Another Australian-owned Formula 1 team

This article was written by Barry Lake and was published in Motor Racing Australia 85, April/May 2005.

It’s a long way from a done deal, but most of the pieces are in place for a brand new Formula 1 teamto join the circus. And the man behind it is still-young Australian engineerwho has worked his way up from our local Formula Ford series, as Barry Lake reports.

Mark Preston isn’t an as-tough-as-nails businessman in the mould of ProDrive’s David Richards, who until recently held the reins at BAR-Honda, or Tom Walkinshaw, who owned the Arrows Formula 1 team, or even Minardi’s Australian owner, Paul Stoddart, for that matter.

Neither is he a sometime racer turned single-minded team owner like Frank Williams or Eddie Jordan. If you had to liken Preston to any one of the very individualistic F1 team owners, you might start with Ron Dennis. But then, that isn’t him, either.

What you start to realise is that none of these men is like another. They all are individuals with little in common other than that single-mindedness and a passion for Formula 1 motor racing.

This clean-cut, quietly-spoken 36 year-old Australian engineer has his sights set on emulating, in his own way, the career of McLaren’s Ron Dennis, who worked his way up from being a race mechanic to owning one of the most successful Formula 1 teams in the sport’s history.

But he wants to add a bit of Ferrari to the blend, as well. Preston believes that people are what an F1 team is all about, but they have to more than just the best at what they do, they also need to be happy in their work, and focussed on their jobs, rather than on internal politics. Although his background is in engineering, Mark now is studying business at Oxford, the highest ranked business school in the United Kingdom and among the best in the world, at the same time as he is pulling together his team.

This isn’t just a pipe dream. Preston already has all the key people lined up, some ready to go, some already working with him. He has been mentally noting the people he wants to have around him throughout the years he has been in F1. And he has the option of moving into an already-established – and currently unused – purpose-built F1 factory. All he needs is the financial backing.

That’s the hardest part, although Preston already has some experienced financial people on board and he is working tirelessly, scouring the entire world for a company that can really benefit from the exposure they would get by backing an F1 team.

Getting a spot on the F1 grid isn’t a problem. The series was structured, years ago, around having a grid of 24 cars – a total of 12, two-car teams. At the moment there are only 10 teams, that’s 20 cars, racing. F1 supremo Bernie Ecclestone has been waiting for years for someone to come along and fill the extra two spots.

Last year, when Preston first decided to go for it, he could see three rivals already vying for the two spots. Since then, they have been removed from the equation completely, because all three have moved into existing teams. One, a Russian business man, has joined forces with Carlin Motorsport and purchased the Jordan F1 team. Another, the Austrian owner of the Red Bull sports drink company, has bought what was the Jaguar team. And Christian Horner, the 31-year-old who was well advanced with plans for a team of his own, has accepted the job as team manager for the new Red Bull F1 team.

That’s not to say that new rivals won’t spring up out of the woodwork in the near future. But, for the moment at least, Mark Preston’s is the only group (as far as he knows) currently working towards creating a new F1 team, and there are two spots up for grabs. His operations manager is Kevin Lee, who joined TWR in 1979 and was general manager through their Le Mans-winning Silk Cut Jaguar days. He later was responsible for sorting out financial problems at Benetton and Arrows F1 teams and took part in the formation of the Toyota F1 team.

Michael Boon, finance and business services, also was with the TWR Jaguar program and was in F1 for eight years with Benetton (now Renault).

Chief designer Paul Bowen has 17 years experience in F1, originally as chief designer at Arrows, later head of mechanical research at Ferrari, on both occasions working directly with Ferrari’s current technical director, Ross Brawn.

Composites design is taken care of by Dr Robert Neumann, who was a design engineer at Arrows, and now has his own company.

Brand development is in the hands of Paul Balaam, who has 20 years in the marketing industry in UK, Europe and USA.

Warwick Marx, who provides strategic management consultancy, has had a 15 year career with companies in USA and Australia in professional engineering and business management.

Other key personnel can not be named because they are currently working in other jobs until needed by Preston Racing on a full-time basis.

Preston has assembled a team that is poised and ready to take on any project and already the team has worked on some racing projects. They can take on anything right up to a full F1 attack at short notice, depending on what a financial backer wishes to achieve.

They are constantly monitoring the Fl situation to keep pace with developments, but Preston realises that a backer might want to try something a little less daunting before launching into F1. To this end, and having members on the team who have twice been on the winning team in the Le Mans 24 Hour Race, they have analysed the requirements for winning the race again. It is possible, says Preston, but no pushover. A serious attack on Le Mans would have to be a three year project, he says.

Realising that Preston Racing as yet has no real track record as a company, Mark knows they might have to do something spectacular to demonstrate their capabilities. The team has designed what they call the Preston Racing Track Car, or PR-TC for short, a “new technologies demonstrator”. They are keeping the design under wraps at the moment, planning to save the visual impact until the time is right for maximum exposure for any company that might wish to back the project.

But we can tell you that the track car is based on a Formula 1 car (a one-year old car, which they would buy from one of the teams) with full sports car bodywork, and the plan would be to attack the long-standing outright lap record for the world famous original North Loop of the Nurburgring road circuit in Germany. After that, it could be a show car, displayed world wide at motor shows and racing car and engineering shows, to promote both the sponsor and Preston Racing.

While undertaking all of this and searching for companies that can benefit from their involvement with Preston Racing, Mark spends one week in every two months studying for a Master of Business Administration degree at Oxford Business School. It has the dual benefit of developing Mark’s already impressive business skills, as well as putting him in the company of a lot of important people in big business from all over the world who are there to prepare themselves for the final move to upper level management. Many of them, including some of the lecturers – are excited and enthused by Preston’s plans.

Mark Preston can’t put his finger on exactly what triggered his interest in motor sport. He remembers that, as a young boy, he always used to watch the big Bathurst touring car race on TV every year, and that his grandfather, who owned a motor wrecking business, was “into cars”.

Mark also says his appetite was whetted by this writer’s stories in Modern MOTOR in the late 1980s of our Datsun 1600 club motor sport car. He told us, “I actually went out and bought a Datsun 1600, although I never got around to competing in it.” His main interest was in the engineering side, so he concentrated on completing his school studies and following this with a mechanical engineering course at Monash University in Melbourne.

“I found the uni course was very theoretical and, although I obviously wanted to learn the theory, I was anxious to get some practical experience,” remembers Preston. So he asked around the sport if anyone could steer him towards someone in Australia who was building his own racing cars. He was directed to Mike Borland, designer and manufacturer of Spectrum Formula Ford racing cars.

It was 1988 and Borland had built one Spectrum 04, but was busy race engineering a Formula Holden for Mark Skaife, who won the Australian Drivers’ Championship that year.

“When I first went to see Michael and told him I wanted to design racing cars, he gave me some chassis information and told me to go away and draw up some roll centres. So I went home and did that and went back with them the next day. He looked surprised when he saw me, and said, “Oh; you’re back again. Most people don’t come back…”

So Mark was on the team – part time. A customer had bought one of Borland’s cars and Borland ran it for him at race meetings, with Mark as one of his crew. As well as helping at the race meetings, Mark was given various projects by Mike to work on, largely those that could benefit from the time Mark was prepared to put in on the computer.

Being keen and inventive, during the period that Borland was designing his Spectrum 05, Mark would come up with various ideas of his own and go back to Mike saying, “Hey, what about this…” and Mike would, more often than not, reply, “We’ve tried that; it doesn’t work.

Mark even wrote his own computer simulation program, so he could simulate what a car would do around a circuit with certain modifications to its set-up. Then, when the car was tested at the track, if it did better or worse than the simulation suggested, he would have a direction in which to head in a quest to learn why the changes did or didn’t work.

He called the program Dynamic Response and has continued to update it and still offers it via his web site today.

Preston finished his university degree in 1991 and eventually took a job as project engineer at Holden Special Vehicles. As well as working on various projects for HSV, he also was drafted in to do some for Holden – including adapting a two litre engine to the Holden Commodore intended for sale in South-East Asia. He continued to work with Borland on the side, and went with him to the race meetings.

But Mark wanted to be full-time in the business of designing and building racing cars. By 1995 he realised that Borland wasn’t going to sell enough Formula Fords in Australia – against the then top-selling British Van Diemen cars – to be able to employ Mark full time. So he put together a proposal and set off to Malaysia to try to sell the motor sport people there on the idea of starting a series by buying Spectrum Formula Fords.

The man he was directed to talk to was the father of the yet-to-be racing driver Alex Yoong, then a wealthy real estate developer and a big wheel in Malaysian motor sport circles. But Mr Yoong was unimpressed with a proposal from an Australian manufacturer who had built only a few cars and hadn’t yet won anything of note. He implied that if Mark was representing a European manufacturer with a good track record, he might be interested.

Mark decided then and there that he would have to go to England if he wanted to be a racing car designer on the scale that he was envisaging.

“When I said to Michael I was going to go to England we talked about it and decided, ‘Let’s do one more year and do everything we’ve talked about; own the car ourselves; run the team ourselves.’ So we went halves in the cost of the car, and we got Jason Bargwanna as the driver

That was 1996 and Jason finished second in the championship, behind David Besnard.” At the Oran Park round of that series, Preston was talking to the writer of this story and said he was planning on going to England, did I have any ideas on who he should be talking to about a job, where to live and other such things.

I had only a little earlier been talking to experienced race engineer, recently returned to Australia, Bruce Cary and suggested that he would know. I found Bruce, introduced him to Mark and Bruce said, “How old are you?” Mark told him he was 27, he would be 28 in a couple of months, and asked why he wanted to know.

Bruce said, “If you’re less than 28 years old you can get a two year working visa for Britain, but once you’ve turned 28 they don’t want to know you. “Mark fired into action the next day. Over the next few weeks he organised his visa, gave his notice at HSV, and soon was on his way. He arrived in England on the 26th of October 1996, 12 days before his 28th birthday.

At about the same time Chris Dyer, an electronics engineer with the Holden Racing Team and a friend of Mark’s, also was considering going to England. Their impending departure inspired Blake Arrowsmith, then building engines at HRT, to follow suit. Dyer now is race engineer with Michael Schumacher at Ferrari, so has a few world championships under his belt, and Arrowsmith now is an engineer in the engine department at Toyota F1 in Cologne.

But back then, in late-1996, they all scored jobs at the Arrows Formula 1 team. It was coincidental that Tom Walkinshaw, who owned Holden Special Vehicles, had just bought Arrows. The real reason they got in at Arrows was that Walkinshaw moved it tonew premises in a different area and some of the staff decided not to stay on, and Tom was planning on increasing the staff anyway so, as luck would have it, there were plenty of jobs on offer just as the Aussie trio arrived on the scene.

Mark worked for Arrows for six years, beginning in stress engineering, which he did for a year, and he then became ‘senior vehicle performance analyst’.

“That was a position created for me, rally. I had asked if we could do vehicle dynamics in the stress analysis department. I wanted to carry on with simulation, so I was put in charge of that. For the last eight months that I was there I was head of R&D and of the test team as well. R & D covered almost everything from stress analysis to vehicle dynamics, and the laboratories, which included the four-post rigs, gearbox rigs, and crash testing. So they put the test team in with R&D, and we effectively had the whole area. It was a good set-up, really; very efficient. The test team mechanics, when they were not away testing, could help out on the test rigs etc. It was great fun; I had so much variety there. I loved every minute of it.”

But then Tom Walkinshaw got into financial trouble and Arrows was caught up in the bankruptcy of most of his group of companies. Mark was “shattered”. “That job was everything that I had always wanted to do. And it was better than it could have been in a bigger team. Arrows didn’t have as much money as the big teams, so we went away testing only half as often as the rest of them did. So we didn’t travel as much, but what it meant was that we spent a lot of time back at the factory, and we had the time to do research there that we couldn’t have done if we’d been away testing all the time. It was the perfect loop.

“The first year that we did it that way, I thought it was a lot more efficient than when we had done twice the test miles the previous year. And when we did go away testing, with just one car instead of two, and with only four test days available, we were more focussed, and more organised. Arrows had a computer simulation program that was great for combining the test results with what we learned back at the factory.”

It was about August 2002 that the team collapsed and disappeared from the Fl grids. Mark had seen it coming and had begun looking around and going for job interviews. He started with McLaren only 16 days after he left Arrows – and that break was only to comply with legal requirement in my contract.

His first job at McLaren was “principle designer, structures”. “I dropped quite a bit in the breadth of the work I was doing. It involved composite design, stress analysis, crash testing, and the laboratory (four-post rigs). It was still fairly broad, but not the complete loop I’d had at Arrows.

“I was at McLaren from August 2002 to June 2004, slightly less than two years. I left, in the end, mainly because, after everything went wrong with the MP4-18 car in 2003, they changed everything within the organisation. Everyone’s jobs were broken down a lot more. When I first went there they wanted to have four principle designers, but now they divided it between eight designers. At that point I decided McLaren wasn’t the place for me for the rest of my life.

“At McLaren you’re just a cog in a huge machine. If I was English and I had a wife and kids and a mortgage and just wanted a job to pay the bills, I think I could have learned to be content with the situation there. But I wanted to go further than that. I could see that I would never be technical director at McLaren, in charge of the whole thing. And yet it was one of the biggest and best teams in the business. There was nowhere else to go – nowhere that would have the situation or possibilities I was after, anyway. I had reached a point where I could either go back to Australia – and I couldn’t think of anything there that I really wanted to do – or I could get on with something else that was going to offer me the challenge and the fun that I was looking for.

That “something else” was to start a Formula 1 team of his own.

As Mark says, “I am pretty much hooked on F1, because it is the pinnacle of motor racing.” It is his confidence, his total lack of doubt, that reminds you of a young Frank Williams, a Ron Dennis, or an Eddie Jordan – all of whom started with nothing and built their own F1

Asked if he is in any way daunted by the prospect, Preston answers, “No, not really. If it’s the same as everything else I have done along the way, it shouldn’t be too much of a problem. Everything else I’ve done has been just a matter of keeping on bashing away at it until it happens.”