About markandrewpreston

Mark Preston's illustrious career in motorsports is a testament to his passion, innovation, and leadership. From his early beginnings in Australia, where he developed a love for cars while working on a farm, to his groundbreaking achievements in Formula 1 with Arrows Grand Prix and McLaren, Preston has consistently pushed the boundaries of engineering and technology. His entrepreneurial spirit led to the rapid establishment of the Super Aguri Formula 1 team, built from scratch in just 100 days. Transitioning to Formula E, Preston played a pivotal role in its inception, leading Team Aguri and DS TECHEETAH to multiple championships. Now, as the motorsport director at Lola Cars, he continues to drive innovation with a focus on sustainability, underscored by a new partnership with Yamaha for Formula E. Mark Preston's journey is a remarkable blend of technical expertise and visionary leadership, making him a significant figure in the evolution of motorsports.

Did Formula E Lose China? My Shanghai Interview on Batteries, Software and the Future of EV Racing

Posted on July 16, 2026 by markandrewpreston

The morning after Lola Yamaha ABT’s first Formula E victory, I sat down with Telescope in Shanghai to talk about a bigger question: has Formula E kept pace with the electric-vehicle revolution it helped to make credible?

It was a particularly personal conversation. The interviewer and I had worked together during the TECHEETAH years, so he had seen both the highs and the difficult periods at close range. We began with the win, but quickly moved into China’s EV industry, battery competition, software-defined vehicles, Gen4 technology and where Lola might contribute next.

Watch the interview

Did Formula E really lose China?

I challenged the premise. When Formula E held its first race in Beijing in 2014, electric racing still attracted plenty of scepticism. There were predictions that the cars would not complete a credible race. Drivers changed cars halfway through, and the idea of an electric single-seater championship felt experimental.

That first race succeeded, Lucas di Grassi won it, and the championship grew from there. The original car swaps now feel like prehistory. Formula E helped demonstrate that electric cars could be serious performance machines. What was once surprising is now taken for granted.

China’s market has moved extraordinarily quickly, however, and that changes the standard by which relevance is judged. Chinese customers discuss battery chemistry, charging rates, cold-weather performance and thermal preparation with a level of familiarity that is less common in many European markets. So the question is fair: what should electric racing contribute now that electric road cars are already mainstream?

Where Formula E chooses to compete

Every racing category must decide where to permit technical competition and where to standardise. Formula E does not ask teams to develop the chassis. Modern composite monocoques remain sophisticated, but they are no longer the area that best connects the championship to the road-car market.

Instead, competition focuses on the powertrain and, increasingly, software. That matters because the future of the automotive industry is the software-defined vehicle. A Formula E car is already one: energy management, braking, torque delivery, efficiency and race strategy all depend on software interacting with the physical machine in real time.

Formula E’s relevance is not only that it is electric. It is that the car is a live demonstration of powertrain efficiency, control systems and software-defined performance.

Should Formula E open battery development?

This was the sharpest point of disagreement in the conversation. Formula E currently uses a common battery. The case for opening battery competition is compelling: batteries are central to electric-vehicle performance, and competition could accelerate development in chemistry, charging, thermal management and packaging.

The case against it is equally practical. Developing a competitive racing battery is expensive and complex. We have examined what it would mean, and it could require something close to doubling manufacturer budgets. It could also turn the championship into a contest between a handful of battery suppliers, just as periods of Formula One became dominated by the tyre war rather than the cars themselves.

There may be a middle route. A future battery tender could run as a faster development programme alongside the main vehicle cycle, allowing the whole field to benefit from improved technology without making battery spending the primary competitive differentiator. Gen5 planning will make this an important discussion sooner than it might appear.

The next performance frontier

When asked to imagine the ultimate performance EV, I came back to control. More grip and downforce can always make a racing car faster, but the more interesting electric developments are those that create new ways to manage the vehicle.

Multiple rear motors could provide finer torque control while packaging may continue to favour a single front motor.
In-wheel motors could remove gearboxes, differentials and driveshafts, although engineers must balance that benefit against unsprung mass.
Brake-system changes may offset some of that weight and alter the overall trade-off.
AI and learning systems could extend control beyond the powertrain into a broader understanding of the car and its operating environment.

Gen4 is already moving closer to the kind of high-performance electric machine we imagined a decade ago. The next advances may be less visible than another motor or a larger headline power figure, but far more significant.

Lola, China and manufacturer collaboration

Lola has a long history of helping manufacturers turn ambition into competitive machinery. One of the best-known examples is the Lola Mk6, whose architecture contributed to the development of the Ford GT40. Our archives also contain correspondence between Soichiro Honda and Lola founder Eric Broadley about working together.

That collaborative model remains relevant. Chinese manufacturers are setting the pace in batteries, charging, software integration and performance EVs. Lola brings deep experience in rapid engineering, motorsport execution and building vehicles around a partner’s objectives.

I would genuinely like to explore what those capabilities could achieve together—whether in Formula E, a record programme, a high-performance demonstrator or another form of competition.

Why this conversation mattered

Near the end of the interview, my former colleague observed that whatever happens, I keep racing: teams change, partnerships evolve, and another challenge appears. That persistence is not an individual story. It comes from groups of people choosing to rebuild, learn and compete again.

The Shanghai victory made the timing of this discussion special. It demonstrated what a new partnership can achieve, but it also opened the next question. Winning is a moment. The more useful task is deciding what to build from it.

Watch the complete conversation above or open the interview on YouTube.

A Thousand Monkeys with a Compiler

Posted on June 22, 2026 by markandrewpreston

The Oracle Principle — why AI is mastering code first, and what it tells you about where it goes next.

Everyone knows the thought experiment, even if they don’t know its name. The infinite monkey theorem: sit enough monkeys at enough typewriters for long enough and, almost surely, one of them bangs out the complete works of Shakespeare. It usually gets wheeled out to illustrate the power of infinity, or randomness, or both.

But the interesting thing about the monkeys isn’t that they’d get there eventually. It’s why they never do in practice. The problem was never the typing. The problem is that nobody is reading the pages. There’s no one standing behind the monkeys saying “warmer,” “colder,” “that line is from Hamlet — keep it.” Random generation without selection is just noise, forever.

Now hand one of the monkeys a compiler.

The thing people keep being surprised by

I keep seeing people express genuine surprise that software is the fastest-moving frontier in AI. Coding assistants went from autocomplete to writing, testing and fixing whole features in about two years. Meanwhile, the same models still can’t be trusted to run your marketing strategy or settle a contract dispute. Why the gap?

To me, the answer is so obvious it’s strange it isn’t said more often: code has an oracle. Most work doesn’t.

A compiler is an oracle. It gives an instant, automatic, unambiguous verdict. The code compiles or it doesn’t. The test passes, or it fails. There’s no committee, no taste, no “well, it depends.” Yes or no.

That single property changes everything, because it converts brute force from noise into search. The monkeys with a compiler are no longer typing at random — every attempt gets graded, the failures are discarded, and the system climbs. You can generate a thousand candidate solutions, throw away the 999 that don’t compile or don’t pass the tests, and keep the one that does. Run that loop fast enough, and it looks like genius. It’s actually just selection pressure with a very fast clock. It’s the difference between random mutation and evolution: the mutations were always there, but evolution only happens once something is sorting them.

That, in a sentence, is the Oracle Principle: the speed and autonomy of AI in a domain is governed by the strength of its oracle.

Code isn’t the only one

Once you see it, you see oracles everywhere. AI is advancing quickly — and the absence of one everywhere it’s stuck.

Mathematics. Formal proof checkers like Lean are oracles. A proof is valid, or it isn’t, and the checker says which. That’s precisely why AI maths has accelerated — the machine can verify its own steps.
Games. The rules, plus the final win or loss, make a perfect oracle. It’s no accident that the breakthroughs came in chess and Go first: a system can play itself millions of times and learn purely from who won.
Geometry and simulation. A CAD kernel is an oracle of sorts — the model is watertight, or it isn’t, the assembly clashes, or it doesn’t. An FEA solver converges, or it diverges. These are exactly the kinds of engineering loops where brute-force optimisation already runs beautifully, because something objective grades each attempt.
Protein folding, chip layout, logistics. All the same shape: a hard, cheap, automatic check sitting underneath the search.

The common thread is verifiability, not intelligence. Karpathy made roughly the same point — the tasks AI is conquering are the ones where success can be checked automatically. Strong oracle, fast progress.

When the oracle lies

There’s a subtler trap I learned the hard way, and it’s the most important caveat to everything above. An optimiser is only ever as good as the model underneath it. Optimisation is hill climbing — and if the hill is a model rather than reality, the optimiser will happily climb to the top of a hill that doesn’t exist.

Run a free optimisation on a tyre model and, given the chance, it often won’t find the fastest setup. It’ll find the weakest part of the model — the corner of the curve the equations describe badly — and exploit it, because that’s where the cheap “gains” are. It hands you an answer that is optimal for the model and nonsense on the track. And the answer usually isn’t obviously wrong; it’s just non-obvious enough that you can’t tell by looking whether it’s a real insight or the model quietly breaking.

In the world of racing, this issue is especially acute because the sport operates within nonlinear parameters. Crucial factors like combustion and tyre performance—which ultimately determine lap times—rely on physics that remains partially obscured, often verified on rigs or dynamometers that fail to perfectly replicate race conditions. While a straightforward, linear problem would eliminate the need for a race engineer, the true challenge lies in these nonlinearities. This is precisely where models become unreliable, and optimisers pose the greatest risk.

Tyres, combustion — the places where lap time is actually decided are the places the underlying physics is still half black art, validated on a dynamometer or a rig that is not the race. A linear, well-behaved problem would be easy; nobody would need a race engineer. The whole game is the nonlinearity, and that’s exactly where the model is least trustworthy, and the optimiser is most dangerous.

So the lesson generalises into a warning: a proxy oracle can be gamed. A compiler can’t lie to you — passing the test is the ground truth. But a simulation, a tyre model, or an LLM grading its own output against a loose rubric are only approximations of reality, and a powerful enough search will find the gap between the proxy and the truth and drive a bus through it. AI researchers have a name for this now — reward hacking — but I was watching optimisers do it to tyre models twenty years ago. The fix was never a better optimiser. It was an engineer who knew the curve well enough to look at the “optimal” answer and say: That’s not real — that’s the model breaking.

The flip side — and why it matters to you

Now run the principle backwards. Where is there no oracle?

Most of the work that runs an organisation. Strategy. Law, where case precedent is interpreted, not computed. Brand. Leadership. Most of the management. In these domains, there is no automatic verifier that says yes or no — and so brute force produces something worse than failure: fluent, confident nonsense, because nothing in the loop ever tells it it’s wrong. We’re back to the monkeys, only now they’re very articulate.

This is why the same model that writes production code is only a thought partner for a strategy decision. Not because it’s less capable in the second case, but because the second case has no oracle, so a human has to be the one holding authority and supplying the verdict.

Which makes the Oracle Principle a genuinely useful tool for leaders, not just a neat observation. If you want to predict where and how fast AI will hit your business, don’t start with the hype. Find the oracle — and then ask how honest it is.

A true oracle — an automatic, cheap, unambiguous check that is the ground truth, like a compiler or a proof checker? Expect rapid, possibly near-autonomous progress. Build for it.
A proxy oracle — a model, simulation or rubric that only approximates reality? Useful, but it can be gamed. The expert’s job is to know where the model breaks and to verify the verifier before trusting the answer.
No oracle — strategy, leadership, most management? Expect augmentation, not replacement. Keep the expert in the loop, because the expert is the oracle — the one supplying the yes or no the machine can’t generate for itself.

The monkeys were never the problem. The typewriters weren’t either. The missing piece was always the thing standing behind them, able to say yes or no. Find that in your own work, and you’ll know exactly where AI is about to get very good, very fast — and where it still needs you.

What a F1 Keynote Speaker Should Actually Deliver

Posted on June 6, 2026 by markandrewpreston

The question is whether the speaker you book delivers that — or just tells good stories.

I’ve been on both sides of this. For thirty years I worked in the most pressure-compressed sport in the world — starting as an engineer at McLaren, co-founding Super Aguri F1, and eventually becoming Team Principal of the DS Techeetah Formula E squad that won five consecutive World Championships. Along the way I picked up an Oxford MBA and started thinking hard about why the principles that make a racing team elite are so rarely translated into business practice.

Now I give keynote talks. And I have a strong view on what separates a genuinely useful F1 keynote speaker from an entertaining one.

The entertainment trap

Motorsport produces extraordinary stories. Building Super Aguri from scratch in four months. The decisions made in a 45-minute race window. The moment you realise a championship is lost on strategy, not pace. These are compelling narratives and audiences enjoy them.

But entertainment is not the same as utility. If a speaker leaves the stage having made the audience feel good about motorsport without giving them a single framework they can apply on Monday morning, you’ve paid a lot for a fireside chat.

The best corporate keynotes from any sporting background do one specific thing: they use the extreme environment as a laboratory. Racing is useful to business audiences not because it’s dramatic, but because it compresses — a race weekend forces decisions that take months in a normal organisation into a structure where cause and effect are visible in real time. That compression is where the insight lives.

What actually transfers

The principles that win championships are not esoteric. They are disciplined versions of things every organisation already attempts: strategy under uncertainty, communication when speed matters, building systems that surface problems before they become failures, and creating cultures where people perform at their best under pressure rather than retreating.

What motorsport adds is proof of concept at extreme conditions. When I talk about margin-of-error decision-making, I’m not drawing on a management framework — I’m drawing on what it actually costs when the decision is wrong, measured in tenths of a second and millions of pounds.

Over fifteen years of speaking at corporate events, leadership programmes, and MBA classes, I’ve found that this specificity is what makes the difference. When I delivered the Motorsport MBA programme at the Saïd Business School and to the Oxford Healthcare Leadership Programme, participants weren’t interested in racing as a metaphor. They were interested in the mechanisms — how a team of 600 people aligns on a strategy with no time to deliberate, how you build accountability without blame, how you maintain precision when the environment is anything but controlled.

Those mechanisms transfer directly. They’ve been applied in energy companies, financial institutions, NHS trusts, and technology scale-ups. Not because those organisations need to think about lap times, but because they face structurally identical challenges.

The question to ask before you book

If you’re evaluating F1 keynote speakers for a corporate event, one question cuts through most of the noise: “What will my audience be able to do differently after your talk?”

A speaker who answers with themes (“they’ll be inspired to think differently about performance”) is offering entertainment. A speaker who answers with frameworks (“they’ll have a practical model for decision-making under time pressure that maps directly to their own function”) is offering utility.

The best motorsport keynotes I’ve heard — and the approach I try to bring myself — work at the intersection: compelling enough that the audience wants to engage, specific enough that the engagement produces something they can use.

What makes motorsport different from other sporting contexts

Sport in general produces useful leadership lessons. But motorsport has a specific quality that makes it unusually applicable to technology-led businesses in particular: it is an engineering discipline first and a sporting contest second.

A Formula 1 team is more like a complex organisation — with R&D, manufacturing, logistics, data science, and real-time operations — than it is like a football club or a rowing eight. The team principal is closer to a CEO than a coach. The decisions are made with data, under time pressure, with immediate and measurable consequences.

That structural similarity is why the lessons tend to land with engineering leaders, technology executives, and anyone running an organisation where precision and speed are in constant tension.

Mark Preston is a 5x Formula E World Champion Team Principal, McLaren F1 engineer, and Oxford MBA. He speaks on leadership, decision-making under pressure, and building championship cultures — for corporate conferences, executive education, and leadership summits. Book a speaking engagement →

The Friction Tax

Posted on April 6, 2026 by markandrewpreston

What 30 Years of Engineering Taught Me About Where AI Actually Helps

Every technical professional knows the feeling: you have the expertise to solve a problem, but most of your day is consumed by overhead. File management. Data formatting. Debugging input decks. Building GUIs around calculations. Navigating systems designed for a different era. Report templates. Status updates.

At DeQuorum we call this the friction tax — the procedural overhead between you and the value-creating work you’re actually trained for. And across thirty years in engineering, from crash simulation to Formula 1 to autonomous vehicles, I’ve watched that tax shrink with every tool generation. What happened next was always the same: the work didn’t shrink with it. It expanded.

Hand-Meshing and Mainframes

When I started as a stress analyst at GM Holden in the early 1990s, crash simulation meant hand-meshing CAD models. You placed finite elements manually on geometry surfaces — squares and triangles, one at a time. The analysis software, LS-DYNA, used text-based keyword files where a misplaced parameter in the wrong column could silently corrupt your entire simulation. Jobs ran overnight on mainframes, sometimes for weeks on machines in America. A misplaced decimal in a contact definition could waste a fortnight of compute time.

Debugging consumed more engineering time than actual structural analysis. The friction tax was enormous — probably 70% of a crash analyst’s time went into file preparation, error-checking, and compute management. Maybe 30% went into the engineering judgment that the whole exercise was supposed to be about.

Then HyperMesh arrived and automated the meshing.

In the 3D solid modelling domain, CATIA could now auto-mesh solid models — the element quality wasn’t as good as hand-placed elements, but the volume of work you could do meant better overall insight into structural behaviour. Both domains of structural analysis programmes went from five or six configurations to hundreds.

The friction shrank. The engineering expanded. Nobody went home early.

The Pascal-to-Visual-Basic Moment

I saw the same pattern in programming. In the Pascal era, building an engineering tool meant spending 80% of your time on the GUI and 20% on the actual calculations. Every button, every input field, every display widget had to be hand-coded. The engineering logic — the bit that actually mattered — was almost an afterthought squeezed into the remaining time.

When I moved to Visual Basic — which purists considered a Mickey Mouse language — that ratio flipped. Suddenly, 80% of my time went into the engineering logic, 20% into the interface. The compute speed wasn’t dramatically different. What changed was where I spent my time.

This is the point that most discussions about AI tools miss entirely. People focus on raw compute power — how fast the processor is, how many cores you have, how quickly the solver converges. But for most engineering work, the binding constraint has never been the computer. It’s been the human. Specifically, it’s been the friction between the human and the valuable work.

A faster processor that still requires three hours of manual file setup is worth less than a slower processor with an intelligent pre-processor that gets you running in twenty minutes. The bottleneck moves from compute to cognition — and then from cognition to friction around cognition.

The Oxford Laboratory

I recently visited a laboratory at University of Oxford conducting medical research. They had a million-dollar machine for analysing test compounds. The bottleneck wasn’t the machine — it was deciding which tests to run and setting up the Excel files to drive it. The machine sat idle while researchers wrangled data formats. AI attacking that friction could push utilisation from 40% to 90%, making experiments that weren’t previously worth the setup cost suddenly viable.

The total research output expands because the friction between having a hypothesis and testing it collapses. Not because the machine got faster. Not because the researcher got smarter. Because the tax on their time shrank.

The Race Car: Where Friction Meets Complexity

In racecar engineering, the design space is enormous and highly non-linear. Aerodynamics are non-linear. Tyres are non-linear. The interactions between them — downforce affecting tyre loading, which affects temperature, which affects grip, which changes the aero platform, which changes downforce — create a coupled system that defies simple optimisation. Add fuel load, track evolution, weather, strategy, and regulatory constraints, and you have a design space so large that no team can explore more than a fraction of it. In fact, we rely on the rules to constrain the total problem space to a degree!

AI does two things here. First, the familiar friction reduction: build parametric models faster, automate iteration, and generate report templates. Second, something qualitatively different — surrogate modelling, where neural networks approximate the non-linear physics relationships trained on CFD and tyre data, enabling exploration of the full design space at viable speed.

But surrogate models are interpolators, not extrapolators. They work within the training envelope. Outside it — novel concepts, new tyre compounds, regulation changes — they produce confidently wrong answers. The engineer who understands what the model can’t tell them wins the race.

This is the expert advantage in practice: domain knowledge doesn’t just help you use AI better. It tells you when to stop trusting it.

The Pattern

Today, with AI assistance, I can rebuild engineering tools that took months in days, and add optimisation layers that weren’t previously worth the development effort. The pattern is identical across three decades and multiple tool generations:

The tool arrives. The friction shrinks. The expert’s output expands. The job changes shape rather than disappearing.

In economics, this pattern has a name. William Stanley Jevons identified it in 1865, watching British coal consumption rise as steam engines became more efficient. Make something cheaper to use, and people use more of it. The Jevons paradox.

Make crash analysis cheaper, and engineers do more crash analysis. Make experimentation faster, and researchers run more experiments. Make design iteration cheaper, and teams explore more of the design space. The demand for the output is elastic — there’s always more crash safety to improve, more compounds to test, more lap time to find. Efficiency creates expansion, not contraction.

But There’s a Question

Every previous friction reduction in my career led to more work, not less. Hand-meshing to HyperMesh. Pascal GUIs to Visual Basic. Overnight mainframe runs to desktop clusters. The Jevons paradox has held true for 30 years.

But I’ve also watched the administrative infrastructure around engineering teams shrink continuously — and I watched it happen so gradually that nobody remarked on it at the time.

When I first worked at General Motors , every memo was printed out, and everyone on the CC list received a physical copy, stapled and placed in their pigeonhole. Someone’s job was to print, collate, and distribute those memos. The BCC — blind carbon copy — existed because in the days of actual carbon copy paper, you could add extra recipients to the copy list without the primary recipients knowing. Someone had to manage that distribution. Email didn’t just speed up that work. It made the entire role vanish. And the economy didn’t need more memo distribution then. It needed zero.

When I arrived at McLaren Racing in the early 2000s, we still had the last remnants of having a tea lady — a very British institution. I’d seen something similar when I finished university in Australia in the 1990s. The role existed because keeping engineers productive meant having someone bring tea to their desks rather than losing 15 minutes in the canteen queue. Better kitchen facilities and cultural shifts eliminated the role entirely. Nobody’s job expanded to absorb the freed capacity. The friction just disappeared.

The drawing office. The print room. The filing department. The data entry team. The pool of secretaries. All progressively automated away over decades.

Here’s what’s different about this moment: AI is attacking all the remaining friction layers simultaneously. Setup automation, code generation, file debugging, iteration management, report writing, data formatting — every layer of overhead that previously shrank one at a time is collapsing at once.

For the engineers, that’s the Jevons paradox in overdrive — more output, more exploration, more ambition. But for the roles that existed to manage the friction itself? That’s a different story entirely. And it leads to an uncomfortable question about whether the economic optimism that applies so reliably to expert technical work extends to everyone else.

This is the first in a three-part series on AI, friction, and the future of work. Part 2 explores a fundamental limit on AI’s economic impact — the \”speed of light\” problem. Part 3 examines what happens to workers whose entire job is the friction AI eliminates.

DeQuorum http://www.dequorum.tech/insights

Mark Preston is a mechanical engineer and motorsport executive with 30+ years in Formula 1 , Formula E (five Championships in the FIA – Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile Formula E World Championship as Team Principal of DS Automobiles TECHEETAH Formula E Team ), and autonomous vehicles. He writes about engineering leadership, AI strategy, and the lessons motorsport teaches about decision-making under uncertainty.

Mike Potts is an entrepreneur and technology leader working at the intersection of data, AI, and autonomous systems. He founded StreetDrone , a UK pioneer in autonomous delivery vehicles (acquired by Oxa in 2024), and earlier built and exited Elisa Interactive, a digital data and analytics consultancy acquired by Havas Media Network , where he later served as Chief Data Officer. He writes about AI-native systems, decision intelligence, and how data-driven technology is transforming mobility and infrastructure at DeQuorum .

The Agentic Bench: What Hitchens, Thatcher and Eleven Others Taught Me About AI

Posted on February 21, 2026 by markandrewpreston

By Mark Preston

Update — April 2026. The debate tool above has evolved. What began as three agents arguing a motion is now a full Oxford Union bench: four speakers a side, each with a distinct role and a distinct historical voice. The post below has been rewritten to describe where the architecture has actually ended up — and why it matters.

Imagine, for a moment, that you could fill an Oxford Union bench with anyone you wanted.

On the proposition side: Christopher Hitchens opens — rolling sentences, literary bombardment, moral certainty delivered with theatrical élan. Edmund Burke builds — organic metaphors, accumulated wisdom, arguments that unroll slowly and arrive with the force of inevitability. Malcolm X takes the clash — controlled fury, refusal of the opposition’s framing, rhetorical questions that have no comfortable answer. Winston Churchill closes — architectural sentences that ascend to a moral crescendo.

On the opposition side: Margaret Thatcher, William F. Buckley Jr., Emmeline Pankhurst, Cicero.

The motion: This House Believes That Artificial Intelligence Will Be Humanity’s Last Great Invention.

You can now watch that debate run in a browser window. Not as a gimmick — as a serious piece of AI architecture pretending to be a party trick. This post is about the architecture.

What Is a Mixture of Agents?

Most people’s experience of AI is a single conversation: you ask, it answers. One model, one response, one perspective.

Mixture of Agents (MoA) is different. Instead of asking one AI for an answer, you ask several — each reasoning independently, each approaching the problem from a different angle. Their outputs are then synthesised into a combined response that is, demonstrably, better than any single agent could produce alone.

Think of it less like asking a consultant and more like convening a committee — except this committee doesn’t suffer from groupthink, doesn’t defer to seniority, and can run in seconds.

The key insight: diversity of reasoning produces better answers than depth of reasoning alone. An agent with a slightly different framing of the problem will catch things the first agent missed. An adversarial agent — one specifically tasked with finding holes in the argument — will surface weaknesses before they become failures.

Good organisations already know this. You don’t present a plan and ask if everyone agrees. You present it and ask someone to break it. Formula 1 teams don’t debrief a race with one engineer. They debrief with a strategist, a vehicle dynamicist, a tyre engineer, and a race engineer — each looking at the same stint through a different lens, and the sum of those lenses is sharper than any one of them on their own.

From Three Voices to a Full Bench

The first version of this tool — the one that went live on this page in February — used three agents: Proposition, Opposition, and a Devil’s Advocate that attacked whichever side was winning. That already produced debates noticeably richer than a single-model answer. But it had a structural lie baked into it: the Oxford Union isn’t two voices. It’s a bench.

At the Union, each side fields three or four speakers, each with a distinct job.

The Opener defines the terms, sets the burden of proof, and plants the flag.
The Builder deepens the case with evidence, answers the opposition’s opening, and extends into a second substantive theme.
The Clash engages the central disagreement head-on, repairs damage, and holds the line.
The Closer crystallises the debate into voting issues, weighs the two cases, and delivers the peroration.

The new version — branded DeQuorum and sitting live above — models that bench properly. Each speaker is its own agent with its own role constraints, its own prompt structure, and its own place in the sequence. The Opener is not allowed to trespass on the Closer’s job. The Closer is not allowed to introduce new substantive material. The Clash speaker is forbidden from avoiding the main disagreement. These aren’t stylistic preferences — they’re hard rules in the prompt, because a real Union debate is a structured game.

And the speeches are generated in sequence, each speaker seeing what came before, each one knowing what their role expects of them and what the next speaker is waiting to receive. Speeches stream live into the bench roster as they generate — you can watch the debate unfold in real time rather than wait for a monolithic paragraph to drop at the end.

The Persona Library: Thirteen Great Debaters

The architectural move that makes the bench interesting isn’t the roles. It’s the personas.

Each speaker on each side can be assigned an identity — a famous debater whose rhetorical DNA is injected into the agent. Not as a costume, but as an instruction. Hitchens does not argue like Obama. Thatcher does not concede like Beauvoir. A persona encodes not just what an agent says but how it reasons.

The current library has thirteen:

Christopher Hitchens — polemical wit, literary bombardment
William F. Buckley Jr. — conservative forensics, aristocratic diction
Malcolm X — moral urgency, refusal of the opposition’s framing
Margaret Thatcher — iron logic, relentless enumeration
Barack Obama — professorial bridge-building, concession-and-pivot
Emmeline Pankhurst — suffragette moral force, personal testimony as evidence
Edmund Burke — philosophical conservatism, organic metaphors
Abraham Lincoln — biblical cadence, stripped-down moral clarity
Cicero — full classical rhetoric, devastating peroration
Frederick Douglass — abolitionist pathos fused with constitutional rigour
Mary Wollstonecraft — Enlightenment rationalism, demolition by reason
Winston Churchill — soaring oratory, architectural sentences
Simone de Beauvoir — existentialist analysis, refusal of false dichotomies

Each persona is defined with an era, a nationality, a catalogue of notable debates, a style profile (rhetorical devices, temperature hint, verbosity), and — crucially — a prompt-injection block that is pasted verbatim into the agent’s instructions. Each persona also has a suggested role or two where their style plays strongest. Burke wants to build. Churchill wants to close. Hitchens wants to open or handle clash. Beauvoir is at her best late in the debate, crystallising the philosophical scaffolding.

The library is deliberately cosmopolitan — British, American, Roman, French, Irish; 70 BC to present; conservative, liberal, radical, philosophical. The point isn’t who you agree with. The point is that different rhetorical traditions surface different arguments. A Hitchens opener on an AGI motion finds different weaknesses in the opposition than a Thatcher opener will. Stack the wrong bench for the wrong motion and the debate is thinner. Stack it right and you get an argument that no single model — and arguably no single human — could produce alone.

Why This Matters Beyond Debate

The bench is a piece of debate prep. But the architecture it demonstrates is much more general.

Role specialisation beats role duplication. Giving four agents four different jobs produces better reasoning than giving four copies of the same agent the same question. The Opener’s constraints force it to define terms — something a general-purpose agent usually skips. The Closer’s constraints force it to weigh — something an agent will usually avoid unless compelled. Structure the roles and you force the reasoning.

Persona is a tool, not a gimmick. Injecting a rhetorical style into an agent isn’t cosplay — it’s a way of forcing the agent into a reasoning pattern it would not default to. A Buckley agent challenges premises before engaging arguments. A Wollstonecraft agent asks whether custom can survive rational scrutiny. A Malcolm X agent refuses the terms set by the opposition. These are reasoning moves disguised as voices.

Sequence matters as much as substance. An agentic system is not a pile of agents — it’s a pipeline. The Devil’s Advocate runs after the speeches because it needs to know who’s winning before it decides who to attack. The Closer runs last because it needs the full debate to weigh. The order of operations is architectural, not cosmetic.

Memory is a design decision. V1 used lossy round summaries. The new version maintains structured debate memory across turns — what’s been argued, what’s been conceded, what’s unanswered, what the floor is likely to raise. In any agentic system longer than a single exchange, the shape of your memory is the shape of your reasoning.

The output is the product. The debate itself is not the deliverable. The deliverable is a brief — structured, synthesised, usable in the chamber. This is true of every production agentic system: the chain of thought is a means; the distilled output is the end.

What Comes Next

The public tool above is Prep Mode — use it before the debate. Two further modes are in the V2 spec:

Training Mode — drill specific debate skills (rebuttal under pressure, POIs, crystallisation) against an adversarial bench tuned to your weak points.
Live Companion Mode — observe a real debate in progress. Track clash points, flag floor attacks as they emerge, produce a post-debate report that a speaker’s coach can actually use.

None of that is magic. It’s the same architectural pattern — specialised roles, distinct personas, structured memory, clear outputs — applied to three different use cases.

That’s the bigger point. Mixture of Agents isn’t a feature. It’s a way of thinking about intelligence as a system you design — not a tool you query. The interesting question has changed from what should I ask the AI? to how should I structure the reasoning process?

The Oxford Union debate tool is a small, concrete answer to that question. It’s free to use. It’s open to modify. It takes about ten minutes to understand end-to-end, and about two minutes to run.

Pick a motion. Stack your bench. Watch Hitchens and Thatcher fight about AGI.

Then ask what else this architecture could do.

Mark Preston is a technology executive and MBA graduate of Oxford University. He writes about AI, decision-making, and the future of intelligent systems. DeQuorum is the open toolkit for structured, adversarial AI reasoning.

The Future of Motorsport: My Insights on the Electric Age

Posted on February 20, 2026 by markandrewpreston

I had the pleasure of joining Roger Atkins in his video, “The Future Of Motorsport In The Electric Age.”

We sat down to discuss a defining challenge for our industry: how do we reconcile the 70-year romance and heritage of racing with the pressing realities of climate change and technological innovation?

During our conversation, I shared my perspective on where the racing world is heading and how it continues to drive the broader automotive industry forward. Here are a few of my key takeaways from the discussion:

Motorsport as a “Prototyping Competition”

I’ve always believed that motorsport is fundamentally a prototyping competition. When developing consumer road cars, the technology has to reliably stay on the road for 15 years. In racing, our hardware only has to last one year, which gives us the freedom to take greater risks, experiment rapidly, and even make mistakes. This environment makes series like Formula E and Formula One incredible incubators for change. For example, Formula E is saw huge technological leaps, with the Gen3 generation of cars jumping to an astonishing 600 kilowatts of energy regeneration.

The Unique Challenge of Electric Racing

We also discussed how electrification is changing the role of the driver. In Formula E, drivers have to save about 40% of their energy to complete the race distance. Because telemetry isn’t doing the work for them, they are constantly doing complex computations in the cockpit, deciding exactly when to lift off and regenerate energy. F1 drivers will now have to get ready for Managing Electrons, not just tyres, adding more cognitive load and pushing teams and drivers to innovate.

Furthermore, because a Formula E event packs testing, qualifying, and racing into a single day, it heavily favors what I call “explosive talent”—drivers who can show up, make zero mistakes, and deliver under pressure immediately.

A “Horses for Courses” Future

When looking at the future of mobility, I firmly believe that the electric drivetrain will ultimately win out because it is far more controllable. However, I don’t believe the energy carrier will be a one-size-fits-all battery solution. It will be “horses for courses”. For example, in a country like France with abundant nuclear power, direct electrification to battery-electric vehicles makes perfect sense. But in vast countries like my home of Australia, transporting energy over long distances might require turning it into a synthetic liquid fuel, hydrogen, or ammonia. Engineering gives us the tools to come up with diverse, brilliant solutions for the challenges we face.

The transition to sustainable transport isn’t just a binary choice—it’s complex, exciting, and full of opportunities. I highly recommend checking out Roger’s full video to hear more from the other brilliant industry experts featured alongside me!

From Paper to Code: The Future of Engineering Tools

Posted on January 5, 2026 by markandrewpreston

Jan 2026

Over the last few months, since the original blog post on vibe coding, I have been experimenting with workflow and development methodologies. Modern vibe coding has its limitations, but for a subset of “jobs to be done”, it works incredibly well. Engineering software tool design is one of those areas in which I think it excels.

Over the years of racing, I have developed several engineering tools that have been a core part of my learning. The first such tool was a suspension geometry analysis, first shown to my colleagues on a black and white laptop with a VGA screen in the early 90s! I wrote the software because I was asked to draw up roll centres on a large piece of paper at full scale. CAD was not that common at the time (1990), and I was taking computer programming classes, so it seemed like the perfect starting point for writing my own software.

The second piece of software I developed was a simulation. I developed it because we didn’t have a data logger, and, being curious, I thought the only way to learn more about how the car worked on the track was to write a simulation. Again, at the time, there wasn’t much information about this sort of thing, so I had to start from scratch. My correlation methodology was to ask the driver to recall RPM and gear at different corners and at the end of different straights.

The tracks were created from aerial photos (not from Google, I had to buy them from the aerial surveyors) correlated against track distance stated in the program of the race. I then traced the tracks into AutoCAD and created a DXF driving line. The first simulations consisted solely of straights and corners. Why was this accurate enough for the first development stages? The answer lies in the simple integration of a parabola. You can use algebra to solve for the area under the curve, or you can do several approximations based on numerical methods. Best to look again at High School maths to prove this one to yourself.

The first simulation used distance as the integration variable. Each solution step varied in length depending on the rate of change of forces and velocities, and although the model was primitive, the learning curve it produced was steep. Years later, I wrote up that experience in a blog post, “Simple Vehicle Simulation,” reflecting on how constructing even a rudimentary model forced me to understand weight transfer, tyre forces, transient response, and the simple mathematics hidden beneath the apparent complexity of vehicle dynamics.

Aerial photo of Winton Raceway, Australia

That early simulation is relevant here for the same reason SpringForge exists: when you don’t have the tools, you build them. And when you build them, you learn far more than you expected.

Those early tools for engineering were strong evidence of how we might use LLMs and vibe coding.

I have been looking for a good starting point to try a complete workflow and came across the perfect thing: a paper (in paper form!), written for my design assignment for Computer-Aided Design of Machine Elements—an ideal test of running through an entire workflow.

Could I go from a paper, PDF (this one was scanned from a paper copy found in my parents’ garage!), through ChatGPT, write a Product Definition Document, then pass that PRD to Google Antigravity running RooCode, create a specific Prompt to get the LLM to write a complete specification for the coding plan, then autocode the final result?

What made this assignment the perfect candidate wasn’t nostalgia. It was structure. The report contained every formula, every constraint, every decision branch that the original Pascal program handled. It’s engineering distilled into equations—and therefore an ideal substrate for Vibe Coding. A human engineer understands the why behind the formulas. An LLM can process the what with extraordinary breadth. Together, they make a surprisingly potent hybrid.

When there is a mismatch between training data and testing (Ref 1)

The workflow went something like this: extract all formulas, assumptions and tables from the scanned PDF; turn that material into a clear, modern PRD; hand the PRD to RooCode’s planning mode in Google Antigravity, which reasons more like a systems architect than an autocomplete engine; generate a detailed implementation plan; and finally switch to autocode mode to build the full browser‑based tool. Throughout this process, the LLM wasn’t replacing engineering judgment—it was amplifying it, allowing me to explore many more branches of the design space than would be sensible by hand.

And the results were startlingly good. SpringForge.tech now reflects the 1990 program’s intent while avoiding its limitations. It manages geometry, solid height, natural frequency, fatigue, buckling, clash allowance, wire selection, and the whole zoo of design constraints. It validates inputs, surfaces warnings, and provides explicit design messages rather than cryptic Pascal errors. It even generates clean drawings in the browser, which would have felt like witchcraft to my 1990 self armed with graph paper.

To make it practical, I also purchased a URL for £10, springforge.tech, where you can review the final code.

The most interesting discovery wasn’t that an LLM could write the code. It was that the act of building the tool—even in this new hybrid way—provoked the same learning sensation I remember from the suspension tool and the early vehicle simulator. Writing software to embody a theory forces you to test that theory. The moment an equation doesn’t behave the way the text implies, your understanding tightens. The ambiguity collapses. You see the physics more clearly.

This is where Vibe Coding really shines. It isn’t magic, and it absolutely isn’t a replacement for experienced engineering intuition. But as an accelerant? As a way to run the entire arc from paper → reasoning → spec → code → validation in days? It’s transformative. It lets you treat software like modelling clay. You can re‑shape it, re‑run it, and re‑test it at a pace that makes experimentation almost playful.

For mechanical engineers, in particular, this matters. Much of our world remains locked in PDFs, textbooks, or legacy syntax we no longer run. Vibe Coding unlocks that material. It enables us to extract knowledge from static documents and transform it into living, testable models. SpringForge is just one example, but the pattern is broadly applicable: take a well‑defined engineering domain, extract the rules, write a PRD, use an LLM to boost the planning stage, then let autocode handle the grunt work while you keep your hands on the steering wheel.

I’ll be refining SpringForge further—by adding optimisation, exporting to CAD formats, and eventually integrating more advanced analysis—because the barrier to iteration is now low. This was the promise I hinted at in the previous blog: that the combination of human judgment and AI‑accelerated development would enable engineers to create tools rapidly, creatively, and with a new sense of agency.

SpringForge Output

Re‑engineering the past is a powerful way to build the future. And if a 1990 spring‑design assignment can become a modern web app in 2026, I suspect we’re just scratching the surface of what this approach will enable next.

If this journey sparks ideas about how AI and vibe‑coding workflows could accelerate innovation inside your own organisation, I’m sharing these stories for a reason. Over the past months, I’ve been refining practical ways to bring these methods into real engineering and executive settings — not as hype, but as demonstrations grounded in actual tools like SpringForge. If you’d like a talk, workshop, or executive‑level session on how AI can be applied pragmatically inside your teams, please reach out.

The authors’ 1990 Design Assignment – Computer Aided Design of Machine Elements, 25th May, 1990

Workflow:

PDF specification/paper scan
ChatGPT -> Product Requirements Document (PRD)
Google Antigravity – RooCode -> Planning Prompt Mode
Gemini 3 & Claude Sonnet 4.5 running through OpenRouter

References:
1- Zhao, Chengshuai, et al. Is Chain-of-Thought Reasoning of LLMs a Mirage? A Data Distribution Lens. arXiv:2508.01191v3, 2025, arxiv.org/abs/2508.01191.

What Racing Teaches Us About Change: Reflections on Leadership, Pressure, and the Art of Decisive Progress

Posted on November 15, 2025 by markandrewpreston

By Mark Preston

Every motorsport story has two tracks running side by side. One is the obvious one—the fight for championships, the engineering battles, the split‑second choices. The other is the quieter, deeper track: how you build, steer, and sustain a high‑performance organisation through uncertainty.

My second conversation with PJ Stephens was really about that second track. We talked less about race wins and more about how teams learn, adapt, communicate, and make decisions—particularly when the world throws the unexpected at you.

This post unpacks some of those ideas with a little more breathing room.

A Career Built on Curiosity and Calculated Leaps

Racing has always been a mix of intuition and structured thinking for me. From Formula Fords in Australia to working alongside Adrian Newey and Mike Coughlan at McLaren, to creating Super Aguri in 100 days, to winning championships with DS Techeetah, the through‑line has never been a straight line.

It’s been a series of small bets, rapid decisions, and a willingness to move before the path is fully visible.

That mindset—somewhere between entrepreneurial and engineering—is what allowed me to move from F1 to electric powertrains to autonomous vehicles, and eventually into founding StreetDrone. The world changes fast. You either build with that change or you try to outrun it, and the latter rarely works.

Leading Through Chaos Requires a Map of Possibilities

During the early months of the pandemic, scenario planning became essential. Not because it gave us certainty—it didn’t—but because it created psychological stability.

We mapped out three worlds:

A best case, where racing resumed quickly.
A worst case, where we waited a year or longer.
A middle case, which was messy and unclear.

What mattered wasn’t predicting exactly what would happen. What mattered was preparing thinking that prevented panic and reduced guesswork. Scenario planning is really just structured curiosity: What if the world looked like this? What would we do?

Motorsport thrives on speed and clarity, but in these moments you survive through flexibility.

When Information Is Missing, People Invent Their Own

One line from PJ stood out: when there’s a vacuum of information, people fill it.

That is true everywhere—in race teams, in startups, and in global businesses. During the crisis, we over‑communicated deliberately. Regular updates to partners, drivers, sponsors, engineers—anyone who had a stake in what happened next.

The Santiago race collision PJ and I discussed was a perfect metaphor. Two drivers, working from incomplete information, made completely rational decisions—based on incorrect assumptions. The result was chaos.

That’s what miscommunication does. It manufactures failure.

Communication Isn’t Talking. It’s Verification.

One of the simplest leadership habits I’ve carried for years is this: after you communicate something important, ask the person to explain back what they believe they heard.

It isn’t patronising—it’s quality control.

In high‑speed environments, you don’t want compliance. You want clarity. Those aren’t the same thing.

Whether it’s drivers discussing race strategy, engineers interpreting constraints in software, or partners interpreting sponsorship expectations—alignment happens only when both sides confirm they’re looking at the same picture.

Customer Influence: Racing as a Technology Demonstrator

People don’t always realise how motorsport influences what ends up in their driveway.

Formula E has shifted public perception of EVs from slow, quirky prototypes to intelligent, responsive machines. The acceleration advantage of electric powertrains isn’t theoretical—it’s lived every race weekend.

You don’t win with greenwashing. You win by demonstrating.

Competition accelerates maturity. In EVs, that’s meant:

More efficient motors
Better regeneration
Smarter software
Clearer proof of what electric mobility feels like

All of which flows directly into road cars.

Building a High‑Performance Environment: It’s Never One Thing

People often ask about the “secret sauce” at DS Techeetah. The truth is dull in its honesty: there is no one thing.

Winning came from:

The right drivers
The right engineers
The right structure
The right partners
A culture of clarity and ownership

But if there is a thread that ties it all together, it’s this: we replaced black‑art thinking with science.

Ron Dennis used to say that a black art is just a cloak for “we don’t know.” He was right. Mature racing environments remove mystique and replace it with measurement.

You don’t guess your way to championships.

You model, test, iterate, and then you trust the work.

Purpose: Why Motorsport Matters Beyond Entertainment

I’ve always believed motorsport must remain relevant. Formula E wasn’t created for spectacle alone—it was built as an early proving ground for electrification.

Now, with hydrogen on the horizon and synthetic fuels in development, motorsport again has a responsibility: to be the experimental platform where next‑generation tech gets pushed, stressed, refined.

Racing sits in Technology Readiness Levels 3–6—the fast, messy middle where risk and learning collide. Road cars sit at 8–9, where reliability matters more than iteration.

Without the middle, you don’t get the end.

That’s why I believe motorsport absolutely has a purpose—and why sustainability isn’t a branding exercise but a direction of travel.

Decision‑Making at Speed: Lessons from Building a Team in 100 Days

One of the stories PJ asked about was launching Super Aguri and getting to the F1 grid in 100 days.

What did that experience really teach me?

Break everything into small steps.

When the goal feels overwhelming, shrink the problem. Progress becomes visible, which keeps teams moving.

Good enough beats perfect.

Analysis paralysis kills momentum. Colin Powell’s rule applies: if you’re 40–70% confident, make the call.

Don’t socialise risk.

Shared decisions are useful, but shared responsibility can be dangerous. Leaders must own the final call.

And never assume.

Assumption is the mother of all errors. In racing, assumptions crash cars. In business, they derail projects.

Time‑box everything.

If you have 100 days, you have 100 days. No extensions. You make decisions when the clock says you make them, not when you feel ready.

These aren’t theoretical lessons. They’re survival tools.

The Real Work of Leadership

If there’s a single theme that ran through this episode, it’s that leadership is not charisma or cleverness.

It’s pattern recognition.
It’s communication.
It’s judgement under pressure.
It’s knowing when to push, when to listen, and when to commit.

Motorsport just makes all of that visible. Every race, every weekend.

What matters most is this: high‑performance teams win because they learn faster than the competition.

And learning comes from clarity, curiosity, and the courage to move—even before the road is perfectly lit.

Full Transcript

# PJ Tips Podcast Episode

## Title

PJ Tips Podcast with DS Techeetah Principal Mark Preston talking winning

on the track and in business

## Podcast

PJ Tips Podcast Leading Business Change

## Published

19 July 2021

## Duration

42 min 57 sec

## Description

PJ Tips Podcast Leading Business Change with Entrepreneur, Businessman

and Formula E Team Principal Mark Preston on winning on and off the

track and translating those lessons into leading business change.

PJ Tips Audio Transcript Number 2

Transcript

00:00:13 Paul Stephens

Good morning, my name is Paul Stephens.

00:00:16 Paul Stephens

I’m with my PJ Tips podcast this morning, Leading Business Change, with the exceptional Mark Preston, perhaps best known for being principal of the double world championship-winning Formula E team, DS Techeetah.

00:00:29 Paul Stephens

And actually behind that sits half a dozen businesses or so that Mark runs in an extensive portfolio around autonomous tech.

00:00:39 Paul Stephens

remotely operated trucks, sustainable powered vehicles.

00:00:42 Paul Stephens

In fact, there’s a significant amount.

00:00:44 Paul Stephens

So just in a second, I’m going to ask Mark to introduce himself.

00:00:46 Paul Stephens

But there are two comments I wanted to make, not from myself, from other people.

00:00:51 Paul Stephens

One, when I asked somebody, they referred to Mark as a genius.

00:00:56 Paul Stephens

And somebody else said the most dynamic out-of-the-box thinker they’d worked with.

00:01:01 Paul Stephens

So with that introduction over, Mark, perhaps you give us a more detailed overview of your career, sir?

00:01:07 Mark Preston

Yes, good morning.

00:01:09 Mark Preston

Good to join you.

00:01:10 Mark Preston

Yeah, so, well, I started a long time ago in Australia in Formula Fords.

00:01:17 Mark Preston

I started in racing cars.

00:01:18 Mark Preston

I worked for GM at the same time as I was running a small racing car business called Spectrum Racing Cars, which is still running, and I think they’ve won many of the Walter Hayes trophies in the UK over the last 20 years, and also continued to win championships in Australia and other places around the world in Formula Fords.

00:01:38 Mark Preston

I worked at GM and then I decided that I needed to come over to the UK to do Formula One and so came over in 96 and worked for Tom Walkinshaw at Arrows Grand Prix.

00:01:49 Mark Preston

I did that for many years until sadly they closed down and I then moved on to McLaren, which was an interesting couple of years working with Adrian Newey, Mike Coughlin, Neil Oatley and people like that.

00:02:03 Mark Preston

Fascinating to work at McLaren.

00:02:06 Mark Preston

I then decided that I wanted to start my own Formula One team, and I went off and did an MBA at Oxford at the same time while we were sort of trying to do that, and eventually came together with Aguri Suzuki, Honda, Bridgestone, and a few others from Arrows, and started Super Aguri, which was an incredible ride in 2005 through to 2008.

00:02:30 Mark Preston

Again, at 2008, Honda pulled out of the Formula One and we had to shut down Super Eury because of the financial crash.

00:02:39 Mark Preston

And then I started to look at startups around motor racing and what I thought was the future and got involved in spinning out a company of Oxford University called Oxford Yasa Motors, which is still going, which got me interested in electric motors, electric cars, et cetera.

00:02:57 Mark Preston

I started looking at electric

00:03:00 Mark Preston

racing at that time with actually David Hunt, who was James Hunt’s brother.

00:03:05 Mark Preston

And we did our first sketch way back in 2009, which I did actually keep a picture of, which is quite funny in one of my journals, which we actually did call it for Marie when we were doing our sketches.

00:03:16 Mark Preston

And over the next few years, I was actually, you know, involved in a couple of other startups to do with composites, manufacturing and other things.

00:03:24 Mark Preston

And then the FIA put out a tender for

00:03:29 Mark Preston

the new Formula E, and I pitched for that.

00:03:33 Mark Preston

I didn’t win that one, but Alejandro Agag did, and he had a total plan for everything, and he started Formula E.

00:03:42 Mark Preston

And again, I sort of put my hand up and said, Can I have a team?

00:03:47 Mark Preston

And he said, If you can bring Aguri from Japan again, because we thought, you know, we might be able to get Honda to join, then you can have a team at the beginning.

00:03:56 Mark Preston

So, we started as Team Aguri, and

00:03:59 Mark Preston

sort of progressed along the way.

00:04:01 Mark Preston

At one point, we sold to a company in China called Sika.

00:04:06 Mark Preston

And eventually, we’ve now become DS to Cheetah.

00:04:09 Mark Preston

And as you say, we’ve won the last three drivers and two teams championships in Promodary and currently in season 7, heading towards the last races of the season.

00:04:20 Mark Preston

In a good position, probably, for that sort of thing.

00:04:24 Mark Preston

And at the same time,

00:04:26 Mark Preston

Myself and one of my old friends looked at autonomous vehicles and started a company called Street Drone, which manufactures autonomous vehicles and now is getting more into last mile deliveries in trucks and in normal deliveries to houses.

00:04:44 Mark Preston

So that’s it in a nutshell.

00:04:45 Paul Stephens

Just tell us a little bit more about last mile deliveries, if you would.

00:04:51 Mark Preston

Yeah, sure.

00:04:52 Mark Preston

So we’re doing a big truck up at Sunderland, Nissan Sunderland plant.

00:04:56 Mark Preston

And I suppose that’s either first or last, depending on how you see it.

00:05:00 Mark Preston

There’s always a bit of a definition thing there because we basically, this truck is going to pull big HGV trailers from the suppliers or the supply chain around the Nissan manufacturing plant.

00:05:15 Mark Preston

to the main plant and back again, obviously, to reload.

00:05:18 Mark Preston

So you could say that’s kind of first mile, i.e.

00:05:22 Mark Preston

it’s the first mile in the journey of an assembled car.

00:05:25 Mark Preston

Or you could say it’s last mile because it’s last mile deliveries to the assembly plant.

00:05:31 Mark Preston

We’re focusing on low-speed vehicles, so less than 20 miles an hour.

00:05:35 Mark Preston

The same is true, we’re looking at, we also manufacture a small vehicle based on the Renault Twizzy.

00:05:41 Mark Preston

which is a small, in America, they’re called neighborhood electric vehicles.

00:05:47 Mark Preston

But we’re working on making a last mile delivery there.

00:05:50 Mark Preston

And again, that could be called first mile as well, because if you recognize that, you know, most of us, when we get something from Amazon, there’s a lot of returns as well.

00:06:00 Mark Preston

So you can say it’s

00:06:02 Mark Preston

last mile, i.e.

00:06:02 Mark Preston

delivered to your house, but it could also be first mile as you send something back or you, send something to be recycled or something of the type.

00:06:11 Mark Preston

So that’s why we call it first and last mile, but specifically low speed vehicles.

00:06:19 Paul Stephens

Thanks, Mark.

00:06:19 Paul Stephens

And that’s, I suspect that might be a topic for another podcast, actually, because I’m fascinated by that.

00:06:25 Paul Stephens

My first and last mile just locally is on my

00:06:30 Paul Stephens

scooter, not an electric scooter, just a scooter because I can move around within a mile of where we live much faster, you know, than a vehicle.

00:06:36 Paul Stephens

Sure, I can’t do 20 miles an hour, but I think we certainly need to pay attention to that, how we, not just from parcel delivery, but from, you know, passenger movement, people movement within that, within towns and cities.

00:06:49 Paul Stephens

Certainly, it’s a fascinating topic.

00:06:51 Paul Stephens

Can I ask, just given the, you know, like it’s a bit of an old, bit of a perhaps an old hat question, but

00:06:57 Paul Stephens

given the upheaval of the last 18 months, and given that you’re, leading a Formula E team and saying, and half a dozen businesses and startups, how have you managed to lead through the, I guess the chaos or trauma of the last 18 months?

00:07:15 Mark Preston

I mean, when everything actually kicked off, have you done much on the concept of scenario planning?

00:07:21 Mark Preston

Have you looked at that before?

00:07:24 Paul Stephens

I have.

00:07:24 Paul Stephens

Do you want to tell us a bit more about it?

00:07:25 Paul Stephens

Because

00:07:26 Paul Stephens

Because I think there’s one thing about the theory of it, there’s something else about the practical leadership of it.

00:07:31 Paul Stephens

So do you want to talk us through it?

00:07:33 Mark Preston

Yeah, so scenario planning, I think, came to the fore when Shell looked at this in the 70s, when there was an oil crisis.

00:07:41 Mark Preston

And they started to look at things and try to figure out what didn’t they and didn’t they know about the future and why weren’t they prepared?

00:07:49 Mark Preston

So when things kind of started to become clear that we didn’t know what the future was,

00:07:55 Mark Preston

we started to sort of map down, we put it a high, medium and low case.

00:08:00 Mark Preston

So you sort of say, what’s the best and what’s the worst things that could possibly happen?

00:08:05 Mark Preston

And so I think as our worst case, we said, you know, what if we hit the place for another year?

00:08:10 Mark Preston

And our best case was that we could race within sort of a month or two of the whole thing starting to become clear.

00:08:18 Mark Preston

And by having that mapped out and mapping out thoughts on what we would do in each,

00:08:25 Mark Preston

in each eventuality, it makes it easier to sort of think through things.

00:08:29 Mark Preston

So things aren’t a surprise because you sort of start to say, well, that was our worst case was this, and if that had happened, we wouldn’t have to do XYZ, and we were kind of then to maybe have to do that.

00:08:41 Mark Preston

It turns out, I think often you get it right when you get the medium case where you can say, well, it wasn’t the worst, it wasn’t the best, but we did think through a lot of the things that could happen.

00:08:53 Mark Preston

And we were ready for many of them, not all of them, because obviously this was new to everybody, but at least we did we did think through things and that sort of helped me Michael to understand what we could do and what we might have planned to be ready for.

00:09:09 Paul Stephens

Thank you.

00:09:10 Paul Stephens

But just a little bit more on that, because when you’re, you know, you’re leading, say, you know, a double world championship, you know, Formula winning Formula E team,

00:09:18 Paul Stephens

you’re leading across, sponsors, teams, drivers, many cultures.

00:09:23 Paul Stephens

I mean, it’s a global, it’s a global business.

00:09:26 Paul Stephens

How did you, how do you, there’s two questions really, how do you lead normally across those cultures and balance, so you know, the relationships with sponsors and drivers and so on.

00:09:38 Paul Stephens

But, and then how did you, know, how did you include them in your kind of situational planning or, you know, change programme last year, given what you were going through?

00:09:49 Mark Preston

I think an old comment that a colleague of mine said, when things are unclear or there’s a vacuum of information, people make it up.

00:09:59 Mark Preston

So most of it is to do with communication and letting everybody know where we think things are up to.

00:10:07 Mark Preston

So regular communication, because if you don’t get any information, most people make it up.

00:10:12 Mark Preston

And I think that’s where rumor and hearsay and theories and

00:10:17 Mark Preston

conspiracy theories come from us because there’s not enough information.

00:10:20 Mark Preston

So people fill in the blanks however they feel necessary, they want to make up things.

00:10:25 Mark Preston

So I think communication is pretty much key in any situation.

00:10:30 Mark Preston

In fact, when things don’t go right, it’s often because of some sort of miscommunication or lack of communication.

00:10:37 Mark Preston

A good example is on the racetrack when two of our drivers, our two drivers had

00:10:43 Mark Preston

coming together at one of the races that keeps getting replayed in Santiago about two or three years ago, most of the reasoning behind that was because the guy behind thought the guy in front was too slow.

00:10:55 Mark Preston

But they were both targeting a different lap.

00:10:58 Mark Preston

We’d had a complete breakdown in communications of the cars because of power outage in the pit lane.

00:11:05 Mark Preston

And so most of the misunderstanding came because

00:11:09 Mark Preston

they thought, the guy in front must be really slow.

00:11:13 Mark Preston

And the guy in front was saying, why is he attacking me so much?

00:11:16 Mark Preston

He’s going to run out of battery.

00:11:17 Mark Preston

But really, they’d both been targeting two different things.

00:11:20 Mark Preston

And as soon as the systems came back up again, we checked which lap they’re on and said, okay, calm down.

00:11:26 Mark Preston

You’re looking at one lap longer and you’re looking at one lap shorter.

00:11:29 Mark Preston

The actual answer is this.

00:11:31 Mark Preston

And of course, they then settled down into the final two or three laps.

00:11:36 Mark Preston

But that was a miscommunication that happened on the

00:11:39 Mark Preston

on the track just because the communication has broken down.

00:11:41 Mark Preston

So I think that’s a good example, on track.

00:11:45 Paul Stephens

Thank you.

00:11:46 Paul Stephens

And just, I mean, the last couple of days I’ve been interviewing some senior leaders of a business and six out of seven of them have all cited communication issues in the business is one of the most, perhaps one of the

00:11:58 Paul Stephens

areas of risk that they’ve identified.

00:12:01 Paul Stephens

And yet, we all talk about communication, but it’s still so important.

00:12:05 Paul Stephens

And yet to some degree, we don’t seem to have kind of improved it or gotten our, really kind of gotten our heads around it.

00:12:12 Paul Stephens

So from a leader’s perspective, how do you check the quality of communication?

00:12:17 Mark Preston

Well, you know, some people say that communication, it’s okay if it’s one-sided, you know, I’m telling you something, but unless you listen, it doesn’t get through, does it?

00:12:25 Mark Preston

So it’s a two-way process.

00:12:27 Mark Preston

So in some ways, you’ve got to say, I’m going to do this.

00:12:30 Mark Preston

And then I have to ask you, what did you expect me to, what are you expecting me to do?

00:12:35 Mark Preston

So that I check whether or not the actual communication got through.

00:12:39 Mark Preston

So I can’t remember who’s saying that was, but certainly communication is, you know, two-sided.

00:12:46 Mark Preston

It has to get through.

00:12:47 Mark Preston

It has to be listening and communication.

00:12:50 Mark Preston

Otherwise, it’s not really communication, I suppose.

00:12:54 Paul Stephens

True.

00:12:54 Paul Stephens

Just message sharing and you don’t know if it’s been taken on board or going to be actioned.

00:12:57 Paul Stephens

Yeah, exactly.

00:12:59 Paul Stephens

No, cool.

00:13:00 Paul Stephens

Can I ask, in terms of Formula E, who are your, and I’m not sure if you use this word, but who are your customers in Formula E?

00:13:07 Paul Stephens

Okay, perhaps a better one then.

00:13:08 Paul Stephens

Who does Formula E serve and who does DS to Cheetah serve?

00:13:16 Mark Preston

Yeah, so I suppose the team’s customers at the end of the day are its sponsors as one level.

00:13:21 Mark Preston

So that’s the kind of B2B relationship.

00:13:24 Mark Preston

And then the other customers are the B2C, i.e.

00:13:28 Mark Preston

the fans that want to watching the racing, because that’s also the customers of our B2B partners.

00:13:36 Mark Preston

So yeah, there’s probably two types of customers.

00:13:39 Mark Preston

There’s, as I say, B2B and that is other, you know, partners that are associated with, let’s say, the car company with DS.

00:13:48 Mark Preston

But DS is looking to talk to their customers, which are obviously consumers and sometimes businesses who are potentially buying cars for fleets and those kind of things.

00:13:56 Mark Preston

So we’ve got two sort of levels of customer.

00:14:01 Paul Stephens

And do you, I’d be curious to what sort of level our customers, maybe the broader customer, so me, the public, how much are we influenced in perhaps our car buying or product buying by race teams or the success of race teams such as you?

00:14:19 Mark Preston

I think you need to showcase things.

00:14:21 Mark Preston

I mean, if I go back to, that timeline I said before, in 2009, I don’t know if you remember there was this Top Gear Hammerhead Eagle Eye Thrust, because I keep remembering the name, because I keep using it as an example.

00:14:36 Mark Preston

That’s what Top Gear did on the, you know, on their show, and it was this crazy electric car that they drove around Oxfordshire at like 4 miles an hour or something.

00:14:45 Mark Preston

When you think about that was what people thought of an electric car back in 2009, coming through to some of the latest cars.

00:14:54 Mark Preston

I mean, I drive a DS3, so it’s an electric B-segment SUV.

00:15:01 Mark Preston

Not to convince people that they should drive them, but at least convincing them that there are options now.

00:15:09 Mark Preston

Back in 2009,

00:15:11 Mark Preston

I don’t even know what options were available.

00:15:13 Mark Preston

Maybe there was an Nissan Leaf that had a fairly small range, I imagine.

00:15:18 Mark Preston

Maybe a Renault Twizzy and a few other different vehicles.

00:15:20 Mark Preston

But now there’s a huge array of vehicles, everything from the DSs through to Peugeots, Opels, Porsches, Mercedes, et cetera.

00:15:31 Mark Preston

There’s such a selection.

00:15:32 Mark Preston

I think what Formula E does is it shows that the technology is viable, valid,

00:15:39 Mark Preston

early adopters can, follow the racing and can spread the word that, EVs are not any more milk floats as they used to be called in the old days.

00:15:50 Mark Preston

They’re now proper serious vehicles.

00:15:51 Mark Preston

And in fact, we’re getting to a point where you’ll notice that most very high-end sports cars that are hybrid have to have electric parts to the powertrain, otherwise you can’t get the north to 100 times because only with an electric motor,

00:16:08 Mark Preston

can you get so much torque from zero?

00:16:11 Mark Preston

Well, instead of being, unless you’re going to use obviously an F1 engine, but they’ve also got electric elements to the hybrid system in order to get the off-the-line torque.

00:16:21 Mark Preston

So I think all in all, motor racing helps to improve the breed, obviously, through competition, but also to show the early adopters what can be done with an electric vehicle.

00:16:39 Paul Stephens

And certainly your piece about, acceleration, all that sort of, early on power when you just, dump a, or it’s almost like releasing A throttle.

00:16:47 Paul Stephens

It’s almost like not pressing a throttle, but when you release a throttle on some of these five, 600 horsepower, or, you know, the equivalent rd cars, you know, I’m thinking of the Tesla, for example.

00:16:58 Paul Stephens

I mean, that’s, I mean, that’s blisteringly quick.

00:17:00 Paul Stephens

I think they call it ludicrous, or there’s a ludicrous button, but it’s blisteringly quick.

00:17:04 Paul Stephens

And yes, our Nissan Leaf doesn’t have the

00:17:07 Paul Stephens

the longest range.

00:17:08 Paul Stephens

I think perhaps it’s a little bit, it’s only a couple of years old, but it’s probably a little bit out of date in terms of technology, but even that can pick up its skirts and kind of get on with it a bit.

00:17:17 Paul Stephens

But it’s surprisingly comfortable, which I hate to admit, but through, but I do, I know it’s sort of wrong, but there’s something, there’s something that I don’t want to like it, but I do like it.

00:17:28 Paul Stephens

And I’ve mentioned to you before that, you know, I think it’s the DS7, the E-tent.

00:17:33 Paul Stephens

A few years ago, I never would have looked at that car.

00:17:35 Paul Stephens

or consider.

00:17:36 Paul Stephens

And now I’ve got a real hankering for one, partly because of, I think the brand and actually that has come out of Formula E.

00:17:43 Paul Stephens

So I guess what I’m answering my own question, I’m a sucker for racing and I am in, I’m influenced.

00:17:49 Paul Stephens

I hope that doesn’t make me shallow, perhaps just influenceable.

00:17:53 Paul Stephens

So listen, back to, if we can, a bit more little, you know, a bit more about business and your business success.

00:17:59 Paul Stephens

Over the many years, how have you gone about creating an environment

00:18:05 Paul Stephens

that has allowed you and others to be so successful.

00:18:10 Paul Stephens

And we can say that because you are double, world champions, three times drivers champions.

00:18:15 Paul Stephens

So, and I’m assuming you carry that on to business.

00:18:18 Paul Stephens

So what is it that you do or create when it comes to the environment?

00:18:23 Mark Preston

I mean, one of the things I learned going, there was two things I, big learning things I learned.

00:18:28 Mark Preston

I started at Arrows and Tom Mochenshaw, I would say, was very entrepreneurial in his approach to things.

00:18:36 Mark Preston

he would let you do anything you wanted in order to make Pelico faster.

00:18:40 Mark Preston

But at the same time, then I went to McLaren, and I always use this particular quote by Ron Dennis, where he sort of says, when he came into racing, things were a black art.

00:18:52 Mark Preston

And if you’ve ever been involved in racing in the early days, or when you get out of Formula One into other series below Formula E and Formula One,

00:19:00 Mark Preston

There’s a lot of, he says, a blackout was a cloak for we really don’t know.

00:19:05 Mark Preston

It was intuitive engineering.

00:19:07 Mark Preston

So he decided to make it a science.

00:19:08 Mark Preston

And I do believe that is a really key element is to have a deep understanding of what makes your, in motor racing, what makes a car go fast, for example.

00:19:20 Mark Preston

So I’ve done a lot of work on 1st order performance variables, second orders.

00:19:25 Mark Preston

You know, what really makes a car go fast?

00:19:27 Mark Preston

And

00:19:29 Mark Preston

That is, in Formula E, it’s definitely a large amount driver, obviously the actual vehicle itself.

00:19:37 Mark Preston

But then there’s a lot of things just to do with, in the military, they call it tactics, techniques and procedures.

00:19:44 Mark Preston

So I once did something with the MOD and they were saying that, survivability in the field is not just about what armour you’re using, it’s also about how you go about what you’re doing.

00:19:58 Mark Preston

So there’s a lot of parallels you can take from different industries.

00:20:02 Mark Preston

But the basis for me is that you need to have a deep understanding, go through it in a logical way.

00:20:09 Mark Preston

It’s not just about having the fanciest equipment.

00:20:12 Mark Preston

You do have to have a big team around it.

00:20:15 Mark Preston

And so, you know, people often say, what’s your secret sauce from the E?

00:20:19 Mark Preston

And for me, it’s the total package.

00:20:21 Mark Preston

You have to have the best drivers, the best engineers,

00:20:24 Mark Preston

the best organisation.

00:20:25 Mark Preston

You need to pay the bills at the right time.

00:20:27 Mark Preston

You need to have the right amount of money to do the job.

00:20:30 Mark Preston

You need to have the right understanding.

00:20:32 Mark Preston

You need to be organised and run projects in a correct way.

00:20:37 Mark Preston

So it’s not just one thing, it’s multiple things.

00:20:43 Paul Stephens

When you, know, we’re talking about winning here, so that’s, you know, that’s winning on the track.

00:20:49 Paul Stephens

It’s points, you know, points make prizes and all that stuff.

00:20:53 Paul Stephens

But we hear particularly things like Formula E, teams or perhaps Formula E themselves talking about purpose.

00:21:01 Paul Stephens

And maybe we discuss whether that’s purpose with a small P or purpose with a capital P.

00:21:07 Paul Stephens

But how do you, know, what is the purpose of motor racing, I guess, and how do you balance this purpose around sustainability with winning?

00:21:19 Mark Preston

Yeah, that’s an interesting word, isn’t it?

00:21:20 Mark Preston

I mean, at a

00:21:22 Mark Preston

I suppose at top level, motor racing is about winning, ’cause we are competing it’s a competition, but I do…

00:21:30 Mark Preston

I do think that, as I said before, competition improves the breed.

00:21:35 Mark Preston

One of the comments or discussions I’ve had with someone recently was, you know, when you look at Tour de France, obviously the bike riding race, when you look at people in the Peloton, so in the leading pack, there’s, I think, a general understanding that if you weren’t, if you didn’t have all the people with you, wouldn’t be able to stay with the Peloton.

00:21:59 Mark Preston

And in some ways, competition drives things forward faster.

00:22:07 Mark Preston

Have you ever looked at technology readiness levels from NASA?

00:22:12 Paul Stephens

Yeah, go on.

00:22:13 Mark Preston

Yeah.

00:22:14 Mark Preston

So one of the things I think is that we operate in kind of level sort of three to six, somewhere in that range where

00:22:23 Mark Preston

We’re doing technology demonstrators, basically.

00:22:26 Mark Preston

We can take more risk than a road car manufacturer because on the road, they have to design a car for 15, 20 years on the road.

00:22:33 Mark Preston

So they have to be very, very careful when they design something because it’s got to be out there in the world for so long.

00:22:39 Mark Preston

In F1, for example, you can change things every race or a lot of things every race.

00:22:45 Mark Preston

In Formula E, to reduce our budgets, we don’t, we only, you can homologate the powertrain every year.

00:22:52 Mark Preston

although you can make changes if there are any safety or quality concerns.

00:22:57 Mark Preston

But software can change every race.

00:22:59 Mark Preston

So it’s a fast-paced development area.

00:23:04 Mark Preston

And as I say, we run in this technology readiness levels.

00:23:07 Mark Preston

I think it’s level 5, which is technology demonstrator.

00:23:10 Mark Preston

So in a lot of ways, I would say we do technology demonstrators and the competition driven by competing with others.

00:23:19 Mark Preston

makes the product better and it happens at a faster rate than it would do if it was just in an R&D department, maybe in university or something.

00:23:30 Mark Preston

So I think motorsport drives the technology forward at a greater speed and that’s in showcases that technology to make it viable for the outside world and also helps to mature things.

00:23:47 Mark Preston

So for example, in Pulmonary at the beginning, we had five-speed gearboxes.

00:23:52 Mark Preston

And when we were starting to look at Pulmonary before BFIA did their tender, or quite like when we was looking at their tender, we weren’t sure whether or not the ultimate answer would have been five-speed, quick-speed, quick-shift gearboxes like in Formula One with a certain type of motor.

00:24:10 Mark Preston

Now you wind forward eight years,

00:24:13 Mark Preston

and everybody’s got very similar or closer together than they were.

00:24:18 Mark Preston

And so what happens there is that if you’re doing a road car, you can say, well, in racing, in this format, the most successful answer has been this.

00:24:29 Mark Preston

So I will put that into my road car, or I’ll be more confident in choosing that for my road car because the racing has gone through lots of iterations quickly and come to this conclusion that

00:24:40 Mark Preston

this format of car setup is the right way to go.

00:24:44 Mark Preston

So motor racing can help drive the technology, but it also helps to show the public, the buying public, this particular setup works well for a car.

00:24:57 Paul Stephens

And that, you know, when you were just talking about that sort of risk and innovation piece and the different levels, just two things sprung to mind for me.

00:25:02 Paul Stephens

One is almost the opposite of that, not, you know, perhaps a bit harsh, but almost the opposite of that in, say, the marine industry.

00:25:09 Paul Stephens

where perhaps it’s the owner of the yacht or the boat that’s taking some of the risk and, trialling the technology, because often boats are one-off or they’re very few.

00:25:21 Paul Stephens

So it tends to be a bit like a cottage industry.

00:25:23 Paul Stephens

I don’t know many owners that have had boats where things haven’t gone wrong.

00:25:27 Paul Stephens

And yet, you know, we get in cars now, even the lower level cars,

00:25:31 Paul Stephens

And, they, on the whole, they never go wrong.

00:25:34 Paul Stephens

they’re tried and tested to such a degree.

00:25:37 Paul Stephens

It would be very interesting.

00:25:38 Paul Stephens

I think maybe Tesla do it, but that thing you just said about the software updates, your cars don’t, the software does.

00:25:45 Paul Stephens

Perhaps soon we’ll just, you know, I’ll just be, I’ll have a car, I’ll just kind of plug it in, it’ll just kind of get updated, maybe even serviced, you know, through software.

00:25:53 Paul Stephens

I don’t know, it’d be quite an exciting time, I think, to, when that starts coming onto our driveways.

00:26:00 Mark Preston

Yeah, I think that’s the big thing, isn’t it?

00:26:02 Mark Preston

Because if there’s something learned from the racetrack, for example, about how maybe to drive a car and use it for energy management, I can see a time when there’ll be updates, well, to the, for example, the charging, the way you charge the car, behind the scenes, it’s not just full power into the vehicle.

00:26:22 Mark Preston

There are maps and other things where the

00:26:25 Mark Preston

the charger maybe ramps in slow at the beginning, monitors temperature, all those kind of things.

00:26:31 Mark Preston

But if over time we learn things in racing, we can pass those through to rd cars.

00:26:36 Mark Preston

Maybe there’s some elements of the way we charge cars that could be over the air updated to the rd car.

00:26:44 Paul Stephens

Do you think, just talking about charging cars, do you think the future is in

00:26:50 Paul Stephens

electric rechargeable cars?

00:26:52 Paul Stephens

Are we going to be looking at synthetic fuels or what’s your view on that?

00:26:55 Paul Stephens

What are you doing?

00:26:57 Mark Preston

I certainly am interested in the sustainability of motor racing because someone actually said to me, what’s my purpose at one point?

00:27:03 Mark Preston

And one of the reasons I did go looking at Formula E was to see what was the sustainable future of motorsport.

00:27:11 Mark Preston

I think if you look at there was a tweet that I think Elon Musk did a little while back.

00:27:17 Mark Preston

where the city didn’t believe in hydrogen.

00:27:22 Mark Preston

I think there’s a chart that shows that direct electrification, what I mean by that is you’ve got solar panels, the electric power goes straight into an electric car, let’s say, through the grid.

00:27:33 Mark Preston

You’re up in the sort of 80% range when you go from kind of the solar rays hitting the solar panels to the cars moving.

00:27:42 Mark Preston

That’s a very high efficiency

00:27:44 Mark Preston

system.

00:27:45 Mark Preston

So in things like cities, I do believe that direct electrification will be the key because it is the most efficient way of doing taking energy from renewables through to movement, let’s say.

00:28:00 Mark Preston

But there are a lot of things still in the world that where that’s not true.

00:28:07 Mark Preston

So aircraft, one probably answer where in the end we’ll probably be using

00:28:12 Mark Preston

synthetic fuels because of the energy density of a synthetic fuel.

00:28:16 Mark Preston

Now, the efficiency converting from renewable energy to a synthetic fuel is quite low at the moment, but there’s a lot of research going on to increase that efficiency.

00:28:30 Mark Preston

So I can see that efficiency will increase.

00:28:33 Mark Preston

You can see that Porsche is doing some work down in South America where there’s an excess supply of wind power.

00:28:41 Mark Preston

I think that’s an important word, excess supply of energy.

00:28:46 Mark Preston

Because if you look at a map of where the world’s most wind is, it’s actually along that coast of that coast of Chile.

00:28:52 Mark Preston

So, you know, in that area, they it would be logical that they had a lot of wind energy that was used to create to create these synthetic fuels.

00:29:02 Mark Preston

Same is true of Australia.

00:29:03 Mark Preston

So I’m from Australia and you’re out in the middle of Australia, you can see that you could have vast solar farms that would be converting

00:29:12 Mark Preston

you’d have to go to the coasts to get the water, obviously.

00:29:15 Mark Preston

But the electricity could be used to convert to hydrogen, which most likely gets converted to ammonia.

00:29:23 Mark Preston

And ammonia is a good way of transferring or transporting energy to another country.

00:29:28 Mark Preston

So a country like Japan, which has a lack of landmass and not many natural resources, will be, you know, they’re a net importer of energy.

00:29:39 Mark Preston

So they’ll probably import

00:29:41 Mark Preston

things like ammonia from Australia, for example.

00:29:44 Mark Preston

So there’s going to be horses to the courses, but I do think in the world’s cities, which are where most people live, direct electrification, i.e.

00:29:53 Mark Preston

battery electrification, is really still being the primary source of transportation.

00:30:00 Paul Stephens

God, thanks, thanks for that insight.

00:30:02 Paul Stephens

And when, and I say that genuinely, because when I, you know, when I kind of first met you and spoke to you, we didn’t

00:30:11 Paul Stephens

we didn’t talk about purpose and yet you bored me over with your sense of purpose.

00:30:18 Paul Stephens

So you might not necessarily stand on the soapbox and kind of, but share it, from that sense.

00:30:29 Paul Stephens

But in the way that you, your being, I’ve always found it, we’ll say right from the start, I was absolutely enthralled by it.

00:30:35 Paul Stephens

And when you talk like that, it’s, you know, it’s incredibly captivating.

00:30:39 Paul Stephens

But

00:30:39 Paul Stephens

And that seems like a deep purpose.

00:30:41 Paul Stephens

My point is, do you think motorsport also has that kind of deep purpose?

00:30:46 Paul Stephens

Or are they just kind of greenwashing it for the sake of still going racing?

00:30:51 Mark Preston

I think it has to be relevant to the future.

00:30:55 Mark Preston

And I did start working a little bit with RoboRace, which is one of the reasons I did get involved in autonomous vehicles, because I could see that’s the next step.

00:31:04 Mark Preston

Does motor racing

00:31:07 Mark Preston

have a purpose?

00:31:08 Mark Preston

I believe so.

00:31:09 Mark Preston

I mean, maybe it’s, there’s always early adopters in something.

00:31:13 Mark Preston

there’s a comment, I think it’s in most sales and marketing that says, early adopters are something like, is it 15% of people?

00:31:21 Mark Preston

So, when you think about it, us in Formula E, we’re the early adopters.

00:31:26 Mark Preston

And the tech, the technology is already spilling over into your senior, the latest LM

00:31:34 Mark Preston

H cars in Le Mans have got a much bigger electric capability.

00:31:39 Mark Preston

You’ll see F1, I believe in the future, will go to more and more electrification of the powertrain.

00:31:45 Mark Preston

I don’t know what percentage they’ll end up at, but they’re going to go more and more electrified, I believe.

00:31:49 Mark Preston

Four wheel drive is super logical because that’s obviously what’s happening in Le Mans and already has been in Le Mans actually already with Toyota and others who have run the LMP1 rules in the past.

00:32:00 Mark Preston

So I think

00:32:02 Mark Preston

There’s always the early adopters.

00:32:04 Mark Preston

I think ourselves and Formula E have made a big step.

00:32:07 Mark Preston

Alejandro and the FI made a big step.

00:32:10 Mark Preston

But you know, that was seven or eight years ago.

00:32:12 Mark Preston

It’s still a long time ago.

00:32:14 Mark Preston

And you could also say that obviously F1 fed into Formula E.

00:32:18 Mark Preston

If Formula One hadn’t done Kurz in 2007 or 8, I think about 9 it was introduced, but it was started the discussions in 2007, I think it was.

00:32:30 Mark Preston

If Formula One hadn’t done

00:32:31 Mark Preston

occurs, maybe we wouldn’t have the base technology ready to go into Formula E back in 2013.

00:32:39 Mark Preston

So actually, F1 pushed forward a long time ago now.

00:32:44 Mark Preston

It’s almost, you know, gosh, that’s 10, 15 years ago.

00:32:48 Mark Preston

And that technology has now, you know, come through all the way through into Formula E.

00:32:54 Mark Preston

And then we’ll push, you know, some of the technology that we’re doing.

00:32:57 Mark Preston

Obviously, you probably know that DS is part of Stellantis.

00:33:01 Mark Preston

and Peugeot is now going into Le Mans, into the new hypercar rules.

00:33:07 Mark Preston

And there’s technology that’s going from their work in Formula E into the Le Mans car.

00:33:13 Mark Preston

And actually, there’s a relationship developing between TECHEETAH and the Peugeot team as well to take over some of the engineering knowledge into Le Mans.

00:33:24 Mark Preston

So there’s a lot of flow through, but yeah, I don’t know how long it’ll be until

00:33:30 Mark Preston

all motor racing is electric or how much of it might be, it could be the classic cars end up being, have synthetic fuel for quite a long time to at least be taking energy from renewable sources.

00:33:45 Paul Stephens

Well, listen, I look forward to seeing how you influence, you know, you personally and your team, how you might influence Le Mans.

00:33:52 Paul Stephens

And therefore, another excuse for me to go back out there because I missed last year.

00:33:56 Paul Stephens

It’s a great, it’s a great boys weekend away, but if you can get behind the scenes and sponsored as I’ve been lucky enough to do so, it’s amazing to get to talk to people about some of the technology they’re using and the materials that are now being employed.

00:34:10 Paul Stephens

So I’ve just got a couple of questions just to wrap up because I’ve just been taking quite a lot of your time.

00:34:14 Paul Stephens

I really do appreciate it.

00:34:16 Paul Stephens

You’ve mentioned some of the leaders you’ve worked with, all the way back to Tom Walkinshaw, which is amazing, and Ron Dennis.

00:34:23 Paul Stephens

Who, perhaps, are some of the business influencers that you’ve worked with or business leaders that you’ve worked with who you would, you know, kind of really rate and who have perhaps mentored you?

00:34:35 Mark Preston

I mean, having worked mostly in motor racing, I think, you know, I worked with Tom Wolf and Shore, and then obviously Adrian, and those guys there, Oguri Suzuki and Honda.

00:34:46 Mark Preston

Honda’s certainly an interesting

00:34:49 Mark Preston

influence on myself from the business side of things.

00:34:52 Mark Preston

I always like reading about what Mr.

00:34:54 Mark Preston

Honda had done in the past and how he’d gone about growing Honda.

00:34:59 Mark Preston

So I’ve sort of a lot of influence from that from my MBA.

00:35:02 Mark Preston

I do a lot of reading.

00:35:04 Mark Preston

You know, having done the MBA, I read the Harvard Business Review a lot, Clayton Christensen and those kind of forward-thinking people.

00:35:12 Mark Preston

I read a lot about strategy from those kind of famous leaders.

00:35:19 Mark Preston

So I do a lot of reading.

00:35:22 Mark Preston

Alejandro obviously done an amazing job to start Formula E and grow it.

00:35:26 Mark Preston

So it’s always fascinating to watch what he’s doing next, you know, with things like extremeing into the future.

00:35:33 Mark Preston

Very interested in entrepreneurship.

00:35:35 Mark Preston

So obviously take interest in people like Elon Musk and others in that field to have done amazing startups and growing businesses worldwide.

00:35:46 Mark Preston

So those

00:35:48 Mark Preston

Majority engineering in my past, but certainly interesting of what’s happening in our commercial.

00:35:58 Paul Stephens

It’s really, I don’t know if you’ve done any, if you’ve looked at any of the leadership stuff over at MIT Sloan, but it’s interesting when you talk because there’s two, you know, from one of their models and let’s face it, everybody’s got to have a full box model if you do an MBA or you’re at uni or something.

00:36:10 Paul Stephens

But, you know, you seem to really combine that, the visionary piece of leadership very, very strongly, coupled with that ability

00:36:18 Paul Stephens

to gather information and make sense of it.

00:36:21 Paul Stephens

Because I see some other leaders that, they’re, they’re OK on vision or they’re, they’re OK on gathering information, but the making sense of it is where you really seem to excel.

00:36:31 Paul Stephens

Is that fair?

00:36:32 Mark Preston

Yeah, I think that’s the that’s one of the biggest tricks I’d say to motor racing is, you know, you’ve got to take in a lot of information and boil it down to what’s important.

00:36:41 Mark Preston

what are the underlying performance drivers?

00:36:44 Mark Preston

What really is going to make the biggest, what are the biggest levers, I suppose?

00:36:48 Mark Preston

And certainly, you know, what is the biggest low-hanging fruit?

00:36:53 Mark Preston

You know, people talk about low-hanging fruit a lot.

00:36:55 Mark Preston

It’s like, where can you have the biggest change?

00:36:57 Mark Preston

And I’ve been Mark Whitmarsh actually at McFarren once brought me on to the idea of the Pareto principle.

00:37:03 Mark Preston

You know, the idea that 80% of the work

00:37:07 Mark Preston

gets, sorry, the first 80% takes 20% of the effort.

00:37:11 Mark Preston

It’s the last 20% that takes 80% of the effort.

00:37:14 Mark Preston

That’s definitely true in motor racing.

00:37:16 Mark Preston

You can get within a second or two of the leaders, but to get the last 20% is the absolute, is the hardest bit to get.

00:37:25 Mark Preston

So yeah, that’s certainly one of the key elements is to break down the project or the job you’re doing and try to understand

00:37:35 Mark Preston

what really has the biggest impact so that you can have the biggest impact on what you do?

00:37:41 Paul Stephens

Thanks.

00:37:41 Paul Stephens

And then the last one, because I’d like just to close from you on just a couple of top tips for our listeners on leading business change.

00:37:50 Paul Stephens

And it may come from, as I said, I’m genuinely hoping that we can come back and do another one.

00:37:57 Paul Stephens

But when you launched or you took Super Aguri to the F1 grid in, was it in Bahrain?

00:38:03 Paul Stephens

And you did that in 100 days, right, while still running another business, doing your MBA and, a bunch of other stuff, right?

00:38:11 Paul Stephens

So how, if you could just take a couple of perhaps top tips, maybe from that time for leaders, how did you manage to lead a new F1 team in 100 days, you know, to the grid?

00:38:23 Mark Preston

Yeah, I think there was one that I remember.

00:38:25 Mark Preston

If you don’t know what to do next, take small steps.

00:38:27 Mark Preston

So break everything down into small steps.

00:38:30 Mark Preston

and plan, that’s certainly a huge thing.

00:38:34 Mark Preston

What are the things that did I find?

00:38:39 Mark Preston

There’s one by Colin Powell that I always think of, the general from the US, where he says, you know, sometimes you’ve actually got to go with your gut.

00:38:47 Mark Preston

So when something’s, when you’re 40 to 70% sure, you’ve got to make a decision.

00:38:51 Mark Preston

Because if you can get into analysis paralysis if you wait too long to make decisions.

00:38:56 Mark Preston

And that’s obviously where the leadership comes into it.

00:39:01 Mark Preston

You need to communicate, as we said early.

00:39:03 Mark Preston

I had an old saying where emails don’t work, because I had some of my guys would actually say, but I sent that person an e-mail.

00:39:11 Mark Preston

And it’s like, yeah, but that doesn’t mean that they got the, they didn’t listen to that answer.

00:39:16 Mark Preston

So clear communication is a huge one.

00:39:21 Mark Preston

I found that you got to be careful of sort of socializing risk.

00:39:24 Mark Preston

And what I mean there is that, you know, everyone says, I thought you’d do the, you’d do the job.

00:39:30 Mark Preston

So you’ve got to be sort of careful that you don’t sort of make it so that everyone makes a decision too much together.

00:39:37 Mark Preston

You’ve got to leave at some point and make the decisions.

00:39:41 Mark Preston

And never assume too much.

00:39:43 Mark Preston

I always say assumption is the mother of all screw-ups, you know?

00:39:46 Mark Preston

So don’t assume anything when you’re under pressure to deliver.

00:39:50 Mark Preston

Because if you assume, oh, I assumed he was going to do it or she was going to do it, that’s kind of what I mean by you socialize the risk and then just assume that everybody’s, someone else has done the job.

00:40:00 Mark Preston

So that was some of the bigger things that I’ve learned.

00:40:05 Mark Preston

I think you’ve got to, there’s another concept they call time boxing, where you’ve sort of got to say, to get something done in 100 days, I think they call it, I have not done sort of agile and sprints, but I think that’s another way of looking at it, where you sort of say, this is the total, you’ve got to get there in 100 days.

00:40:22 Mark Preston

Now break it down into sections.

00:40:24 Mark Preston

Now when you get to the end of a sprint, you have to make your decision.

00:40:28 Mark Preston

There’s no second choice.

00:40:29 Mark Preston

You just have to make a decision, even if you’re not sure it’s quite the right one.

00:40:33 Mark Preston

We had a few examples when we were doing super eguri where people said, but we can’t possibly make that decision.

00:40:39 Mark Preston

It just won’t work.

00:40:40 Mark Preston

And I just have to say, no, we’re doing that.

00:40:42 Mark Preston

And then later on, two months later, people would say, oh, I’m glad you made that decision because we didn’t have got here if you hadn’t made the decision on the time.

00:40:49 Mark Preston

So I think there’s a lot of those sort of concepts.

00:40:52 Mark Preston

And

00:40:52 Mark Preston

It’s interesting.

00:40:53 Mark Preston

I’ve been talking about sort of adding, taking things from my MBA and putting them together with, you know, what we’ve learned in motorsports and kind of making out almost like a motorsports MBA at some point.

00:41:05 Paul Stephens

Well, that’s one, you know, it’s fascinating because you do combine

00:41:15 Paul Stephens

very eloquently that leadership theory or that business theory to, the practical elements of leadership in business, which, and I’ll be honest, I think businesses need the practical elements.

00:41:28 Paul Stephens

They need the, they need the how to, the why to, the, you know, what do I actually need to focus on and get on and do?

00:41:33 Paul Stephens

Because there’s so much theory out there and I genuinely don’t think we need more theory.

00:41:38 Paul Stephens

We need that translation of theory into practical stuff.

00:41:42 Paul Stephens

Tell me what, like feedback, or communication.

00:41:44 Paul Stephens

How do I give and receive better quality feedback so that, you know, how do I check?

00:41:49 Paul Stephens

Because just talking about it doesn’t, you know, doesn’t get things done, feel quite strongly about that.

00:41:54 Paul Stephens

So if we can get you back to talk more about that sort of business piece and perhaps maybe, give us some insights into the motorsport-led MBA, you know, I’d be absolutely delighted.

00:42:07 Paul Stephens

But for…

00:42:08 Paul Stephens

For today, Mark Preston, superstar, thanks so much for joining us and just giving us your insights from your perspective as a transformational leader in tech and startups and motorsport.

00:42:19 Paul Stephens

I don’t know if I can…

00:42:21 Paul Stephens

share everything, but autonomous driving, principle of world champs, DS to cheetah.

00:42:27 Paul Stephens

And as I say, as I go back to when somebody said earlier, just the most incredible out-of-the-box thinker that the person I asked said they’d ever worked with.

00:42:35 Paul Stephens

So this has been me, PJ Stevens, with my PJ Tips podcast on leading business change with, as I say, the absolute superstar Mark Preston.

00:42:43 Paul Stephens

Thanks, Mark.

00:42:44 Mark Preston

Thank you very much.# PJ Tips Podcast Episode

## Title

PJ Tips Podcast with DS Techeetah Principal Mark Preston talking winning

on the track and in business

## Podcast

PJ Tips Podcast Leading Business Change

## Published

19 July 2021

## Duration

42 min 57 sec

## Description

PJ Tips Podcast Leading Business Change with Entrepreneur, Businessman

and Formula E Team Principal Mark Preston on winning on and off the

track and translating those lessons into leading business change.

PJ Tips Audio Transcript Number 2

Transcript

00:00:13 Paul Stephens

Good morning, my name is Paul Stephens.

00:00:16 Paul Stephens

00:00:29 Paul Stephens

And actually behind that sits half a dozen businesses or so that Mark runs in an extensive portfolio around autonomous tech.

00:00:39 Paul Stephens

remotely operated trucks, sustainable powered vehicles.

00:00:42 Paul Stephens

In fact, there’s a significant amount.

00:00:44 Paul Stephens

So just in a second, I’m going to ask Mark to introduce himself.

00:00:46 Paul Stephens

But there are two comments I wanted to make, not from myself, from other people.

00:00:51 Paul Stephens

One, when I asked somebody, they referred to Mark as a genius.

00:00:56 Paul Stephens

And somebody else said the most dynamic out-of-the-box thinker they’d worked with.

00:01:01 Paul Stephens

So with that introduction over, Mark, perhaps you give us a more detailed overview of your career, sir?

00:01:07 Mark Preston

Yes, good morning.

00:01:09 Mark Preston

Good to join you.

00:01:10 Mark Preston

Yeah, so, well, I started a long time ago in Australia in Formula Fords.

00:01:17 Mark Preston

I started in racing cars.

00:01:18 Mark Preston

00:01:38 Mark Preston

I worked at GM and then I decided that I needed to come over to the UK to do Formula One and so came over in 96 and worked for Tom Walkinshaw at Arrows Grand Prix.

00:01:49 Mark Preston

00:02:03 Mark Preston

Fascinating to work at McLaren.

00:02:06 Mark Preston

00:02:30 Mark Preston

Again, at 2008, Honda pulled out of the Formula One and we had to shut down Super Eury because of the financial crash.

00:02:39 Mark Preston

00:02:57 Mark Preston

I started looking at electric

00:03:00 Mark Preston

racing at that time with actually David Hunt, who was James Hunt’s brother.

00:03:05 Mark Preston

00:03:16 Mark Preston

And over the next few years, I was actually, you know, involved in a couple of other startups to do with composites, manufacturing and other things.

00:03:24 Mark Preston

And then the FIA put out a tender for

00:03:29 Mark Preston

the new Formula E, and I pitched for that.

00:03:33 Mark Preston

I didn’t win that one, but Alejandro Agag did, and he had a total plan for everything, and he started Formula E.

00:03:42 Mark Preston

And again, I sort of put my hand up and said, Can I have a team?

00:03:47 Mark Preston

And he said, If you can bring Aguri from Japan again, because we thought, you know, we might be able to get Honda to join, then you can have a team at the beginning.

00:03:56 Mark Preston

So, we started as Team Aguri, and

00:03:59 Mark Preston

sort of progressed along the way.

00:04:01 Mark Preston

At one point, we sold to a company in China called Sika.

00:04:06 Mark Preston

And eventually, we’ve now become DS to Cheetah.

00:04:09 Mark Preston

And as you say, we’ve won the last three drivers and two teams championships in Promodary and currently in season 7, heading towards the last races of the season.

00:04:20 Mark Preston

In a good position, probably, for that sort of thing.

00:04:24 Mark Preston

And at the same time,

00:04:26 Mark Preston

00:04:44 Mark Preston

So that’s it in a nutshell.

00:04:45 Paul Stephens

Just tell us a little bit more about last mile deliveries, if you would.

00:04:51 Mark Preston

Yeah, sure.

00:04:52 Mark Preston

So we’re doing a big truck up at Sunderland, Nissan Sunderland plant.

00:04:56 Mark Preston

And I suppose that’s either first or last, depending on how you see it.

00:05:00 Mark Preston

There’s always a bit of a definition thing there because we basically, this truck is going to pull big HGV trailers from the suppliers or the supply chain around the Nissan manufacturing plant.

00:05:15 Mark Preston

to the main plant and back again, obviously, to reload.

00:05:18 Mark Preston

So you could say that’s kind of first mile, i.e.

00:05:22 Mark Preston

it’s the first mile in the journey of an assembled car.

00:05:25 Mark Preston

Or you could say it’s last mile because it’s last mile deliveries to the assembly plant.

00:05:31 Mark Preston

We’re focusing on low-speed vehicles, so less than 20 miles an hour.

00:05:35 Mark Preston

The same is true, we’re looking at, we also manufacture a small vehicle based on the Renault Twizzy.

00:05:41 Mark Preston

which is a small, in America, they’re called neighborhood electric vehicles.

00:05:47 Mark Preston

But we’re working on making a last mile delivery there.

00:05:50 Mark Preston

And again, that could be called first mile as well, because if you recognize that, you know, most of us, when we get something from Amazon, there’s a lot of returns as well.

00:06:00 Mark Preston

So you can say it’s

00:06:02 Mark Preston

last mile, i.e.

00:06:02 Mark Preston

delivered to your house, but it could also be first mile as you send something back or you, send something to be recycled or something of the type.

00:06:11 Mark Preston

So that’s why we call it first and last mile, but specifically low speed vehicles.

00:06:19 Paul Stephens

Thanks, Mark.

00:06:19 Paul Stephens

And that’s, I suspect that might be a topic for another podcast, actually, because I’m fascinated by that.

00:06:25 Paul Stephens

My first and last mile just locally is on my

00:06:30 Paul Stephens

scooter, not an electric scooter, just a scooter because I can move around within a mile of where we live much faster, you know, than a vehicle.

00:06:36 Paul Stephens

00:06:49 Paul Stephens

Certainly, it’s a fascinating topic.

00:06:51 Paul Stephens

Can I ask, just given the, you know, like it’s a bit of an old, bit of a perhaps an old hat question, but

00:06:57 Paul Stephens

00:07:15 Mark Preston

I mean, when everything actually kicked off, have you done much on the concept of scenario planning?

00:07:21 Mark Preston

Have you looked at that before?

00:07:24 Paul Stephens

I have.

00:07:24 Paul Stephens

Do you want to tell us a bit more about it?

00:07:25 Paul Stephens

Because

00:07:26 Paul Stephens

Because I think there’s one thing about the theory of it, there’s something else about the practical leadership of it.

00:07:31 Paul Stephens

So do you want to talk us through it?

00:07:33 Mark Preston

Yeah, so scenario planning, I think, came to the fore when Shell looked at this in the 70s, when there was an oil crisis.

00:07:41 Mark Preston

And they started to look at things and try to figure out what didn’t they and didn’t they know about the future and why weren’t they prepared?

00:07:49 Mark Preston

So when things kind of started to become clear that we didn’t know what the future was,

00:07:55 Mark Preston

we started to sort of map down, we put it a high, medium and low case.

00:08:00 Mark Preston

So you sort of say, what’s the best and what’s the worst things that could possibly happen?

00:08:05 Mark Preston

And so I think as our worst case, we said, you know, what if we hit the place for another year?

00:08:10 Mark Preston

And our best case was that we could race within sort of a month or two of the whole thing starting to become clear.

00:08:18 Mark Preston

And by having that mapped out and mapping out thoughts on what we would do in each,

00:08:25 Mark Preston

in each eventuality, it makes it easier to sort of think through things.

00:08:29 Mark Preston

00:08:41 Mark Preston

00:08:53 Mark Preston

00:09:09 Paul Stephens

Thank you.

00:09:10 Paul Stephens

But just a little bit more on that, because when you’re, you know, you’re leading, say, you know, a double world championship, you know, Formula winning Formula E team,

00:09:18 Paul Stephens

you’re leading across, sponsors, teams, drivers, many cultures.

00:09:23 Paul Stephens

I mean, it’s a global, it’s a global business.

00:09:26 Paul Stephens

How did you, how do you, there’s two questions really, how do you lead normally across those cultures and balance, so you know, the relationships with sponsors and drivers and so on.

00:09:38 Paul Stephens

But, and then how did you, know, how did you include them in your kind of situational planning or, you know, change programme last year, given what you were going through?

00:09:49 Mark Preston

I think an old comment that a colleague of mine said, when things are unclear or there’s a vacuum of information, people make it up.

00:09:59 Mark Preston

So most of it is to do with communication and letting everybody know where we think things are up to.

00:10:07 Mark Preston

So regular communication, because if you don’t get any information, most people make it up.

00:10:12 Mark Preston

And I think that’s where rumor and hearsay and theories and

00:10:17 Mark Preston

conspiracy theories come from us because there’s not enough information.

00:10:20 Mark Preston

So people fill in the blanks however they feel necessary, they want to make up things.

00:10:25 Mark Preston

So I think communication is pretty much key in any situation.

00:10:30 Mark Preston

In fact, when things don’t go right, it’s often because of some sort of miscommunication or lack of communication.

00:10:37 Mark Preston

A good example is on the racetrack when two of our drivers, our two drivers had

00:10:43 Mark Preston

00:10:55 Mark Preston

But they were both targeting a different lap.

00:10:58 Mark Preston

We’d had a complete breakdown in communications of the cars because of power outage in the pit lane.

00:11:05 Mark Preston

And so most of the misunderstanding came because

00:11:09 Mark Preston

they thought, the guy in front must be really slow.

00:11:13 Mark Preston

And the guy in front was saying, why is he attacking me so much?

00:11:16 Mark Preston

He’s going to run out of battery.

00:11:17 Mark Preston

But really, they’d both been targeting two different things.

00:11:20 Mark Preston

And as soon as the systems came back up again, we checked which lap they’re on and said, okay, calm down.

00:11:26 Mark Preston

You’re looking at one lap longer and you’re looking at one lap shorter.

00:11:29 Mark Preston

The actual answer is this.

00:11:31 Mark Preston

And of course, they then settled down into the final two or three laps.

00:11:36 Mark Preston

But that was a miscommunication that happened on the

00:11:39 Mark Preston

on the track just because the communication has broken down.

00:11:41 Mark Preston

So I think that’s a good example, on track.

00:11:45 Paul Stephens

Thank you.

00:11:46 Paul Stephens

00:11:58 Paul Stephens

areas of risk that they’ve identified.

00:12:01 Paul Stephens

And yet, we all talk about communication, but it’s still so important.

00:12:05 Paul Stephens

And yet to some degree, we don’t seem to have kind of improved it or gotten our, really kind of gotten our heads around it.

00:12:12 Paul Stephens

So from a leader’s perspective, how do you check the quality of communication?

00:12:17 Mark Preston

Well, you know, some people say that communication, it’s okay if it’s one-sided, you know, I’m telling you something, but unless you listen, it doesn’t get through, does it?

00:12:25 Mark Preston

So it’s a two-way process.

00:12:27 Mark Preston

So in some ways, you’ve got to say, I’m going to do this.

00:12:30 Mark Preston

And then I have to ask you, what did you expect me to, what are you expecting me to do?

00:12:35 Mark Preston

So that I check whether or not the actual communication got through.

00:12:39 Mark Preston

So I can’t remember who’s saying that was, but certainly communication is, you know, two-sided.

00:12:46 Mark Preston

It has to get through.

00:12:47 Mark Preston

It has to be listening and communication.

00:12:50 Mark Preston

Otherwise, it’s not really communication, I suppose.

00:12:54 Paul Stephens

True.

00:12:54 Paul Stephens

Just message sharing and you don’t know if it’s been taken on board or going to be actioned.

00:12:57 Paul Stephens

Yeah, exactly.

00:12:59 Paul Stephens

No, cool.

00:13:00 Paul Stephens

Can I ask, in terms of Formula E, who are your, and I’m not sure if you use this word, but who are your customers in Formula E?

00:13:07 Paul Stephens

Okay, perhaps a better one then.

00:13:08 Paul Stephens

Who does Formula E serve and who does DS to Cheetah serve?

00:13:16 Mark Preston

Yeah, so I suppose the team’s customers at the end of the day are its sponsors as one level.

00:13:21 Mark Preston

So that’s the kind of B2B relationship.

00:13:24 Mark Preston

And then the other customers are the B2C, i.e.

00:13:28 Mark Preston

the fans that want to watching the racing, because that’s also the customers of our B2B partners.

00:13:36 Mark Preston

So yeah, there’s probably two types of customers.

00:13:39 Mark Preston

There’s, as I say, B2B and that is other, you know, partners that are associated with, let’s say, the car company with DS.

00:13:48 Mark Preston

But DS is looking to talk to their customers, which are obviously consumers and sometimes businesses who are potentially buying cars for fleets and those kind of things.

00:13:56 Mark Preston

So we’ve got two sort of levels of customer.

00:14:01 Paul Stephens

00:14:19 Mark Preston

I think you need to showcase things.

00:14:21 Mark Preston

00:14:36 Mark Preston

That’s what Top Gear did on the, you know, on their show, and it was this crazy electric car that they drove around Oxfordshire at like 4 miles an hour or something.

00:14:45 Mark Preston

When you think about that was what people thought of an electric car back in 2009, coming through to some of the latest cars.

00:14:54 Mark Preston

I mean, I drive a DS3, so it’s an electric B-segment SUV.

00:15:01 Mark Preston

Not to convince people that they should drive them, but at least convincing them that there are options now.

00:15:09 Mark Preston

Back in 2009,

00:15:11 Mark Preston

I don’t even know what options were available.

00:15:13 Mark Preston

Maybe there was an Nissan Leaf that had a fairly small range, I imagine.

00:15:18 Mark Preston

Maybe a Renault Twizzy and a few other different vehicles.

00:15:20 Mark Preston

But now there’s a huge array of vehicles, everything from the DSs through to Peugeots, Opels, Porsches, Mercedes, et cetera.

00:15:31 Mark Preston

There’s such a selection.

00:15:32 Mark Preston

I think what Formula E does is it shows that the technology is viable, valid,

00:15:39 Mark Preston

early adopters can, follow the racing and can spread the word that, EVs are not any more milk floats as they used to be called in the old days.

00:15:50 Mark Preston

They’re now proper serious vehicles.

00:15:51 Mark Preston

00:16:08 Mark Preston

can you get so much torque from zero?

00:16:11 Mark Preston

Well, instead of being, unless you’re going to use obviously an F1 engine, but they’ve also got electric elements to the hybrid system in order to get the off-the-line torque.

00:16:21 Mark Preston

So I think all in all, motor racing helps to improve the breed, obviously, through competition, but also to show the early adopters what can be done with an electric vehicle.

00:16:39 Paul Stephens

And certainly your piece about, acceleration, all that sort of, early on power when you just, dump a, or it’s almost like releasing A throttle.

00:16:47 Paul Stephens

00:16:58 Paul Stephens

I mean, that’s, I mean, that’s blisteringly quick.

00:17:00 Paul Stephens

I think they call it ludicrous, or there’s a ludicrous button, but it’s blisteringly quick.

00:17:04 Paul Stephens

And yes, our Nissan Leaf doesn’t have the

00:17:07 Paul Stephens

the longest range.

00:17:08 Paul Stephens

00:17:17 Paul Stephens

00:17:28 Paul Stephens

And I’ve mentioned to you before that, you know, I think it’s the DS7, the E-tent.

00:17:33 Paul Stephens

A few years ago, I never would have looked at that car.

00:17:35 Paul Stephens

or consider.

00:17:36 Paul Stephens

And now I’ve got a real hankering for one, partly because of, I think the brand and actually that has come out of Formula E.

00:17:43 Paul Stephens

So I guess what I’m answering my own question, I’m a sucker for racing and I am in, I’m influenced.

00:17:49 Paul Stephens

I hope that doesn’t make me shallow, perhaps just influenceable.

00:17:53 Paul Stephens

So listen, back to, if we can, a bit more little, you know, a bit more about business and your business success.

00:17:59 Paul Stephens

Over the many years, how have you gone about creating an environment

00:18:05 Paul Stephens

that has allowed you and others to be so successful.

00:18:10 Paul Stephens

And we can say that because you are double, world champions, three times drivers champions.

00:18:15 Paul Stephens

So, and I’m assuming you carry that on to business.

00:18:18 Paul Stephens

So what is it that you do or create when it comes to the environment?

00:18:23 Mark Preston

I mean, one of the things I learned going, there was two things I, big learning things I learned.

00:18:28 Mark Preston

I started at Arrows and Tom Mochenshaw, I would say, was very entrepreneurial in his approach to things.

00:18:36 Mark Preston

he would let you do anything you wanted in order to make Pelico faster.

00:18:40 Mark Preston

But at the same time, then I went to McLaren, and I always use this particular quote by Ron Dennis, where he sort of says, when he came into racing, things were a black art.

00:18:52 Mark Preston

And if you’ve ever been involved in racing in the early days, or when you get out of Formula One into other series below Formula E and Formula One,

00:19:00 Mark Preston

There’s a lot of, he says, a blackout was a cloak for we really don’t know.

00:19:05 Mark Preston

It was intuitive engineering.

00:19:07 Mark Preston

So he decided to make it a science.

00:19:08 Mark Preston

And I do believe that is a really key element is to have a deep understanding of what makes your, in motor racing, what makes a car go fast, for example.

00:19:20 Mark Preston

So I’ve done a lot of work on 1st order performance variables, second orders.

00:19:25 Mark Preston

You know, what really makes a car go fast?

00:19:27 Mark Preston

And

00:19:29 Mark Preston

That is, in Formula E, it’s definitely a large amount driver, obviously the actual vehicle itself.

00:19:37 Mark Preston

But then there’s a lot of things just to do with, in the military, they call it tactics, techniques and procedures.

00:19:44 Mark Preston

So I once did something with the MOD and they were saying that, survivability in the field is not just about what armour you’re using, it’s also about how you go about what you’re doing.

00:19:58 Mark Preston

So there’s a lot of parallels you can take from different industries.

00:20:02 Mark Preston

But the basis for me is that you need to have a deep understanding, go through it in a logical way.

00:20:09 Mark Preston

It’s not just about having the fanciest equipment.

00:20:12 Mark Preston

You do have to have a big team around it.

00:20:15 Mark Preston

And so, you know, people often say, what’s your secret sauce from the E?

00:20:19 Mark Preston

And for me, it’s the total package.

00:20:21 Mark Preston

You have to have the best drivers, the best engineers,

00:20:24 Mark Preston

the best organisation.

00:20:25 Mark Preston

You need to pay the bills at the right time.

00:20:27 Mark Preston

You need to have the right amount of money to do the job.

00:20:30 Mark Preston

You need to have the right understanding.

00:20:32 Mark Preston

You need to be organised and run projects in a correct way.

00:20:37 Mark Preston

So it’s not just one thing, it’s multiple things.

00:20:43 Paul Stephens

When you, know, we’re talking about winning here, so that’s, you know, that’s winning on the track.

00:20:49 Paul Stephens

It’s points, you know, points make prizes and all that stuff.

00:20:53 Paul Stephens

But we hear particularly things like Formula E, teams or perhaps Formula E themselves talking about purpose.

00:21:01 Paul Stephens

And maybe we discuss whether that’s purpose with a small P or purpose with a capital P.

00:21:07 Paul Stephens

But how do you, know, what is the purpose of motor racing, I guess, and how do you balance this purpose around sustainability with winning?

00:21:19 Mark Preston

Yeah, that’s an interesting word, isn’t it?

00:21:20 Mark Preston

I mean, at a

00:21:22 Mark Preston

I suppose at top level, motor racing is about winning, ’cause we are competing it’s a competition, but I do…

00:21:30 Mark Preston

I do think that, as I said before, competition improves the breed.

00:21:35 Mark Preston

00:21:59 Mark Preston

And in some ways, competition drives things forward faster.

00:22:07 Mark Preston

Have you ever looked at technology readiness levels from NASA?

00:22:12 Paul Stephens

Yeah, go on.

00:22:13 Mark Preston

Yeah.

00:22:14 Mark Preston

So one of the things I think is that we operate in kind of level sort of three to six, somewhere in that range where

00:22:23 Mark Preston

We’re doing technology demonstrators, basically.

00:22:26 Mark Preston

We can take more risk than a road car manufacturer because on the road, they have to design a car for 15, 20 years on the road.

00:22:33 Mark Preston

So they have to be very, very careful when they design something because it’s got to be out there in the world for so long.

00:22:39 Mark Preston

In F1, for example, you can change things every race or a lot of things every race.

00:22:45 Mark Preston

In Formula E, to reduce our budgets, we don’t, we only, you can homologate the powertrain every year.

00:22:52 Mark Preston

although you can make changes if there are any safety or quality concerns.

00:22:57 Mark Preston

But software can change every race.

00:22:59 Mark Preston

So it’s a fast-paced development area.

00:23:04 Mark Preston

And as I say, we run in this technology readiness levels.

00:23:07 Mark Preston

I think it’s level 5, which is technology demonstrator.

00:23:10 Mark Preston

So in a lot of ways, I would say we do technology demonstrators and the competition driven by competing with others.

00:23:19 Mark Preston

makes the product better and it happens at a faster rate than it would do if it was just in an R&D department, maybe in university or something.

00:23:30 Mark Preston

So I think motorsport drives the technology forward at a greater speed and that’s in showcases that technology to make it viable for the outside world and also helps to mature things.

00:23:47 Mark Preston

So for example, in Pulmonary at the beginning, we had five-speed gearboxes.

00:23:52 Mark Preston

00:24:10 Mark Preston

Now you wind forward eight years,

00:24:13 Mark Preston

and everybody’s got very similar or closer together than they were.

00:24:18 Mark Preston

And so what happens there is that if you’re doing a road car, you can say, well, in racing, in this format, the most successful answer has been this.

00:24:29 Mark Preston

So I will put that into my road car, or I’ll be more confident in choosing that for my road car because the racing has gone through lots of iterations quickly and come to this conclusion that

00:24:40 Mark Preston

this format of car setup is the right way to go.

00:24:44 Mark Preston

So motor racing can help drive the technology, but it also helps to show the public, the buying public, this particular setup works well for a car.

00:24:57 Paul Stephens

And that, you know, when you were just talking about that sort of risk and innovation piece and the different levels, just two things sprung to mind for me.

00:25:02 Paul Stephens

One is almost the opposite of that, not, you know, perhaps a bit harsh, but almost the opposite of that in, say, the marine industry.

00:25:09 Paul Stephens

where perhaps it’s the owner of the yacht or the boat that’s taking some of the risk and, trialling the technology, because often boats are one-off or they’re very few.

00:25:21 Paul Stephens

So it tends to be a bit like a cottage industry.

00:25:23 Paul Stephens

I don’t know many owners that have had boats where things haven’t gone wrong.

00:25:27 Paul Stephens

And yet, you know, we get in cars now, even the lower level cars,

00:25:31 Paul Stephens

And, they, on the whole, they never go wrong.

00:25:34 Paul Stephens

they’re tried and tested to such a degree.

00:25:37 Paul Stephens

It would be very interesting.

00:25:38 Paul Stephens

I think maybe Tesla do it, but that thing you just said about the software updates, your cars don’t, the software does.

00:25:45 Paul Stephens

Perhaps soon we’ll just, you know, I’ll just be, I’ll have a car, I’ll just kind of plug it in, it’ll just kind of get updated, maybe even serviced, you know, through software.

00:25:53 Paul Stephens

I don’t know, it’d be quite an exciting time, I think, to, when that starts coming onto our driveways.

00:26:00 Mark Preston

Yeah, I think that’s the big thing, isn’t it?

00:26:02 Mark Preston

00:26:22 Mark Preston

There are maps and other things where the

00:26:25 Mark Preston

the charger maybe ramps in slow at the beginning, monitors temperature, all those kind of things.

00:26:31 Mark Preston

But if over time we learn things in racing, we can pass those through to rd cars.

00:26:36 Mark Preston

Maybe there’s some elements of the way we charge cars that could be over the air updated to the rd car.

00:26:44 Paul Stephens

Do you think, just talking about charging cars, do you think the future is in

00:26:50 Paul Stephens

electric rechargeable cars?

00:26:52 Paul Stephens

Are we going to be looking at synthetic fuels or what’s your view on that?

00:26:55 Paul Stephens

What are you doing?

00:26:57 Mark Preston

I certainly am interested in the sustainability of motor racing because someone actually said to me, what’s my purpose at one point?

00:27:03 Mark Preston

And one of the reasons I did go looking at Formula E was to see what was the sustainable future of motorsport.

00:27:11 Mark Preston

I think if you look at there was a tweet that I think Elon Musk did a little while back.

00:27:17 Mark Preston

where the city didn’t believe in hydrogen.

00:27:22 Mark Preston

00:27:33 Mark Preston

You’re up in the sort of 80% range when you go from kind of the solar rays hitting the solar panels to the cars moving.

00:27:42 Mark Preston

That’s a very high efficiency

00:27:44 Mark Preston

system.

00:27:45 Mark Preston

So in things like cities, I do believe that direct electrification will be the key because it is the most efficient way of doing taking energy from renewables through to movement, let’s say.

00:28:00 Mark Preston

But there are a lot of things still in the world that where that’s not true.

00:28:07 Mark Preston

So aircraft, one probably answer where in the end we’ll probably be using

00:28:12 Mark Preston

synthetic fuels because of the energy density of a synthetic fuel.

00:28:16 Mark Preston

Now, the efficiency converting from renewable energy to a synthetic fuel is quite low at the moment, but there’s a lot of research going on to increase that efficiency.

00:28:30 Mark Preston

So I can see that efficiency will increase.

00:28:33 Mark Preston

You can see that Porsche is doing some work down in South America where there’s an excess supply of wind power.

00:28:41 Mark Preston

I think that’s an important word, excess supply of energy.

00:28:46 Mark Preston

Because if you look at a map of where the world’s most wind is, it’s actually along that coast of that coast of Chile.

00:28:52 Mark Preston

So, you know, in that area, they it would be logical that they had a lot of wind energy that was used to create to create these synthetic fuels.

00:29:02 Mark Preston

Same is true of Australia.

00:29:03 Mark Preston

So I’m from Australia and you’re out in the middle of Australia, you can see that you could have vast solar farms that would be converting

00:29:12 Mark Preston

you’d have to go to the coasts to get the water, obviously.

00:29:15 Mark Preston

But the electricity could be used to convert to hydrogen, which most likely gets converted to ammonia.

00:29:23 Mark Preston

And ammonia is a good way of transferring or transporting energy to another country.

00:29:28 Mark Preston

So a country like Japan, which has a lack of landmass and not many natural resources, will be, you know, they’re a net importer of energy.

00:29:39 Mark Preston

So they’ll probably import

00:29:41 Mark Preston

things like ammonia from Australia, for example.

00:29:44 Mark Preston

So there’s going to be horses to the courses, but I do think in the world’s cities, which are where most people live, direct electrification, i.e.

00:29:53 Mark Preston

battery electrification, is really still being the primary source of transportation.

00:30:00 Paul Stephens

God, thanks, thanks for that insight.

00:30:02 Paul Stephens

And when, and I say that genuinely, because when I, you know, when I kind of first met you and spoke to you, we didn’t

00:30:11 Paul Stephens

we didn’t talk about purpose and yet you bored me over with your sense of purpose.

00:30:18 Paul Stephens

So you might not necessarily stand on the soapbox and kind of, but share it, from that sense.

00:30:29 Paul Stephens

But in the way that you, your being, I’ve always found it, we’ll say right from the start, I was absolutely enthralled by it.

00:30:35 Paul Stephens

And when you talk like that, it’s, you know, it’s incredibly captivating.

00:30:39 Paul Stephens

But

00:30:39 Paul Stephens

And that seems like a deep purpose.

00:30:41 Paul Stephens

My point is, do you think motorsport also has that kind of deep purpose?

00:30:46 Paul Stephens

Or are they just kind of greenwashing it for the sake of still going racing?

00:30:51 Mark Preston

I think it has to be relevant to the future.

00:30:55 Mark Preston

And I did start working a little bit with RoboRace, which is one of the reasons I did get involved in autonomous vehicles, because I could see that’s the next step.

00:31:04 Mark Preston

Does motor racing

00:31:07 Mark Preston

have a purpose?

00:31:08 Mark Preston

I believe so.

00:31:09 Mark Preston

I mean, maybe it’s, there’s always early adopters in something.

00:31:13 Mark Preston

there’s a comment, I think it’s in most sales and marketing that says, early adopters are something like, is it 15% of people?

00:31:21 Mark Preston

So, when you think about it, us in Formula E, we’re the early adopters.

00:31:26 Mark Preston

And the tech, the technology is already spilling over into your senior, the latest LM

00:31:34 Mark Preston

H cars in Le Mans have got a much bigger electric capability.

00:31:39 Mark Preston

You’ll see F1, I believe in the future, will go to more and more electrification of the powertrain.

00:31:45 Mark Preston

I don’t know what percentage they’ll end up at, but they’re going to go more and more electrified, I believe.

00:31:49 Mark Preston

00:32:00 Mark Preston

So I think

00:32:02 Mark Preston

There’s always the early adopters.

00:32:04 Mark Preston

I think ourselves and Formula E have made a big step.

00:32:07 Mark Preston

Alejandro and the FI made a big step.

00:32:10 Mark Preston

But you know, that was seven or eight years ago.

00:32:12 Mark Preston

It’s still a long time ago.

00:32:14 Mark Preston

And you could also say that obviously F1 fed into Formula E.

00:32:18 Mark Preston

If Formula One hadn’t done Kurz in 2007 or 8, I think about 9 it was introduced, but it was started the discussions in 2007, I think it was.

00:32:30 Mark Preston

If Formula One hadn’t done

00:32:31 Mark Preston

occurs, maybe we wouldn’t have the base technology ready to go into Formula E back in 2013.

00:32:39 Mark Preston

So actually, F1 pushed forward a long time ago now.

00:32:44 Mark Preston

It’s almost, you know, gosh, that’s 10, 15 years ago.

00:32:48 Mark Preston

And that technology has now, you know, come through all the way through into Formula E.

00:32:54 Mark Preston

And then we’ll push, you know, some of the technology that we’re doing.

00:32:57 Mark Preston

Obviously, you probably know that DS is part of Stellantis.

00:33:01 Mark Preston

and Peugeot is now going into Le Mans, into the new hypercar rules.

00:33:07 Mark Preston

And there’s technology that’s going from their work in Formula E into the Le Mans car.

00:33:13 Mark Preston

And actually, there’s a relationship developing between TECHEETAH and the Peugeot team as well to take over some of the engineering knowledge into Le Mans.

00:33:24 Mark Preston

So there’s a lot of flow through, but yeah, I don’t know how long it’ll be until

00:33:30 Mark Preston

all motor racing is electric or how much of it might be, it could be the classic cars end up being, have synthetic fuel for quite a long time to at least be taking energy from renewable sources.

00:33:45 Paul Stephens

Well, listen, I look forward to seeing how you influence, you know, you personally and your team, how you might influence Le Mans.

00:33:52 Paul Stephens

And therefore, another excuse for me to go back out there because I missed last year.

00:33:56 Paul Stephens

00:34:10 Paul Stephens

So I’ve just got a couple of questions just to wrap up because I’ve just been taking quite a lot of your time.

00:34:14 Paul Stephens

I really do appreciate it.

00:34:16 Paul Stephens

You’ve mentioned some of the leaders you’ve worked with, all the way back to Tom Walkinshaw, which is amazing, and Ron Dennis.

00:34:23 Paul Stephens

00:34:35 Mark Preston

I mean, having worked mostly in motor racing, I think, you know, I worked with Tom Wolf and Shore, and then obviously Adrian, and those guys there, Oguri Suzuki and Honda.

00:34:46 Mark Preston

Honda’s certainly an interesting

00:34:49 Mark Preston

influence on myself from the business side of things.

00:34:52 Mark Preston

I always like reading about what Mr.

00:34:54 Mark Preston

Honda had done in the past and how he’d gone about growing Honda.

00:34:59 Mark Preston

So I’ve sort of a lot of influence from that from my MBA.

00:35:02 Mark Preston

I do a lot of reading.

00:35:04 Mark Preston

You know, having done the MBA, I read the Harvard Business Review a lot, Clayton Christensen and those kind of forward-thinking people.

00:35:12 Mark Preston

I read a lot about strategy from those kind of famous leaders.

00:35:19 Mark Preston

So I do a lot of reading.

00:35:22 Mark Preston

Alejandro obviously done an amazing job to start Formula E and grow it.

00:35:26 Mark Preston

So it’s always fascinating to watch what he’s doing next, you know, with things like extremeing into the future.

00:35:33 Mark Preston

Very interested in entrepreneurship.

00:35:35 Mark Preston

So obviously take interest in people like Elon Musk and others in that field to have done amazing startups and growing businesses worldwide.

00:35:46 Mark Preston

So those

00:35:48 Mark Preston

Majority engineering in my past, but certainly interesting of what’s happening in our commercial.

00:35:58 Paul Stephens

00:36:10 Paul Stephens

But, you know, you seem to really combine that, the visionary piece of leadership very, very strongly, coupled with that ability

00:36:18 Paul Stephens

to gather information and make sense of it.

00:36:21 Paul Stephens

Because I see some other leaders that, they’re, they’re OK on vision or they’re, they’re OK on gathering information, but the making sense of it is where you really seem to excel.

00:36:31 Paul Stephens

Is that fair?

00:36:32 Mark Preston

Yeah, I think that’s the that’s one of the biggest tricks I’d say to motor racing is, you know, you’ve got to take in a lot of information and boil it down to what’s important.

00:36:41 Mark Preston

what are the underlying performance drivers?

00:36:44 Mark Preston

What really is going to make the biggest, what are the biggest levers, I suppose?

00:36:48 Mark Preston

And certainly, you know, what is the biggest low-hanging fruit?

00:36:53 Mark Preston

You know, people talk about low-hanging fruit a lot.

00:36:55 Mark Preston

It’s like, where can you have the biggest change?

00:36:57 Mark Preston

And I’ve been Mark Whitmarsh actually at McFarren once brought me on to the idea of the Pareto principle.

00:37:03 Mark Preston

You know, the idea that 80% of the work

00:37:07 Mark Preston

gets, sorry, the first 80% takes 20% of the effort.

00:37:11 Mark Preston

It’s the last 20% that takes 80% of the effort.

00:37:14 Mark Preston

That’s definitely true in motor racing.

00:37:16 Mark Preston

You can get within a second or two of the leaders, but to get the last 20% is the absolute, is the hardest bit to get.

00:37:25 Mark Preston

So yeah, that’s certainly one of the key elements is to break down the project or the job you’re doing and try to understand

00:37:35 Mark Preston

what really has the biggest impact so that you can have the biggest impact on what you do?

00:37:41 Paul Stephens

Thanks.

00:37:41 Paul Stephens

And then the last one, because I’d like just to close from you on just a couple of top tips for our listeners on leading business change.

00:37:50 Paul Stephens

And it may come from, as I said, I’m genuinely hoping that we can come back and do another one.

00:37:57 Paul Stephens

But when you launched or you took Super Aguri to the F1 grid in, was it in Bahrain?

00:38:03 Paul Stephens

And you did that in 100 days, right, while still running another business, doing your MBA and, a bunch of other stuff, right?

00:38:11 Paul Stephens

So how, if you could just take a couple of perhaps top tips, maybe from that time for leaders, how did you manage to lead a new F1 team in 100 days, you know, to the grid?

00:38:23 Mark Preston

Yeah, I think there was one that I remember.

00:38:25 Mark Preston

If you don’t know what to do next, take small steps.

00:38:27 Mark Preston

So break everything down into small steps.

00:38:30 Mark Preston

and plan, that’s certainly a huge thing.

00:38:34 Mark Preston

What are the things that did I find?

00:38:39 Mark Preston

There’s one by Colin Powell that I always think of, the general from the US, where he says, you know, sometimes you’ve actually got to go with your gut.

00:38:47 Mark Preston

So when something’s, when you’re 40 to 70% sure, you’ve got to make a decision.

00:38:51 Mark Preston

Because if you can get into analysis paralysis if you wait too long to make decisions.

00:38:56 Mark Preston

And that’s obviously where the leadership comes into it.

00:39:01 Mark Preston

You need to communicate, as we said early.

00:39:03 Mark Preston

I had an old saying where emails don’t work, because I had some of my guys would actually say, but I sent that person an e-mail.

00:39:11 Mark Preston

And it’s like, yeah, but that doesn’t mean that they got the, they didn’t listen to that answer.

00:39:16 Mark Preston

So clear communication is a huge one.

00:39:21 Mark Preston

I found that you got to be careful of sort of socializing risk.

00:39:24 Mark Preston

And what I mean there is that, you know, everyone says, I thought you’d do the, you’d do the job.

00:39:30 Mark Preston

So you’ve got to be sort of careful that you don’t sort of make it so that everyone makes a decision too much together.

00:39:37 Mark Preston

You’ve got to leave at some point and make the decisions.

00:39:41 Mark Preston

And never assume too much.

00:39:43 Mark Preston

I always say assumption is the mother of all screw-ups, you know?

00:39:46 Mark Preston

So don’t assume anything when you’re under pressure to deliver.

00:39:50 Mark Preston

00:40:00 Mark Preston

So that was some of the bigger things that I’ve learned.

00:40:05 Mark Preston

00:40:22 Mark Preston

Now break it down into sections.

00:40:24 Mark Preston

Now when you get to the end of a sprint, you have to make your decision.

00:40:28 Mark Preston

There’s no second choice.

00:40:29 Mark Preston

You just have to make a decision, even if you’re not sure it’s quite the right one.

00:40:33 Mark Preston

We had a few examples when we were doing super eguri where people said, but we can’t possibly make that decision.

00:40:39 Mark Preston

It just won’t work.

00:40:40 Mark Preston

And I just have to say, no, we’re doing that.

00:40:42 Mark Preston

And then later on, two months later, people would say, oh, I’m glad you made that decision because we didn’t have got here if you hadn’t made the decision on the time.

00:40:49 Mark Preston

So I think there’s a lot of those sort of concepts.

00:40:52 Mark Preston

And

00:40:52 Mark Preston

It’s interesting.

00:40:53 Mark Preston

00:41:05 Paul Stephens

Well, that’s one, you know, it’s fascinating because you do combine

00:41:15 Paul Stephens

very eloquently that leadership theory or that business theory to, the practical elements of leadership in business, which, and I’ll be honest, I think businesses need the practical elements.

00:41:28 Paul Stephens

They need the, they need the how to, the why to, the, you know, what do I actually need to focus on and get on and do?

00:41:33 Paul Stephens

Because there’s so much theory out there and I genuinely don’t think we need more theory.

00:41:38 Paul Stephens

We need that translation of theory into practical stuff.

00:41:42 Paul Stephens

Tell me what, like feedback, or communication.

00:41:44 Paul Stephens

How do I give and receive better quality feedback so that, you know, how do I check?

00:41:49 Paul Stephens

Because just talking about it doesn’t, you know, doesn’t get things done, feel quite strongly about that.

00:41:54 Paul Stephens

So if we can get you back to talk more about that sort of business piece and perhaps maybe, give us some insights into the motorsport-led MBA, you know, I’d be absolutely delighted.

00:42:07 Paul Stephens

But for…

00:42:08 Paul Stephens

For today, Mark Preston, superstar, thanks so much for joining us and just giving us your insights from your perspective as a transformational leader in tech and startups and motorsport.

00:42:19 Paul Stephens

I don’t know if I can…

00:42:21 Paul Stephens

share everything, but autonomous driving, principle of world champs, DS to cheetah.

00:42:27 Paul Stephens

And as I say, as I go back to when somebody said earlier, just the most incredible out-of-the-box thinker that the person I asked said they’d ever worked with.

00:42:35 Paul Stephens

So this has been me, PJ Stevens, with my PJ Tips podcast on leading business change with, as I say, the absolute superstar Mark Preston.

00:42:43 Paul Stephens

Thanks, Mark.

00:42:44 Mark Preston

Thank you very much.

Did Formula E Lose China? My Shanghai Interview on Batteries, Software and the Future of EV Racing

The morning after Lola Yamaha ABT’s first Formula E victory, I joined Telescope in Shanghai to discuss China’s EV industry, battery competition, software-defined racing, Gen4 technology and Lola’s interest in collaborating with Chinese manufacturers.

by markandrewpreston July 16, 2026July 16, 2026

A Thousand Monkeys with a Compiler

The Oracle Principle — why AI is mastering code first, and what it tells you about where it goes next. Everyone knows the thought experiment, even if they don’t know its name. The infinite monkey theorem: sit enough monkeys at enough typewriters for long enough and, almost surely, one of them bangs out the complete…

by markandrewpreston June 22, 2026June 22, 2026

What a F1 Keynote Speaker Should Actually Deliver

Every conference planner searching for an F1 keynote speaker wants the same thing: a room full of senior leaders who walk out different from how they walked in. Sharper. More decisive. Genuinely changed, not just entertained. The question is whether the speaker you book delivers that — or just tells good stories. I’ve been on…

by markandrewpreston June 6, 2026June 6, 2026

Leading Through Change: What Motorsport Taught Me About Building High‑Performance Teams

Posted on November 14, 2025 by markandrewpreston

By Mark Preston

Formula E has a way of pulling you back in. Not because the racing is unpredictable or because the technology is evolving at breakneck speed—though both of those are true—but because the championship has become one of the clearest mirrors we have for how organisations adapt, align, and win in complex environments.

My conversation with PJ Stephens touched on many of these themes. We began with the obvious question: why return now, and why with Lola? But as the discussion unfolded, we found ourselves exploring leadership, communication, risk, and the peculiar physics of high‑performance teams.

What follows is a more reflective piece to accompany that conversation.

Returning to Formula E: More Than a Reunion

Lola’s rebirth comes at a moment of profound transition in motorsport. The sport is electrifying—literally and philosophically. When Till Bechtolsheimer revived the company, we aligned around three pillars that signal where racing, and mobility more broadly, are heading: electrification, hydrogen, and sustainable fuels and materials.

Formula E sits naturally at the beginning of that arc. It gives us a laboratory for electric powertrains. It accelerates the development of energy management, regenerative braking, and software intelligence—capabilities that translate directly into hydrogen and hybrid systems. And it puts us in a world championship where innovation is not just encouraged but required.

Partnering with Yamaha on the powertrain and ABT on track means we’re building with teams who have both deep experience and shared ambitions. Between us, we’ve won more than a quarter of all Formula E races since the championship began. That’s not nostalgia. It’s capability.

What’s Changed in Formula E—and What Hasn’t

The new Gen3 Evo car marks the biggest conceptual step since the series began. Four‑wheel drive. A huge software footprint. Massive regeneration capability. In attack mode, drivers won’t just push more power—they’ll switch the car’s entire operating philosophy.

This shift matters not only for performance but for leadership. Modern motorsport teams are now software organisations as much as mechanical ones. That means:

Attention moves from hardware to systems.
Decision‑making speeds up.
The boundary between driver and digital tools blurs.

The underlying question becomes: how do you build a team that can iterate quickly, communicate clearly, and learn faster than the competition?

Winning Is a Process, Not a Promise

PJ teased me about this during the podcast—my diplomatic way of saying we’re “building towards winning.” Let’s be honest: the goal is always to win. But the path to it is rarely linear.

During the early DS Techeetah era, we spent years refining the basics: teamwork, communication, alignment, and the ability to extract performance under pressure. Championships followed because the foundation was right.

That same foundation is what we are rebuilding now. You don’t shortcut culture. You accelerate it.

The Leader’s Job: Clarity, Curiosity, and the Courage to Pivot

I’ve long believed in a simple idea borrowed from Japanese manufacturing: go to the place. Great leaders don’t sit in meeting rooms and wait for updates—they walk the floor, talk to people, and discover the truths that never make it into presentations.

That approach helps solve several recurring challenges:

1. Communication Gaps

In motorsport, a missing piece of information can cost you a race. In business, it can stall projects for months. The only way to close these gaps is to be present—physically present—so you notice when someone seems unconvinced or unsure.

2. Alignment Across Partners

With Lola, Yamaha, ABT, and software partners all working together, clarity of intent is essential. Motorsport makes this easier because the aim is shared: win races. But the principle holds for any organisation—if the destination is clear, the route can adapt.

3. Leading Through Ambiguity

This is where strategic intent comes in. You don’t specify every step. You define the direction of travel. Honda’s breakthrough in the US market didn’t come from executing a rigid plan—it came from recognising opportunity and pivoting decisively.

4. Risk, Failure, and the No‑Blame Culture

Innovation demands risk. But people will only take risks if they trust they won’t be punished for outcomes that were encouraged. The fastest teams I’ve worked in were the ones most comfortable failing early, learning quickly, and moving on.

The Hidden Power of Marginal Gains

Motorsport is notorious for its budgets and its engineering battles, but some of the biggest performance improvements I’ve seen cost nothing at all. They came from marginal gains:

A process tightened
A communication path clarified
A misunderstanding resolved

These micro‑improvements compound, quietly reshaping performance. Teams sometimes assume they need more equipment or more budget, when in reality what they need first is more clarity and more connection.

What Leaders Can Learn From the Paddock

If there’s a final reflection to leave with readers, it’s this: motorsport amplifies the fundamentals of leadership. Everything happens faster. The stakes are visible. The feedback is immediate.

But the behaviours that create winning teams are the same ones that help any organisation move faster toward value:

Walk the floor.
Communicate relentlessly.
Encourage intelligent risk.
Pivot decisively when new information emerges.
Build alignment around a clear intent.

Formula E is evolving quickly, and so are we at Lola. But beneath all the change is a constant truth: people and culture win championships long before cars do.

And that’s as true in business as it is on the track.

Formula E’s Evolution: Reflections From Inside the Garage

Posted on November 14, 2025 by markandrewpreston

By Mark Preston

When you spend long enough in motorsport, you develop a second sense for whether a championship is moving forward or just treading water. Formula E has never suffered from the latter. It’s been restless from day one — a kind of experimental lab disguised as a racing series — and that’s precisely why I was drawn to it.

The conversation on the Everything Electric podcast was a chance to look back at where Formula E began, how it’s evolved, and why its story still feels unfinished.

From Blank Sheet to Global Stage

In the early years, the defining characteristic of Formula E wasn’t technology, competition, or even sustainability. It was uncertainty. No one knew if it would work. The cars were under‑powered, the batteries needed swapping mid‑race, and we were operating with rules and systems written almost as experiments.

That fragility created a culture of invention. If something didn’t exist, you built it. If there was no precedent, you improvised one. As a team principal, that environment felt oddly familiar — like the early days of Super Aguri, when half the technical solutions were created on whiteboards at midnight.

But Formula E matured quickly. Manufacturers arrived. The technology caught up. Cities embraced the championship, and suddenly what began as a niche sustainability experiment had the attention of the global motorsport industry.

The Human Core of an Electric Championship

Despite all the talk of software updates, inverters, and kilowatt‑hours, the thing that kept striking me during the early seasons was how human the whole project was.

Drivers had to completely rewire their instincts. Engineers had to unlearn assumptions carried over from decades of combustion racing. Strategists discovered that energy management wasn’t a side‑quest — it was the race.

This is the part of Formula E people still underestimate. The driver becomes a systems manager. Every lap is a negotiation between pace and conservation. And teams who understand the psychology of this balancing act often outperform those with the biggest budgets.

An Arms Race in Efficiency

What makes Formula E fascinating as an engineering challenge is that there is no hiding place. Marginal gains are amplified. Efficiency is visible. Every watt counts.

The evolution from Gen1 to Gen2 — and now to Gen3 — represents a fundamental shift in how we think about performance. We moved from basic electric powertrains to highly optimised energy systems and regeneration models that now recover more than 40% of the energy used in a race.

That’s an extraordinary figure when viewed through a road‑car lens. It’s also a reminder that motorsport has always been a technology accelerator when you give engineers permission to explore the edges.

Lessons for the Next Generation of Innovators

When people ask what Formula E has taught me, I always return to the idea that innovation thrives at the boundary between known and unknown. Inside the envelope, processes matter: quality systems, repeatability, procedure. Outside the envelope — where Formula E spent much of its youth — everything depends on creativity, resilience, and a willingness to rethink fundamentals.

Formula E succeeded because it embraced that boundary. It allowed experimentation to play a central role. And in doing so, it built a platform where sustainability, high‑performance engineering, and global entertainment can genuinely coexist.

Why the Story Isn’t Finished

Even now, the championship feels like it’s in the middle of its adolescence. There are growing pains — governance, technology freezes, commercial pressures — but there’s also an ambition that you don’t find anywhere else.

Electrification isn’t the future. It’s the baseline. The next frontier is autonomy, connectivity, and integrated mobility systems. Formula E, if it chooses to, could become the experimental playground for all of it.

For me, being part of those foundational years was a privilege. They were chaotic, frustrating, exhilarating — exactly what motorsport should be when it’s reinventing itself.

And that’s the point: Formula E’s greatest contribution may not be the racing at all, but the mindset it’s helped normalise. A mindset where change isn’t feared, but invited.

As the championship keeps evolving, so does its potential. And I’m still convinced the most interesting chapters haven’t been written yet.