How to become an F1 Technical Director

Cyd Barge: Hello and welcome to the Sector 1 Motorsport Podcast in partnership with Formula Careers. On today’s episode, I am joined by someone who has been in motorsport for a very long time now. He’s worked with teams such as Arrows Grand Prix, McLaren and Techeetah. We could keep naming them, but we won’t stay here all day. He’s currently the Motorsport Director of Lola Cars. Please welcome Mark Preston. Mark, thank you so much for joining me.

Mark Preston: I’m looking forward to it. Good to be joining you today.

Cyd Barge: I know I’ve given you an introduction there, but it’s always great to hear it in your own words. Could you give us a little bit of an introduction? Who are you?

Mark Preston: Given this is a careers podcast, I should start at the beginning, because it probably creates a bit of a story. I’m a mechanical engineer. I started at Monash University in Australia well over 30 years ago now. In those days we didn’t have things such as Formula Student, and I was getting a little bit bored of too much theory at university. So I went out and found the only manufacturer of racing cars in Australia, Borland Racing Developments, and I started doing some work for them in my spare time. That grew over the time I was at university.

Mark Preston: Formula Student would probably have been my preferred path nowadays, but in those days we had to make it a different way. In those days we didn’t have data loggers, so I started to write my own simulation software. I got into programming at university because we were just learning programming at the time. Then I went and worked at GM in crash testing. So I’ve always been on the theoretical side: the calculations and those kinds of things.

Mark Preston: I then got the chance to work for TWR, Tom Walkinshaw Racing, in Australia. They owned a company called Holden Special Vehicles, which is a bit like GM’s AMG in Australia, so I was getting closer and closer to racing cars. At the same time, in my spare time, I was doing Formula Ford racing. Then, just before I turned 27, a bunch of mechanics and others who had come over from Australia and worked in Formula One told me I should think about getting a visa and coming over before I turned 27. Three months later I was on a plane to the UK. I had 10 interviews. I got one, which was Arrows Grand Prix, and that’s how I got started in F1 in the UK.

Mark Preston: Over time I went to McLaren for a few years, which was interesting: working with Adrian Newey, Mike Coughlan, Neil Oatley and many others who are well known today, like Paddy Lowe. Then I decided to do my MBA, so I switched from the fully engineering side to a bit more of the business side. I did my MBA at Oxford. At the same time, I started planning my own F1 team with a group of people I knew from Arrows. Luckily, just as we were about to give up on that plan, Aguri Suzuki came along with Honda and Takuma Sato, and we started Super Aguri in 100 days. I was technical director there. Sadly, in 2008 we had the financial crash, Honda and many of the Japanese companies decided to pull out of Formula One, and we had to stop.

Mark Preston: We looked at getting involved in another F1 team at the time. I don’t think there’s much on the internet about this, but we were looking at Brabham F1 around the same time as all the cost-cap teams. We didn’t do that, but we ended up starting a composites company. So I ran a composites company and got more involved in the business side of things: sales, and setting up a business from scratch. That was Formtech Composites, which is still south of Oxford and does a lot of work in defence and motorsport.

Mark Preston: Then Formula E came along. Early on, some friends said, “You’re interested in this electric stuff. The FIA is going to put out a tender. Why don’t you try to get involved?” So we did. Long story short, I got involved again with Aguri Suzuki in Formula E at the beginning. Over time we became Techeetah, won a bunch of championships, worked with Renault, where we won a drivers’ championship with Jean-Éric Vergne, then moved to DS Automobiles and won four more titles. And recently I joined Lola, and we’re going back racing at the end of the year. We came back from testing in Italy last week, and we’ll be racing with Yamaha. What’s interesting is that my first F1 engine partner, back at Arrows, was Yamaha. So a lot of things have come full circle.

Cyd Barge: So, from everything you’ve said, it’s not been a very interesting career at all. You haven’t done that much.

Mark Preston: The interesting thing for anybody listening is that you can’t plan exactly how you’re going to get to where you want to go. It’s going to go all these different ways. I was saying to someone just last week that I was once pretty sure I was going to end up in Thailand, because GM had a facility there. I wasn’t ever planning to come to the UK, but this set of events happened, and here I am in the UK 28 years later.

Cyd Barge: I was going to ask you about the move to the UK, because a lot of teams are based here. Do you feel you need to be in the UK to have a successful motorsport career?

Mark Preston: Being from Australia, I talk to lots of young people from Australia and other countries who have come over. If you’re mad keen on motor racing, the best way to put it is this. If you’re working for a smaller team in a different country, or even a smaller team in the UK, then as you move into a bigger and bigger team you get to specialise more. That can be a pro and a con.

Mark Preston: I went sort of big team, small team, big team, small team. When you’re in the big team, you become more of a specialist, which means you get deeper knowledge of a certain topic. When you go to the smaller team, you have to do more, and you’re spread a little thinner. Some people say it’s like a T-shape. The top of the T is being a generalist, but you might also be a specialist who goes very deep in one area. I’ve always been into software, simulation and stress analysis, what they used to call “calculations” in the early days when I was in F1. So if I do specialise, I go back to that area.

Mark Preston: So it’s partly to do with this. If you’re in another country and your team has 25 people, you’re going to be quite general across a lot of things. There’s a pro and a con to that. Now imagine you come to F1. When I was at McLaren, I think we had 550 people, and that was back in 2002. I don’t know exactly where they are now, and with cost caps there are different constraints. But if you’re one of 500 versus one of 20, there’s a pro and a con to each. You learn a lot more in certain specialisms when you’re in F1, and that’s pretty much only here, in Italy and in Switzerland. So it depends on how you’d like to see your career going.

Cyd Barge: Let’s go back even further. How did your passion for motorsport begin, and did you always fancy a career in it? Did it always seem attainable?

Mark Preston: I suppose I’m one of those annoying people who knew they wanted to be an engineer from really young. Over the years I’ve talked to lots of people, and a lot of them don’t know what they want to do. I was lucky enough to grow up around farms, so we were always around tractors and trucks and fixing things. My uncle was a farmer, and my dad went and ran a farm with him when I was very young, around grade five. We kept visiting the farm during the summer holidays, and we were always around vehicles.

Mark Preston: On farms there’s always some old, broken-down something sitting around. One summer we said to my uncle, “Can we fix that truck?” He said, “Yeah, sure, go on,” not thinking we actually would. Three days later we had fixed the truck and were driving it around, much to his dismay, because we didn’t have an exhaust pipe on the back, and that’s dangerous in Australia because of bushfires. He came running after us in the car shouting, “Stop, stop, stop! You can’t be driving that around the farm!”

Mark Preston: Being around those things, I was lucky. When I went to university, I met a couple of other people who were really into motorsport, and I got involved in motorsport quite early on in my spare time. That continued and continued. So I was lucky to be around things I enjoyed doing, and I just kept going.

Cyd Barge: You spoke about getting your foot in the door, coming to the UK, having maybe 10 interviews and one coming through. How difficult is it to keep your composure and motivation when you get rejected, or don’t get the interview? Have you been through much of that?

Mark Preston: Yes, lots. It’s funny: this is third time lucky with Lola, because Lola was one of the ones I was involved with at the beginning, but for some reason it didn’t work out. But I enjoyed some of those experiences, so you can take positives from everything. I think I’ve still got the rejection letter from John Barnard at Ferrari, on Ferrari letterhead, from the days when it would have been a typed letter. So you can take a pro and a con from it and say, well, I kept this letter. And I later worked for John Barnard at Arrows.

Mark Preston: So you can take a positive out of anything. But you’ve got to keep pushing and trying. It’s that old adage: if you don’t do something, nothing happens. Is it Wayne Gretzky? “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.” That’s absolutely the thing I live by.

Cyd Barge: Did you have mentors through your career, or were you headstrong and did it yourself?

Mark Preston: I think it’s really important to get to know a lot of people. It was a slight disadvantage coming to the UK so late, because I hadn’t built up the connections you would typically get through university, and the mentors you’d have straight out of university. All of mine were in Australia. They did know people over here and helped me think about where to go. Over the years I’ve done the same and built up good relationships.

Mark Preston: Interestingly enough, I’m going back and talking a lot more to Monash University now. Whenever I go back to Australia, I try to visit the Formula Student teams, and sometimes I judge Formula Student. We did F1 in Schools a few months ago. So I’m always trying to keep my network in motorsport broad. So the answer is yes, as much as you can.

Cyd Barge: Let’s talk about F1 in Schools and Formula Student, and being able to go back to them now. How rewarding is it to be asked to judge, and to be the knowledgeable one?

Mark Preston: This is another story about Adrian Newey. I think I was still at university, and it was the Grand Prix in Adelaide. Somehow we got ourselves into the pit lane, and we decided to walk up and down the teams. We said, “OK, we’re going to talk to the technical directors.” So we went to Williams and asked, “Can we talk to Patrick Head?” He was the famous one at the time, back in the ’80s. They said, “No, he’s not here, but you can talk to Adrian Newey.” And we said, “OK!” We didn’t know he would be so famous.

Mark Preston: He came up and gave us 20 minutes of his time in the pit lane, just chatting to us about engineering. Fast forward to when I worked with him at McLaren: I told him that part of the reason I came over was that he gave us the time of day when he was probably busy on a race weekend in Adelaide. He still took the time to talk to us. So I try to do the same now, because I respected that he did that for me. It’s one example of giving back what you can along the way. So yes, I do enjoy doing things like that.

Cyd Barge: I love stories like that. Motorsport is so full circle: you always come back to where you started. You mentioned Super Aguri, which you launched in just 100 days. How on earth did you manage that?

Mark Preston: The secret behind it was that we had been, crazily, planning our own Formula One team. I know that sounds pretty nuts, but we were. We were talking to people who had worked at Arrows and other teams, keeping an eye on where everybody was and what they were up to. Me being that kind of crazy person, I would ring people every so often.

Mark Preston: I remember asking a friend, “If we start an F1 team, will you join us?” He said yes. I said, “Are you sure?” He said, “Yes. If you do it, I’ll join.”

Mark Preston: We went through meetings with Aguri, Honda and Bridgestone, and then we got the green light. We started making phone calls to all the people we’d been speaking to, and I called my friend and said, “Remember that promise you made? We’re starting the Formula One team.” He said, “Oh, I can’t miss out!” He went to his boss and said, “Remember that crazy person I told you about who said he was going to start an F1 team? He has, and I sort of promised I’d join.” The boss agreed. So a few people who had said they’d join actually did.

Mark Preston: We then bought all the assets of Arrows Grand Prix from Paul Stoddart, who had bought them from the administrator when Arrows stopped. We’d been speaking to Paul for a year before, and he said, “I’m having a big sale soon, so come and check everything out.” We sent around 17 trucks to Paul Stoddart’s place in Ledbury, brought everything back, and said, “Yes, I think we’ve got pretty much everything.”

Mark Preston: We were still missing two chassis. We knew there were five, and while three would be enough to go racing, five would be better. We got to know someone who happened to have one of the cars, and he sold it to us. Then I think someone found the last car on a stand at an airport, advertising McDonald’s or something. We managed to buy that car as well. So we ended up with five cars, which was enough to go racing.

Mark Preston: It was pretty intense. My wife used to come to work with me just to see me and have lunch, because we worked pretty much every day, non-stop. It was exhausting, but everyone was so dedicated and wanted to make it happen that the time flew by. Before we knew it, we were at the first race. Looking back, it’s a pity the points system wasn’t the same. People forget that at that time points didn’t go down to 10th place, so we didn’t get any points when we finished 10th in the first year. But it was a good ride: an absolutely amazing experience.

Cyd Barge: That didn’t last forever, but you then brought the same kind of team name and people into Formula E. Was it worrying, going into something with the same kind of idea?

Mark Preston: Yes, I see what you mean. You just have to keep pushing, because you never know which direction things will take. You need to be there at the right time. Looking back at some of my experiences with Tom Walkinshaw over the years, I learned that you have to get the right package together at the right time. We were targeting Honda, but that didn’t work out because they were dealing with other issues. Eventually we got Renault and then DS, and we were lucky that Jean-Éric Vergne had just come out of F1. When he aligned with us, the stars sort of aligned. We got the Renault powertrain, which wasn’t the best at the time. The first year at Techeetah was a bit crazy, but by the end of the second year we were up front.

Mark Preston: Look at Red Bull: they had been around for a long time before they succeeded, 20 or 30 years in fact. Things take time, and it often takes a while to pull together the right set of circumstances. That’s part of motorsport. It’s much higher risk than, say, working in a bank, although nowadays people would argue working in a bank has its own risks too. The world seems to be moving faster and faster, with AI and all these stresses on everyone.

Mark Preston: One thing to consider is that Motorsport Valley is like Silicon Valley, but for a different industry. If you join a project in Motorsport Valley and something goes wrong, it’s highly likely another project will be starting soon. That’s one of the benefits of a concentrated area of motorsport. The same is true of Silicon Valley for tech start-ups: one minute it’s Facebook, the next it’s something else. There’s always demand for people in these clusters. If you’re into chips, you might want to be in Taiwan. If you’re into oil and gas, maybe Australia. Different regions have strong clusters for different industries.

Cyd Barge: Formula E is one of my favourite series to watch, but at the start I wasn’t convinced I’d enjoy it, or that it would be successful. Did you have that faith from the beginning?

Mark Preston: With start-ups there’s a saying, and I’m trying to remember who said it: if 100% of people think it’s a good idea, it’s probably wrong. If nobody thinks it’s a good idea, it could be wrong. But if it’s about 50:50, with some people thinking it might work and some thinking it won’t, you might be in the right place.

Mark Preston: We were fairly confident it was going in the right direction, given the trends in China and internationally, and the growing importance of climate change. It’s like having a strategic intent. We could see where things were heading and decided to align with that, even though we didn’t know exactly how it would play out. Electrification seems to be a significant part of the future, even with all the uncertainty and change.

Mark Preston: Taking risks is a big part of it. That’s why we started a Formula One team and went into new areas. You need a strategic intent, and you need to be prepared for it not to turn out exactly as planned. What matters is going in a new direction.

Mark Preston: I found Formula E exciting at the time. I remember asking one of the suppliers questions about electric racing, and they said, “I don’t know. You figure it out.” No one had done electric racing before, so there was no blueprint. That’s the kind of challenge I enjoy in racing and engineering: working on things where the answer isn’t clear. That’s what makes it fun.

Cyd Barge: Clearly you did something right, because you won drivers’ and teams’ championships. What mindset and qualities are crucial to building a winning team in such a competitive environment?

Mark Preston: It’s hard to pin down every piece of the puzzle, but you have to have the total package. At Techeetah, and now at Lola, that means the right people, good powertrain partners and, of course, great drivers.

Mark Preston: One of the biggest things is communication. Most problems arise from poor communication somewhere in the organisation. It’s crucial to avoid a blame culture and make sure everyone can work closely together. Teamwork is a major part, but you also need the right resources. You can’t do it without enough funding or the resources to do the job properly.

Mark Preston: Knowing how to win is important too. After your first victory, you can look at what worked and keep going down that path. Keeping everyone aligned and communicating clearly stops you spiralling into a blame culture, which creates difficulties. There are many aspects, but the most significant are the right drivers, the right partners, the right people, and a high level of communication and professionalism.

Cyd Barge: Lola are back in Formula E this coming season. How excited are you and the team?

Mark Preston: It’s quite exciting, actually. We were at the test last week, and Lucas di Grassi, our number one driver, is fired up for this year. He’s excited because pre-season testing has gone smoothly. “Smoothly” means nothing went significantly wrong. Testing is meant to catch issues, so if something is wrong, it’s good that we can fix it. We had a mix of good things and minor issues to work through, but overall it’s encouraging.

Mark Preston: We feel we’re on the right path. We’ve got the pieces of the puzzle together: good people and strong partners like Yamaha and Abt. We used to race against Abt, and now we’re racing with them. They have a history of winning, and Yamaha is no stranger to winning either. They bring a winning mindset and experience, as does Lola. Everyone is quietly excited to see how it plays out. We know there will be hard work and challenges, but we believe we’ve built a solid foundation. We’re really looking forward to going racing this year.

Cyd Barge: I’ll be trying to get to London to see it in person. Let’s jump back to Formula One for a second. My background isn’t technical at all, and physics was my worst subject at school. Can you pick one of your roles and explain what the job involved?

Mark Preston: Would you like a job like technical director, or like when I was a stress analyst at the beginning of my career?

Cyd Barge: Give us both.

Mark Preston: When I look at people’s CVs (and there are different viewpoints on this, so this is just mine) I think a specialism is useful. I chose a specialism, stress analysis and calculations, and that took me through my career in motorsport. When I started, my work covered everything from the monocoque to the suspension, because I was the stress analyst. The designer would decide how, say, the suspension would work and do some calculations. I would check their calculations and do the stress analysis on the parts they couldn’t do with the tools they had. Then I’d work with the people doing the composite lay-ups for the crash tests. I did a lot of the crash test analysis with spreadsheets and other packages, then went and ran the tests. So I’d validate and sign off the car. That was very specialist; we were the calculations department.

Mark Preston: Over time my role went further and further into the calculations for the car, so that was always my area of expertise. So when you’re younger you probably have a specialism. Then, as technical director in F1, it was more about overseeing everybody: being the person with an eye on the total package and working with experts in every area. The people reporting to me were the chief designer and the design team, the head of aerodynamics, the people looking after the drivers and what happens trackside, and other departments like R&D, electronics and control systems. I would be managing five or more groups and working closely with them.

Mark Preston: Then you become more of a generalist. You don’t have expertise in each area, but you understand each area well enough to ask hard questions, or at least dumb questions, to check that we know what we’re doing, and then help decide where to spend the money. Should we put a new front wing on the car, or spend more on certain control systems? Because you’d been at the racetrack, you’d say, “OK, what’s the priority order? How much faster can we go with each thing?” Then you make a decision: “From trackside, it looks better to have the new engine upgrade, which needs a new exhaust, than the other item.” You always want more performance, so it’s really about the order things get done. Then we’d bring those things to the track when we could.

Mark Preston: And then there are the small, fun ones. At Super Aguri in the first year, we were taking an old car and going racing. We knew we couldn’t win the championship, so we had to find ways of racing that everyone could buy into and enjoy. We’d ask, “What are the five things we’re going to bring to each race?” They could be anything from a new engine package to better coffee in the machines, because everyone was sick of the coffee. Each one had an impact: either everyone stops moaning about the coffee, or more engine power is great. We tried to create small wins all through the season.

Mark Preston: During the season some of the bigger teams started to realise we were competing with them in odd ways, like trying to be the first team in in the morning just to beat them. It didn’t cost us any money, but we wanted to see if we could beat them at something. At the end of the season, when Renault won the championship, there’s a photo of their mechanics bringing champagne down to our mechanics and saying they’d enjoyed competing with us on the strangest things, even if it wasn’t the championship. It was very hard work, so keeping everyone motivated, finding ways to make it fun, and creating small wins everyone could look forward to really mattered. It was always good fun in those days.

Cyd Barge: People in motorsport are so competitive! You’ve talked about doing broader things at a smaller team and specialising at a bigger one. Did you have a preference?

Mark Preston: Over time I’ve enjoyed becoming more of a generalist, but a lot of people prefer to specialise. They like to dive deeper into one area and become experts. That’s why I say it’s like a tree: you can be a generalist at the top or a specialist on one particular branch. When you talk to a real expert in a specific field, you realise there are often 50 PhDs in just that niche. You can’t know all the detail a true specialist knows.

Mark Preston: Some people are drawn to specialising and others prefer being a generalist. Personally, I lean towards being a generalist because I’m not naturally a detail person, though I make the effort when it’s needed. Specialists need a deep understanding of their field, whether it’s engines or control systems, and there are often many specialists in an F1 team focusing on just one area. So while I enjoy the generalist role, I know plenty of people who thrive as specialists.

Cyd Barge: You clearly have an incredible CV. It must be four or five pages by now. Is there a role that’s been the most rewarding, or a moment that’s been unforgettable?

Mark Preston: Starting the Formula One team and being technical director was just incredible. It was really fun. The whole team had an amazing first year in that start-up. It also fitted with doing my MBA, as I was moving to the business side. Then, of course, winning the championships: the first drivers’ championship with JEV, then the second and the third, and then winning two doubles.

Mark Preston: What was the highlight? It’s interesting, because in F1 you have to be with certain teams to have a chance of winning a championship. I was in F1 for quite a while, but I wasn’t in one of the teams when they won. I was chatting to JEV when he won the drivers’ championship at Techeetah, and he said he hadn’t won a championship since Formula Renault 3.5, I think it was. It showed that in his time in F1 he didn’t get a chance to win, at Toro Rosso. So winning is quite amazing, and winning championships against big names is really exciting.

Cyd Barge: We ask all our guests this. If you could see your younger self in front of you now, what advice would you give him?

Mark Preston: Probably to carry on down the path you were already on. The only thing I’ve ever thought is that maybe I should have come to the UK earlier, once I knew what I wanted to do. That would only have been a small difference. At the same time, all the experience I gained in Australia keeps coming back around. You realise, “I worked at GM, so I know how the car companies work.” You look back and think, “I learned this, that and the other at that place,” and you wouldn’t have got where you are without it.

Mark Preston: So what’s the advice? Keep going on the same path, with the same strategic intent. Just point yourself in the direction you want to go and don’t worry too much about the journey it takes you on.

Cyd Barge: To round things up: for people who want to follow a career like yours, or go into a similar field, what are your top tips?

Mark Preston: In motorsport, get involved in your Formula Student team at university. Again, this is my opinion, and others have a different approach. Then find a specialism. You can work out which ones are in demand from job adverts, in the newspapers and online. Which topics do you like at university? Which could you see yourself doing, and becoming really good at? If they match what F1 teams ask for in their job listings, that’s what I would do.

Mark Preston: And put yourself out there. I said I only sent 10 job applications in those days, but I did have to send them by fax, so it was a bit of a job finding the fax numbers and working out how to send them. And read the literature. I was quite surprised how many students didn’t know the racing journals: Race Tech and Racecar Engineering, all those magazines you can read to understand the industry better. They give you a good overview.

Cyd Barge: Mark, thank you so much for coming on and sharing your career with us. We’re so excited to see what happens this coming season in Formula E. Thank you, everyone, for watching and listening. We’ll be back very soon with another Career Talk.