabi, I thought it was one of the greatest races of his life.
• 1:15:08
  The pressure on him was just immense.
• 1:15:12
  And it was, I always remember him doing the speech afterwards and watching it, because I did watch that Grand Prix.
• 1:15:18
  And him saying that he came up behind Max Verstappen.
• 1:15:21
  And he didn't know it was Verstappen, obviously, but he probably saw the Red Bull rear wing or something.
• 1:15:24
  And then his race engineer comes on the radio and says, you've got to overtake the car in front, you know, to make sure you win this championship.
• 1:15:31
  It's Max Verstappen.
• 1:15:32
  And he talked about that and said, there is no worse message I could have had on the radio.
• 1:15:37
  He said, I'm absolutely maxed out knowing how important this is to my career and life.
• 1:15:42
  And then one guy I don't want to have to overtake is Max Verstappen.
• 1:15:45
  And there he is.
• 1:15:46
  So anyway.
• 1:15:47
  In your Williams chapter, a young, hungry Australian, Mark Webber arrives.
• 1:15:53
  He would go on to win races, obviously, with Red Bull and fight for the championship.
• 1:15:57
  But what was the hungry Mark Webber like during that time at Williams?
• 1:16:01
  Yeah, Mark was great, to be honest, and he brought an energy about, you know, he was very professional.
• 1:16:06
  As you know, everything he does, he takes his fitness very seriously.
• 1:16:09
  He turns up to compete properly and, you know, everything he does has always been like that.
• 1:16:17
  And he, it was a particularly difficult time for the team in terms of competitiveness, but...
• 1:16:23
  racing's like that.
• 1:16:24
  So you're always going to do that.
• 1:16:26
  And Mark knows that as well.
• 1:16:27
  Um, you always have ups and downs and he had, he had similar ups and downs at Red Bull and other teams he's been at.
• 1:16:32
  Um, but fortunately I'm really glad, you know, happy for him that he got the, got the wins that he deserved when he was at Red Bull, which obviously didn't, didn't come at Williams.
• 1:16:39
  But, but, uh, no, he was, he was nothing but professional and, you know, got a lot of time for him because I sort of look at, I know where Mark came from.
• 1:16:48
  You know, he came from Queanbeyan, just around the corner from where I used to race dirt bikes.
• 1:16:52
  And I know what it's like for a kid to go from Queanbeyan to winning Grand Prix's in Formula One.
• 1:16:58
  And it's massively easy to underestimate that.
• 1:17:01
  So remember when someone's on a world stage against the other 19-odd other best drivers in the world.
• 1:17:10
  it's extremely competitive just to even be there is an accomplishment in itself, let alone to be there and be competitive and to win Grand Prixs against world champions.
• 1:17:20
  And Mark's done all that.
• 1:17:21
  And the history books say that, and he's ticked that box.
• 1:17:26
  But he had a huge amount of energy.
• 1:17:29
  We had probably a good relationship because we're both Aussies.
• 1:17:33
  I used to go to the Speedway with him.
• 1:17:34
  We'd go and watch Jason Crump, Lee Adams, the two main Aussie guys in Speedway at the time.
• 1:17:42
  Go down there to watch that because he was right into it.
• 1:17:46
  In fact, a few years later when Lee Adams had his accident on his dirt bike here in Australia, Mark and I did a fundraising thing for him because he ended up in a wheelchair.
• 1:17:56
  Um, and, uh, so Mark and I worked on that together many years after we had left Williams and, uh, no, great guy.
• 1:18:03
  I sometimes say to my colleagues in the general media, no, you misunderstand Lewis Hamilton, right?
• 1:18:09
  This guy is a properly talented, even as a junior, super fast.
• 1:18:14
  And we know now what he's gone on to achieve it at world championship level.
• 1:18:18
  I sometimes think they get a bit, you know, by the Hollywood Lewis Hamilton, their opinion is
• 1:18:25
  You worked, you know, during your time at McLaren, he was there obviously before he moved on to Mercedes.
• 1:18:31
  What was he like and do you feel the same as I've just described?
• 1:18:36
  Oh, absolutely.
• 1:18:37
  I mean, he's the best driver in Formula One and that goes...
• 1:18:42
  I know he's winning world championships now, but even when he wasn't winning championships, he's one of the greatest.
• 1:18:50
  He's probably only matched in the current era right now by Sebastian Vettel, maybe to a lesser extent Kimi because Kimi's getting a bit older now.
• 1:19:03
  But they're what I call grade one drivers where they'll...
• 1:19:06
  There's...
• 1:19:08
  There's nothing wrong with being a grade one or grade two driver, but a grade one driver, they'll win races they shouldn't win.
• 1:19:15
  Michael Schumacher was like that, where as a grade two driver, if they're good enough to put a car on the grid and you put it on pole, they'll motor off into the distance and win the race for you.
• 1:19:27
  that group of drivers that can do that is bigger than the ones that win the race they shouldn't win.
• 1:19:33
  Lewis definitely fits in that category.
• 1:19:36
  One thing you've got to remember, this doesn't just apply to Lewis, it applies to all of them, all drivers, is Formula One has three pillars and it's pretty much the show, so the things that keep the business alive.
• 1:19:48
  So it's the show.
• 1:19:48
  So by the show, I mean overtaking pit stops, racing starts, all the action, the stuff that people watch racing for.
• 1:19:57
  The second bit is the technical side.
• 1:19:59
  There's people that watch Formula One, that it could be the most boring race that, you know, it's like watching paint dry, but they'll watch it because they know it's the highest, the best technology.
• 1:20:09
  They want to understand, oh, here's this new curve system or gearbox or whatever the technology is.
• 1:20:15
  They watch it because they know it's the best.
• 1:20:16
  It's a little bit like going to an air show.
• 1:20:18
  You go to an air show is actually not that interesting.
• 1:20:20
  Watching jets fly around really slowly, there's nothing competitive about it.
• 1:20:24
  But you go and see it because you know that F-18 or that MiG is the best that technology can make.
• 1:20:29
  So they attract lots of people for that reason.
• 1:20:32
  Um, and then the third pillar of Formula One is the show is what I call showbiz and the showbiz is Lewis Hamilton going out with a rockstar girlfriend.
• 1:20:40
  Um, Kimmy was staggering out of a nightclub at two o'clock in the morning.
• 1:20:43
  You know, those, those Eddie Irvine slagging someone off in the press for, for, cause he just doesn't like them.
• 1:20:49
  Um.
• 1:20:50
  And Juan Pablo having a tantrum at people.
• 1:20:53
  All those things, by the way, I really like Juan Pablo.
• 1:20:56
  He's one of the greatest drivers I've ever worked with.
• 1:20:59
  But all those things make up Formula One.
• 1:21:01
  And the beauty about Formula One is at any point in time, one of those things is always kicking off.
• 1:21:06
  So you could go through a string of five boring races, but the showbiz is happening.
• 1:21:11
  And in showbiz, I also put politics.
• 1:21:15
  What is it?
• 1:21:15
  Diffuser gate or lie gate or such and such gate, whatever it is.
• 1:21:20
  Keeps us all talking.
• 1:21:21
  Yeah, exactly.
• 1:21:22
  And it's the most resilient business model you can ever imagine because – and I'm not saying I don't have to get audiences, et cetera, et cetera.
• 1:21:29
  I'll talk about that a little bit in a minute because I've got a view on that about motor racing in general.
• 1:21:34
  But –
• 1:21:35
  I've seen it go through points where I've thought, wow, Formula One's really in trouble now, and then something will kick off.
• 1:21:40
  It doesn't take long.
• 1:21:41
  And then sometimes I almost think it's orchestrated.
• 1:21:43
  And I think it's someone like Bernie in the background saying, do this thing now because there's not enough people watching because the racing's boring.
• 1:21:50
  And then suddenly you go through a quiet period of showbiz and you'll have a fantastic Grand Prix because it rains in Spa or it's just a good race, you know, so...
• 1:21:58
  So that's why it's got all those three pillars.
• 1:22:00
  And I think it's got that over any other sport.
• 1:22:03
  If I look at something like, look, if you come back to our homegrown series with supercars, fantastic on-track action and overtaking, nothing really on the technology side.
• 1:22:13
  You know, yeah, there's some technology there.
• 1:22:15
  They're pretty good.
• 1:22:16
  In fact, when you first interviewed me when I started doing some work for Roland, I was actually pretty impressed by what a supercar was.
• 1:22:22
  But it's not Formula One.
• 1:22:23
  They're not prototype racers.
• 1:22:25
  And on a showbiz side, pretty – not compared to Formula 1, but there's not as much stuff going on there.
• 1:22:32
  And that's pretty much the same across all the other categories.
• 1:22:34
  It's only Formula 1 that has those three streams just there all the time, and that's what they protect.
• 1:22:41
  But interestingly, it goes to, so you start off on Lewis and I think Lewis is part of, he's just part of that system.
• 1:22:47
  And he's got some big, big fans and he's got big detractors.
• 1:22:51
  And that's the same with anyone who upsets the, you know, is out there being competitive.
• 1:22:55
  You're never going to keep everybody happy.
• 1:22:58
  But when I worked with him, he was brilliant, very dedicated and focused and natural talent, just absolutely fantastic.
• 1:23:04
  He was beatable.
• 1:23:06
  And that's why Nico beat him to the championship.
• 1:23:08
  Jensen had fantastic years against him and could beat him when, but most of the time I saw him beaten, it was because they were out thinking him, not out driving him.
• 1:23:17
  It was very, very rare to see him get outdriven.
• 1:23:21
  But, yeah, he's a fantastic driver.
• 1:23:24
  So one of the points we just touched on there was the show.
• 1:23:26
  And I think the one thing that I definitely see in racing is... And you're talking about this as motorsport overarching, not just Formula One here.
• 1:23:34
  No, just motorsport in general.
• 1:23:36
  But it probably...
• 1:23:38
  Formula 1 tells us to be a very strong bellwether for everything else because it's so public and it's got so many viewers.
• 1:23:43
  So if you see, you can have small percentage changes and it can be millions of people watching.
• 1:23:48
  So compared to other racing, whether it's supercars or DTM or NASCAR.
• 1:23:54
  If you look at our generation, the younger generation, they have a much different view on the way things, the way sport or entertainment is viewed.
• 1:24:04
  And I think if you look at things like, if you don't entertain a young kid now within a minute or two, they're gone.
• 1:24:10
  And it's because they can, they'll go and look up Russian road rage videos on YouTube, or they'll look at something that just keeps them stimulated very quickly.
• 1:24:18
  So they won't sit out the races as sort of long-time motor racing fans.
• 1:24:23
  And it's the same as if you've watched tennis or you watch rugby league or rugby union, you know you're going to sit through some stuff that's boring because you know the good stuff's going to come.
• 1:24:34
  And fans, diehard fans are prepared to do that.
• 1:24:37
  Young kids aren't.
• 1:24:38
  So they'll look at something and if you don't get them entertained very quickly, they'll turn it off.
• 1:24:44
  So I think one of the biggest challenges for motor racing over the next 10, 20, 30 years is centres around that.
• 1:24:53
  I also think some of the sports, like Formula One in particular, they have a – and I used to have this conversation with Bernie Eccleston.
• 1:25:00
  So one of the problems is you're trying to sell bums on seats and get people to watch TV.
• 1:25:05
  The only reason why people watch sport is because the outcome is unknown.
• 1:25:08
  If you knew what the race result was going to be or you knew the result of this soccer match this weekend, you'd get – the audience would drop by 90% because you'd only get the diehards who just want to watch it because it was technical.
• 1:25:20
  So inside Formula One, what's an engineer's job?
• 1:25:23
  An engineer's job is to understand, make things predictable, make it boring.
• 1:25:28
  Their mission is not to make it boring, but they make it boring as a result of what they do.
• 1:25:32
  And that's the same as any engineer.
• 1:25:33
  You want to make sure when you drive over the bridge...
• 1:25:36
  every day it doesn't fall down and to make sure it doesn't fall down the civil engineer who designs that has to understand it and he has to know i don't want the it to be unpredictable at all it's got to be a boring bridge that someone gets in the car and drives over every day so you can boil engineering down to that that's no different to a f1 engineer saying i want to understand how the aerodynamics and the tires work perfectly so i can do the fastest lap time i want to i want to have a
• 1:26:00
  simulation using machine learning and Monte Carlo methods running continuously in the background, running a billion strategies all the time through the race.
• 1:26:08
  So I make exactly the right call on race strategy.
• 1:26:10
  So I don't waste one lap longer or I don't come too early into the pit.
• 1:26:15
  So I optimize it.
• 1:26:15
  What happens when everyone does that is it makes the sport boring because it's predictable.
• 1:26:21
  So those two things are diametrically opposed inside Formula 1 and because the technical groups have such a big control on Formula 1 and the regulations.
• 1:26:29
  And I was in there living and breathing this myself for 20 years, over 20 years.
• 1:26:32
  So I'm as much to blame for this as well.
• 1:26:37
  By the way, I don't necessarily have a solution to that for Formula 1, but I think it's going to make it incredibly difficult unless they decouple those technical groups from the regulations and the sport themselves
• 1:26:48
  for Formula One to compete into the future and compete against sports that are interesting for the young crowd because the demographic of people who watch motor racing is shifting with our generations, getting older and older.
• 1:27:01
  Absolutely.
• 1:27:01
  And it's not being backfilled.
• 1:27:03
  When I was a young kid growing up, sure, I hung around people that were probably more petrol-headed than average, working for Neil and all the people I knew from motorcycle racing, but,
• 1:27:15
  If I went around my school, not everyone raced a motorbike or something, but they knew about it and they were interested.
• 1:27:19
  Oh, you've got a new car and look, I've got a new Tirana or something like that.
• 1:27:23
  That litmus test of kids now is different.
• 1:27:25
  It's completely gone.
• 1:27:27
  So my kids are 17 and 19, and I don't know any of their friends that are interested in motor racing.
• 1:27:33
  That is scary in my mind.
• 1:27:35
  Yeah, literally none of them.
• 1:27:37
  So they – it's – and there's another good limit of this test is kids getting licences.
• 1:27:43
  Mate, that was on my calendar for about two years.
• 1:27:45
  Probably the same for you.
• 1:27:47
  Yes.
• 1:27:47
  I'm getting my licence on this date and then I can drive and I can go to more dirt bike tracks or something or go to races.
• 1:27:55
  It's just not a big thing now.
• 1:27:57
  By the way, I'm generalising –
• 1:28:00
  And I live in the middle of Sydney, so I do realise that I live in the middle of a city.
• 1:28:04
  But, you know, cities are where the big populations are that you need to watch the television to watch these sports.
• 1:28:10
  So I think...
• 1:28:12
  I don't mean that as doom and gloom.
• 1:28:14
  I mean, if you don't attack that right at the top of the sport, and that applies to supercars, it applies to Formula One, it applies to BTCC, DTM, motorbikes, if they don't attack that right at the top, then I think it's going to come under the threat from other sports.
• 1:28:29
  I think it's a fascinating subject, mate, and probably one that you could dedicate a whole podcast to with a range of different views on it for that matter.
• 1:28:36
  Let's wrap up your Formula One career before we talk about life now.
• 1:28:40
  Firstly, the opportunity to come and to work at Williams, I mean, to work with Patrick Head, to work with Sir Frank.
• 1:28:48
  How did the door open?
• 1:28:49
  And when you got in there, did you really think, firstly, A,
• 1:28:56
  how massive that achievement was and B how big the responsibility was knowing its heritage, knowing the things that they had achieved.
• 1:29:03
  Yeah, it was huge.
• 1:29:04
  I think it was, um, at that time, uh, as I mentioned, um, a while ago, uh, it was the, around 99.
• 1:29:12
  So we'd had a very successful year at Jordan.
• 1:29:15
  Um, we'd beaten Williams in the championship.
• 1:29:17
  They'd come fourth.
• 1:29:18
  We'd come third.
• 1:29:19
  Um,
• 1:29:21
  I'm pretty sure it was McLaren Ferrari in first and second.
• 1:29:25
  And I remember I got a call from Patrick Head right about the same time I actually had a call from Ross Bourne to go to Ferrari because I knew Ross from the pit lane, spent all my early career fighting against him as strategy, as I mentioned earlier.
• 1:29:39
  That's a difficult decision in itself, mate, because you're kind of spoiled for choice there.
• 1:29:42
  Yeah, and I think at that time, my daughter, Tony, had just been born.
• 1:29:46
  So she was only not even a year old.
• 1:29:51
  Jean and Ross had asked me to come to Ferrari.
• 1:29:54
  And when I met with Patrick, I told him that because I actually really wanted to stay in England.
• 1:30:00
  And he responded very quickly and offered me a job.
• 1:30:03
  So I sort of used that a little bit.
• 1:30:06
  you could say.
• 1:30:07
  But it was not because I didn't want to go to Ferrari, but it was really the stage of where my life was up to.
• 1:30:13
  I think if, because my wife Vanessa just had a baby and we were planning on having a second kid, which we did a year later with Jack.
• 1:30:22
  It worked very well for that time.
• 1:30:24
  So we were already living in Oxford and I was at Jordan's and Williams is just 30 minutes the other direction.
• 1:30:30
  So we didn't even have to move house or schools or any of that sort of stuff, not that they were in school at that time.
• 1:30:35
  So that's how it happened.
• 1:30:36
  So I met with Patrick and then I met with Frank.
• 1:30:40
  I had a couple of meetups with them and then joined them as chief operations engineer.
• 1:30:44
  And that was fantastic.
• 1:30:46
  I worked with them for 11 years.
• 1:30:48
  I still keep in...
• 1:30:51
  I keep in touch with them, still know them very well.
• 1:30:54
  Frank Williams is a shareholder in my company actually.
• 1:30:57
  Yeah, so I went back to him after, even though I went to McLaren for four years afterwards.
• 1:31:02
  So I still, in fact, I saw him about three months ago when I was last in England.
• 1:31:06
  So he's someone who has a, if working with Frank is incredible, I'll talk about Frank first, because he, and Patrick actually described this the best.
• 1:31:16
  He said, I've never seen Frank come in
• 1:31:19
  and complain about the fact about his condition he said in my whole time i've ever known him he said remember patrick worked for him for probably 10 years before frank has had his accident and and he said he's he's never come in and in one day and said and felt sorry for himself and said ah this is really crap being in this wheelchair or had a really rough sleep last night never once all he wants to do is talk about the future and
• 1:31:43
  And Frank, you'd come back from winning a Grand Prix, even coming first and second, and he'd say, fantastic.
• 1:31:48
  And five minutes later, it was like, I don't even care what happened, what's going to happen in two weeks' time.
• 1:31:54
  And that mentality was brilliant to have inside the factory.
• 1:31:57
  And Frank's still like that now.
• 1:31:59
  He's obviously elderly now, and he can't do the things that he used to be able to do.
• 1:32:04
  But he's a, you know, he was a fantastic influence and someone who was different to all the other characters I work with, but a really sort of guiding sort of pillar for the company, and he still is for Williams.
• 1:32:16
  Patrick, completely different character, very sort of engineer's engineer, understood all the nuts and bolts and very involved in the detail.
• 1:32:28
  Loved the, very competitive person, you know, just always...
• 1:32:31
  always looking for the very brutal to work for as well, which I actually enjoyed.
• 1:32:36
  Most Aussies like to be told what's straight.
• 1:32:39
  There's no question about Patrick being straight.
• 1:32:42
  I found him, he was probably the, he was very non-political.
• 1:32:48
  So even if you were having tough conversations, and there was probably one of the things to his credit that he said to me when I left Williams and went to McLaren, and he said one of the most enjoyable things about working with you was, meaning myself, was even in the really bad times, you never turned it back on yourself.
• 1:33:05
  Sorry, you never turned it back on anyone else.
• 1:33:07
  You always said, this is my responsibility.
• 1:33:09
  I'm the technical director.
• 1:33:11
  And he spent a lot – he was at pains to point that out to me almost.
• 1:33:13
  It was something that he wanted to obviously communicate, but...
• 1:33:17
  So I got on very well with Patrick and it was actually a really tough decision to leave the team at the time.
• 1:33:22
  How did you handle it then?
• 1:33:24
  Yeah, it was the right time because it was 11 years.
• 1:33:27
  And I looked at it and thought, well, I'd never really – I thought if I stayed there – I could have stayed there.
• 1:33:32
  They wanted me to fulfil a sporting role, but I wanted to go and do something different.
• 1:33:38
  I actually went and did a similar role at McLaren to what Williams wanted me to do.
• 1:33:42
  But I felt that Williams needed renewal and I did as well.
• 1:33:45
  So I sort of feel that about any team.
• 1:33:48
  Ten years is a long time.
• 1:33:49
  For sure.
• 1:33:50
  Yeah, for both of us.
• 1:33:51
  And I think it was absolutely the right thing to do.
• 1:33:53
  And that's the way I put it to them.
• 1:33:55
  And yeah, they were good.
• 1:33:57
  Martin Whitmarsh, Ron Dennis.
• 1:33:59
  I mean, again, you get to work with some very powerful, and from the point of view of Ron, someone just absolutely entrenched in the sport, an icon of the game.
• 1:34:08
  Oh, yeah.
• 1:34:08
  Yeah.
• 1:34:08
  Ron's probably, he's reset so many benchmarks and he's probably, I mean, before I went there and got to know Ron and I mainly worked with Martin for the first couple of years until Martin left and then the next couple of years it was Ron.
• 1:34:23
  But obviously I worked with Ron as well, but he was very focused on the automotive side when I first arrived because they were just launching that 12C road car, et cetera, et cetera.
• 1:34:33
  and in fact it had a lot to do with him straight away because they had a problem with a road car and they needed a race team to go and fix it and I remember they had this sort of they had a problem with this is a road car story but they had a problem with rear suspension bolts when their ferns launched the car that released 100 cars
• 1:34:47
  They'd stopped them at the docks so none had left the country, or maybe a handful hadn't there to get them back.
• 1:34:51
  And they came back and the automotive group had said something like this is a two-week job to rectify this.
• 1:34:57
  And Ron came in to see myself and Martin actually and said, we've got this problem.
• 1:35:03
  Can we get the race?
• 1:35:04
  It was an off weekend for the race team, meaning can we get them to fix it?
• 1:35:07
  So we put the race team together and we did the whole job in 36 hours.
• 1:35:12
  Yeah.
• 1:35:12
  And then the cars were turned around and some of them were being shipped again in 48 hours.
• 1:35:16
  So I'd gone from two weeks, you know, normal production mentality to 36 hours for a race team.
• 1:35:21
  So that was one of my earliest experiences of Ron.
• 1:35:26
  I knew Ron from the paddock and certain meetings and things that we'd been to.
• 1:35:29
  And I remember him from Michelin Gate in India and things like that.
• 1:35:32
  So I'd spent time with him before, but obviously got to know him much more when I worked for him.
• 1:35:38
  He was, I'd say all the stories that you hear about Ron, about making sure the trees on the roundabout are aligned.
• 1:35:45
  All the tie wraps inside the building being aligned, the perfection, that's all 100% true.
• 1:35:53
  He has all the stones on his driveways removed every year and cleaned for moss on the underside just because he knows it's there.
• 1:36:00
  All true.
• 1:36:03
  I think he revels in that because he –
• 1:36:07
  I remember him saying to me once, he said, Sam, I'm going to tell you a secret and I'm going to say it on your podcast because it's fine.
• 1:36:14
  And he said, but everyone says I'm a stickler for detail.
• 1:36:17
  He goes, but what I do is my technique is really, really simple.
• 1:36:21
  He goes, I walk into a room and I purposely look
• 1:36:25
  away from, I look laterally and away from where the center of activity is and I look for a fault.
• 1:36:31
  And what I do is I go to that fault and he said, it could be a cracked tile in the far corner of a building.
• 1:36:37
  And I get everyone over and I say, look at this.
• 1:36:40
  He gives the example of a tile, but it could be a...
• 1:36:42
  you know, a bolt on the back of a car.
• 1:36:44
  And I say, you see this tile?
• 1:36:46
  He said, this is unacceptable.
• 1:36:47
  You know, I've walked straight into this room and seen it.
• 1:36:49
  He said, please make sure we sort this out and it doesn't happen again.
• 1:36:52
  Sort of the worst of those effect.
• 1:36:54
  He said, then I'll leave the room and I know that then what everyone says is, oh my God, how did he see that tile?
• 1:36:59
  If he can see that, he can see everything.
• 1:37:02
  He said, but I can't see everything.
• 1:37:04
  It's impossible.
• 1:37:05
  But he's left that perception.
• 1:37:05
  But I've left that perception.
• 1:37:07
  He goes, so I've walked out of there and everyone's – then when people are doing things I'm never going to see, they're thinking, hey, if Ron can see that cracked tile, he can see what I'm doing here on this wishbone or this gearbox.
• 1:37:16
  So I'm going to make sure if Ron came to look at this now, he can't pick holes in it.
• 1:37:21
  And that's how – his secret was very simple, but he applied that technique every day.
• 1:37:28
  So he had a, to be honest, the biggest thing that Formula 1, first of all, what Ron did for McLaren and Martin.
• 1:37:35
  Martin was a part of that journey, remember.
• 1:37:37
  But building that MTC, building the technology centre, building the road car place, it's just incredible vision.
• 1:37:44
  That was the difference between Ron and Frank.
• 1:37:45
  So Frank was the racer's racer.
• 1:37:47
  It just, although Williams Hybrid Engineering and Williams Advanced Engineering, all that stuff they did, he did that.
• 1:37:54
  It's almost on a duress for Frank.
• 1:37:55
  He wasn't injured.
• 1:37:56
  All he cared about was Formula One racing.
• 1:37:58
  So he knew that the business side needed that, but Ron drove those parts, whereas Frank didn't, which is fine.
• 1:38:05
  Frank was so focused on racing.
• 1:38:06
  And that's probably the biggest difference between the two of them.
• 1:38:09
  So going back to Ron, he built that thing, but...
• 1:38:12
  The biggest thing that Ron Dennis is credited with is he has the ultimate respect of every mechanic in the pit lane.
• 1:38:19
  And that's because he was the first guy that started pulling cars apart in the mid 80s or early 80s when he was a mechanic.
• 1:38:26
  And he would pull the cars apart even when there was nothing wrong with them.
• 1:38:30
  So that's standard practice now in Formula One.
• 1:38:32
  They'll do their two or three hours of practice during the day, and that night everything gets stripped and checked, crack-checked or replaced, turned around for the next thing.
• 1:38:40
  And that's how it achieves – that's how – it doesn't always work out, but their target is to always get 100% reliability.
• 1:38:46
  And that's how it all stems back to Ron Dermis' methodology that he introduced off his own bat as a mechanic.
• 1:38:53
  And he did that because he said, I don't want to go home at night
• 1:38:57
  and just go to bed knowing I had this time to double check, strip that gearbox and make sure it was okay.
• 1:39:03
  So the reliability of his cars became better and his methodology of cleanliness and attention to detail stems back to when he was turning spanners.
• 1:39:12
  And all the mechanics in pit lanes who have studied
• 1:39:16
  and know where F1 mechanics come from, they know that.
• 1:39:19
  So it doesn't matter that he's, I mean, he's out of Formula One now, but it didn't matter when he was team principal or team owner walking down the pit lane, every mechanic knew that guy created the method that I'm applying now.
• 1:39:30
  And that for me is almost like his biggest contribution to racing.
• 1:39:34
  You know, Ron's made 100 contributions, but that for me is the biggest.
• 1:39:38
  And it lasts forever, that legacy.
• 1:39:41
  You can't, impossible to take away.
• 1:39:43
  A couple of final questions on Formula One.
• 1:39:45
  Firstly, the advent of simulators.
• 1:39:47
  I mean, they are a hugely powerful, immensely important tool in the game now.
• 1:39:53
  From your point of view, and there's some backstories about older, more established drivers struggling in them and that younger kids like Max Verstappen love it and things like that, aren't they?
• 1:40:04
  Yeah, so simulators, they can't fully simulate what happens on the track, of course, because they go a long way with creating Gs and there's all different types of platforms.
• 1:40:13
  Some fly around inside big warehouses and things like that.
• 1:40:18
  But what you're trying to do is you're trying to replicate the things that are important to develop the car.
• 1:40:25
  So a really good example of simulating, you have a young driver.
• 1:40:28
  Formula One testing is extremely limited now.
• 1:40:31
  so you can't just throw drivers in for a test like you used to be able to do.
• 1:40:34
  So getting them ready to test in a same mode is really important.
• 1:40:38
  And when you go in there, there's probably three or four things an F1 engineer will look at with a young driver to make sure he's driving a Formula 1 car properly to optimise lap time.
• 1:40:45
  So they'll be looking at brake pressure, steering trace,
• 1:40:49
  you know, throttle, everything else, and just making sure they're driving it the way they should do.
• 1:40:53
  Because Formula 1 cars gain lap time in certain areas that are different to saloon cars or even other cars, mainly because of the huge amount of downforce they've got and the very lightweight that the car is, but also because of tyres, making sure you're not driving over the top of them,
• 1:41:07
  looking at slip angle curves and things like that.
• 1:41:09
  So when you run in a simulator, you have a team of engineers sitting behind a panel, which you've probably seen photos or videos on the web, and they're looking at the data traces as if that car was actually driving around the track.
• 1:41:19
  And the driver driving it is doing the same thing.
• 1:41:22
  Of course they want to go fast, but the last few tenths of the lap time is not what it's about.
• 1:41:26
  It's about looking at the data and making sure, and by the way, I'm not even talking about the aero development, I'm just talking about the driver development.
• 1:41:33
  Making sure the driver is driving as close as they can to the real thing on the track.
• 1:41:38
  Exactly.
• 1:41:38
  So then there's obviously basic things as well.
• 1:41:40
  You look at a Formula 1 steering wheel, it's like a computer.
• 1:41:43
  So getting to know it and knowing what everything does.
• 1:41:45
  Because remember, telemetry is still only one way in Formula 1.
• 1:41:48
  You can't send telemetry to the car.
• 1:41:50
  So if you have to give electronic instruction to a driver, by that I mean...
• 1:41:54
  you know, Sebastian, turn off the backup gearbox pot or something like that, or because there's something wrong with it.
• 1:42:00
  He's got to manually do that on the cockpit.
• 1:42:02
  He won't even know what he's doing.
• 1:42:03
  That'll be a, by the way, what I just said, then there wouldn't be the instruction.
• 1:42:07
  It would be menu six, option B, confirm.
• 1:42:10
  And he'll do a click, click on the straight.
• 1:42:11
  He won't have a clue what that's done.
• 1:42:13
  And they do it subliminally.
• 1:42:14
  They very often don't take their eye off the road.
• 1:42:16
  Subconscious, all that stuff.
• 1:42:18
  But what he does have to know is what to do on the steering wheel to do that.
• 1:42:22
  So it helps you to weed all those things out.
• 1:42:25
  But it's become its biggest focus and the holy grail for the simulators is getting it to the point where you can correctly test aerodynamics, tyres, those type of things.
• 1:42:37
  When I said get into that, I remember doing that.
• 1:42:39
  We started doing that in the mid-2000s at Williams.
• 1:42:42
  We're using it very strongly at McLaren.
• 1:42:44
  McLaren relied very heavily on this simulator when I turned up there.
• 1:42:49
  And those models are getting better and better because I keep using them more.
• 1:42:52
  They're all driven by computer models.
• 1:42:54
  So the more you use them, the more data you're gathering, the more correlation you're doing to the track, et cetera, et cetera.
• 1:43:00
  So it's become a whole other development field by itself, but it's a very important part to driving Formula One.
• 1:43:05
  Going back to your point about different drivers, you're absolutely right.
• 1:43:08
  Some drivers really struggle to drive them.
• 1:43:10
  Some of them even get sick.
• 1:43:12
  I've driven a simulator a couple of times and they're not easy to drive.
• 1:43:15
  It's not like driving a computer game on your laptop, that's for sure.
• 1:43:19
  Was it a hard thing to stop?
• 1:43:20
  And what was the decision-making process?
• 1:43:22
  It had been more than 20 years a part of your life.
• 1:43:25
  How did that come about?
• 1:43:26
  Yeah, I wanted to, for my family, my wife and my two kids, I wanted to stop at a point where I had time to do, to spend more time with my kids and family, especially as they were entering their last years of high school.
• 1:43:40
  I couldn't do that in England.
• 1:43:41
  If I just stopped work in England, then I wanted to come back to Australia at the same time.
• 1:43:45
  I would have just got sucked straight back in.
• 1:43:47
  When I left McLaren, I had...
• 1:43:49
  you know offers from other teams to go there which were long-standing ones um and i knew that if i stayed there the temptation to go back in would be would be very high because it's just easy to keep doing what you're doing um so i wanted to go and develop a different career which is what i've done um and i did that successfully from australia um in fact that actually started in oxford that's that's another story we can talk about in a minute if you like um but it's a
• 1:44:15
  Having done it for that long, I completely respect people who spend their whole life doing motor racing, and I'm still involved in motor racing.
• 1:44:23
  I still do some work for Roland at 888.
• 1:44:27
  I still sit on the Ames safety board with Gary Connolly.
• 1:44:31
  I sit on the...
• 1:44:34
  research working group in Paris for FIA on safety as well.
• 1:44:37
  So I still do some bits and pieces, but it's probably about 5% of my time.
• 1:44:41
  And it enables me to give something back to the business, keep, you know, because I got a lot out of the business over many years.
• 1:44:50
  And so I still do that, but it's sort of very well balanced.
• 1:44:53
  So yeah, I really wanted to set up something while I was still young enough as well.
• 1:44:57
  I think once you go into your 50s and mid to late 50s, then it becomes a lot harder.
• 1:45:03
  So, Frank, you mentioned before, has an interest in this.
• 1:45:05
  What is the business and what are you doing?
• 1:45:07
  Yeah, so we're on a machine learning company.
• 1:45:09
  We started up in Oxford, actually, so we're actually an English company, but we have an office in Perth now as well.
• 1:45:16
  There's only 13, 14 people in the company, half in Australia, half in England.
• 1:45:21
  The main thing that we do is we optimise maintenance.
• 1:45:24
  So we do automated optimised maintenance for big mining companies, oil and gas, transport sector.
• 1:45:31
  So it's nothing to do with racing.
• 1:45:34
  But it was something where I wanted to take the approach methodology that I'd learnt from Formula One and apply it to something completely different.
• 1:45:42
  And I was very interested in getting back into the sort of computing field and coding and AI and machine learning.
• 1:45:50
  because it was something that I did quite a bit of when I was at university, maybe my first couple of years of F1, and was definitely involved in the periphery of that in F1, but I wasn't, you know, I'm not a coder as such.
• 1:46:00
  But if I look at the way the world's going, it's becoming more automated, and I'd really wanted to get a foothold in that, and that's turned out to be very, you know, so far it's going very well.
• 1:46:09
  Good on you.
• 1:46:10
  At the same time, you're doing some work, as you say, with Roland Dane and the Triple Eight organisation.
• 1:46:13
  Just explain what you do there.
• 1:46:16
  So, yeah, with the Triple Eight guys, the main thing I do is do a lot of coaching and mentoring.
• 1:46:22
  So just making sure the team... On the engineering side?
• 1:46:24
  Yes, engineering and sometimes on the mechanics and technical side.
• 1:46:30
  I'm not operational, so even though I might go and do a couple of races a year with them, like a couple of the Enduros, like Bathurst or Gold Coast...
• 1:46:37
  Um, I don't, I don't get involved operationally.
• 1:46:39
  It's not my job.
• 1:46:40
  I don't do that anymore.
• 1:46:41
  Um, and you've got, and I know very well in motor racing to do that.
• 1:46:44
  You've got to be there full time and living and breathing it.
• 1:46:46
  That's, that's not me anymore.
• 1:46:47
  And that's those guys.
• 1:46:49
  Um, so I just help them, uh, on that side, on the coaching and mentoring side.
• 1:46:53
  I do get involved.
• 1:46:54
  I got involved pretty heavily with the new Holden Aero package.
• 1:46:59
  Got involved with the V6 engine before – V6 turbo before that stopped.
• 1:47:03
  A lot of those things are finished now, but there's little things that are ticking over.
• 1:47:08
  But they tend to – it sort of – it works for them and it works for me.
• 1:47:11
  And one of the things I really like about Roland and his team is –
• 1:47:16
  I think if you, once you step away from Formula One and motor racing, you really see the big benefits.
• 1:47:22
  You see both.
• 1:47:23
  You see the positives and negatives.
• 1:47:24
  One of the massive positives about racing people and working with them is they just do stuff.
• 1:47:29
  It's so easy to get stuff done.
• 1:47:31
  Like once you start dealing with big... Riptimes.
• 1:47:35
  Red tape, oh, you have all that with big companies.
• 1:47:38
  And you can look at things, how long is this going to take?
• 1:47:40
  Oh, that's going to take a year.
• 1:47:41
  Go to a motor racing person, oh, we'll have that done by 8 o'clock tomorrow morning.
• 1:47:45
  It's completely different.
• 1:47:46
  And the nice thing about staying in touch with those guys is you sort of keep a foothold and interest in that.
• 1:47:51
  So otherwise you can tend to forget how fast you can do things.
• 1:47:54
  there's still the competitive side and things like that and so it's a yeah again it's a you know it's a they're a great mob to be involved in really enjoy Roland and his his company he's a very competitive individual could have could have been very successful in in Europe I think and even Formula One if he chose not to come out to Australia very sort of sensible and competitive person probably got the same traits as a lot of people like Ron and and Patrick that I've worked with that just have that a
• 1:48:23
  Just across all the detail.
• 1:48:25
  So they couldn't be sort of kidded or misdirected by people.
• 1:48:29
  My dealings with him, I reckon that's 100% accurate.
• 1:48:32
  It's called Rusty's Garage, the podcast series.
• 1:48:34
  So let's come back to the Sam Michael Garage.
• 1:48:36
  Firstly, what is your daily drive?
• 1:48:38
  Oh, you'll be disappointed to know my daily drive is a Toyota Hilux.
• 1:48:41
  No way!
• 1:48:43
  I always get that grief from the guys who work for me in my company.
• 1:48:45
  She's also always saying, why don't you drive a, you know, hotted up road car or whatever it is.
• 1:48:50
  But actually the way I've probably become too practical.
• 1:48:54
  I do still have a 65 Mustang.
• 1:48:57
  Tell me about that.
• 1:48:58
  So I should say that.
• 1:48:59
  It's actually in Southampton in England.
• 1:49:01
  But I have a Mustang that I rebuilt, much to Finesse's, my wife's disappointment, I rebuilt the engine, which is a,
• 1:49:10
  They're a 289 cubic inch V8.
• 1:49:13
  I did a full strip and rebuild of that in my kitchen in Oxford.
• 1:49:18
  And I'd say to her, but to build an engine properly, you need a really clean, sterile environment.
• 1:49:24
  What could be better than a kitchen?
• 1:49:26
  So that lived in our kitchen for about 12 months because it was when I was still doing Formula 1.
• 1:49:30
  So every now and then I'd come home from work and have done a full day and put in some camshaft bearings or check the big ends and stuff like that.
• 1:49:40
  How far have you gone?
• 1:49:41
  I mean, is it Concourse Spick?
• 1:49:43
  Where's it at?
• 1:49:44
  Oh, it's probably, it's all original.
• 1:49:46
  Everything's date coded, so it's got all the proper date codes on it.
• 1:49:50
  Yeah, four-speed manual.
• 1:49:52
  There's nothing on there that didn't come with the car.
• 1:49:55
  I probably had to correct about 5% of it, so bits where, little bits and pieces that I knew were wrong.
• 1:50:01
  But I'm always glad that it's in England because...
• 1:50:05
  It probably goes back to my character trait in that thing that Neil Bates spoke about right at the beginning.
• 1:50:10
  I get so committed to the detail, almost to the exclusion of everything else around me.
• 1:50:16
  So I'd find that my wife would be saying, Vanessa would be saying, let's do this thing.
• 1:50:20
  And my mind would be full of, if not Formula One.
• 1:50:23
  where can I get a water pump pulley for a 65 Mustang with the exact numbers on the code?
• 1:50:30
  And I'd research and find out.
• 1:50:31
  You know who else is really like that?
• 1:50:32
  It's Mark Larkin.
• 1:50:33
  Yeah, he's well into...
• 1:50:36
  The moment you say to a car restorer that they're into date codes, that takes you into another regime of person.
• 1:50:42
  It goes back to that fastidious sort of attention to detail.
• 1:50:46
  So it sort of means something else when you talk about that.
• 1:50:49
  But, yeah, so that's my other driver.
• 1:50:52
  Marco has agreed to come on to the podcast, so I'll hit you up for some ammo when I'm sure there's plenty of it.
• 1:50:58
  If you could have a Grail machine, could be an historic car, could be a Veyron, could be anything, what would the Grail car be?
• 1:51:05
  Although I did a lot of racing motorcycles, dirt bikes when I was younger, I know I'm hopeless on a road bike.
• 1:51:11
  I was in Monaco once and I was at dinner at the Schumacher's house with Michael and Ralph.
• 1:51:17
  And I had to drive from Monaco back to Menton.
• 1:51:20
  There's a little village up the road.
• 1:51:21
  It's about 30 minutes away.
• 1:51:23
  And dinner had finished and he obviously couldn't be bothered giving me a lift back.
• 1:51:28
  So Michael said, take my Ducati Monster.
• 1:51:30
  It's just downstairs.
• 1:51:31
  So I went, yeah, no problem.
• 1:51:32
  I knew how to ride a motorbike.
• 1:51:33
  So I went downstairs, jumped on this Ducati monster.
• 1:51:35
  It was obviously all hotted up as well because why would he not have the fastest monster in the world?
• 1:51:40
  Okay, got on the bike.
• 1:51:42
  I was heading along the sort of French Riviera.
• 1:51:44
  It's probably about nine o'clock at night.
• 1:51:46
  And I thought, oh, I'm doing pretty well here.
• 1:51:48
  You know, I've got this thing under control.
• 1:51:49
  I'm going pretty fast.
• 1:51:51
  I don't want to take it too easy.
• 1:51:52
  Just as I was thinking I was doing really well, these two mopeds came flying past inside of me.
• 1:51:57
  There's two guys on scooters.
• 1:51:59
  So I wouldn't choose a motorcycle.
• 1:52:02
  That's a crushing model.
• 1:52:03
  I know, yeah.
• 1:52:04
  So I do admit to that.
• 1:52:06
  I'll tell you something else about motorcycles in a minute, though.
• 1:52:08
  No, I'll finish on the motorcycles first.
• 1:52:10
  When I was in Formula One, I also sat on the FIA Land Speed Record Commission.
• 1:52:13
  So we used to sanction all the records.
• 1:52:16
  So you'd get involved in the JCB car and all the other things.
• 1:52:22
  everything from Bonneville to Solar Records, everything else like that.
• 1:52:26
  One year we had a meeting that I met, and we had it at Bonneville on the Salt Lake.
• 1:52:31
  One of my favourite movies is The World's Fastest Indian.
• 1:52:35
  I remember going there to Bonneville, and I was there with David Tremaine and Peter Wright, and looking out across his flat, I just thought...
• 1:52:41
  This place is just like, it just sends shivers up your spine to be there.
• 1:52:45
  It's like the Mecca of land speed record.
• 1:52:48
  And I've always sworn that once I, next time I have a transition in my career, you know, between companies or something, I want to build a land speed record bike.
• 1:52:58
  but I'm pretty determined to build like the 50cc record because I know I'll just kill myself if I go, if I went for an outright one, forget it.
• 1:53:04
  So I looked up the speeds for 50ccs and it's about, even that's about 250 kilometres an hour, maybe miles an hour, I don't know, but it's very, very fast.
• 1:53:12
  So anyway, that's probably my foray into bikes in the future.
• 1:53:17
  So when I do that, I'll be tapping up all my contacts in Europe for the best engines, lubes, aerodynamics, structures, et cetera, but that's all on the back burner at the moment.
• 1:53:25
  So going back to your question, I think, I mean, I have to say it sounds a bit cliche, but it's very, I've driven a lot of the McLarens and they are a fantastic car.
• 1:53:36
  I mean, they really redefine sports cars.
• 1:53:39
  It's one of those cars that you can drive it.
• 1:53:42
  10 mile an hour like a Toyota Corolla around the city, and then it's a supercar as soon as you open the throttle.
• 1:53:48
  So it's literally like motorcycle performance on four wheels.
• 1:53:51
  So in terms of modern cars, I quite like those if I had to buy one.
• 1:53:56
  If I bought a vintage car,
• 1:53:59
  I mean, it'd be, for some reason, I've got this, having a 65 Mustang means you've got some sort of, you know, American iron in you, haven't you?
• 1:54:07
  You like that sort of stuff.
• 1:54:08
  I'd probably go back even further to like a 50 Chevy, something like that, that really, you know, one of those cars that just doesn't like to go around corners.
• 1:54:16
  It's just a straight line monster.
• 1:54:18
  So, yeah, I still like those.
• 1:54:20
  I think in terms of sports cars, pretty hard to go away.
• 1:54:23
  I drove one of those Lotuses as a track car in Sydney about two years ago.
• 1:54:27
  Far out.
• 1:54:27
  The value for money, they're pretty good, aren't they?
• 1:54:30
  Because their power to weight ratio is fantastic.
• 1:54:33
  So, anyway, I've given you about four cars.
• 1:54:34
  Yeah, that's all right.
• 1:54:35
  You walk away from those days with a big smile, don't you?
• 1:54:37
  Last one.
• 1:54:38
  You are a calm, methodical person.
• 1:54:41
  I know that.
• 1:54:41
  Does Sam Michael get frustrated on the road by other people's driving habits and things?
• 1:54:47
  What are you like on the road?
• 1:54:49
  Yeah, I do, but it's probably, that's another reason why I drive something like a Hilux, because I can't do much damage in that, can I?
• 1:54:54
  In fact, you're pretty well protected in those things, and you can't go very fast.
• 1:54:58
  Yeah, I do, but it's... Because, I mean, you've come from living in England, and sometimes European driving standards, I think, are seen by well-minded Aussies as being a lot better than in this country, aren't they?
• 1:55:10
  Yeah, that's true.
• 1:55:11
  And I think it's a – I probably haven't – because of the safety boards I've always sat on as well, I've also – I am pretty big on road safety.
• 1:55:19
  When I was a young kid, I drove like an idiot, as we probably all did, and did things that I look at and think, how did you survive all that?
• 1:55:28
  Whether it was off-road on dirt roads with rally cars or even being stupid on the street.
• 1:55:34
  I definitely don't endorse any of that type of driving now.
• 1:55:37
  It's sort of – it's something that can cause a lot of pain if you end up going the wrong way.
• 1:55:42
  But I think it's a – you're right.
• 1:55:44
  I remember going from when I first moved to England in 1993, driving up and down somewhere like Parramatta Road in Sydney is like a battle zone, right?
• 1:55:52
  And you know what it's like.
• 1:55:54
  A lot of drivers have this absolute addiction to keeping you out of their lane.
• 1:55:57
  So if you want to change lanes, it's like, whoa, no way, you're changing lanes.
• 1:56:00
  And I remember I always have this distinct memory of turning up in England –
• 1:56:03
  And being a very – realising I was being a very aggressive driver because I'd go to change lanes and, you know, you're like muscling your way in there.
• 1:56:10
  An English person would back off the throttle and sort of let you in.
• 1:56:13
  No problem.
• 1:56:13
  You want to change lanes, I'll let you in there.
• 1:56:15
  So having driven in England for over 20 years and then coming back, I noticed it straight away when I came back.
• 1:56:21
  But now I think I've probably just filtered in with everybody else.
• 1:56:24
  Yeah.
• 1:56:24
  It's been great to talk to you.
• 1:56:25
  The nice message I reckon to finish on is the road is not a racetrack.
• 1:56:30
  That's a really simple thing.
• 1:56:32
  You've done some amazing things in your career, mate.
• 1:56:34
  We've spoken for ages, but it's been an absolute joy.
• 1:56:36
  Congratulations.
• 1:56:37
  And we're glad that you're still involved in some way with things like AAA and safety boards.
• 1:56:40
  Well done.
• 1:56:41
  Yeah, thanks very much, Greg, and thanks very much to the contribution you've made and everyone in racing, mate.
• 1:56:47
  We're all part of a big family.
• 1:56:49
  It doesn't matter whether it's in Australia or overseas or the globe.
• 1:56:52
  I really love racing people, and I have a lot of thanks for the things that having a career in motor racing has enabled for me.
• 1:56:59
  So thanks very much.
• 1:56:59
  Cheers.
• 1:57:05
  Rusty's Garage is written and presented by me, Greg Rust.
• 1:57:09
  Series producer and editor is Alex Mitchell.
• 1:57:12
  Audio production by Darcy Thompson.
• 1:57:22
  Listener.