MY WEEK IN CARS
Steve Cropley
SUNDAY
SATURDAY
Back to school today – a more pleasant experience than I remember. Especially since the classroom was in the heart of the excellent Silverstone Museum at the entrance to the famous track. I was a guest of Chris Aylett, CEO of Britain’s racing business mouthpiece, the Motorsport Industry Association, to attend part of an intensive four-day course it regularly stages for aspiring race engineers. There were 11 very serious students present, from early-twenties undergraduates to forty-something CEOs, but with the accent definitely on youth. Four were women – a big positive.
Many of the speakers had done one of these courses themselves (the MIA has been doing this for 18 years) before finding successful careers. It was heart-warming to know they were lecturing for love, not money. A deeply experienced, multi-team Formula 1 race engineer explained his bewilderingly complex job, making it crystal clear that teams, not just drivers, deliver victories. A race tyre expert explained the challenges of his job, showing how tyre expertise, properly deployed, can deliver unexpected success.