Formula 1 has pole position in UK's £16bn motorsport industry

Times

6 hours ago

With his neon yellow baseball cap turned backwards on his head and sporting a wristful of beaded bracelets, Lando Norris casually signed autographs for a crowd of fans as he arrived at Silverstone on Thursday.
The McLaren driver, 25, is expecting strong support at the Formula 1 British Grand Prix this weekend, especially from those in the 'Landostand', the grandstand newly named after him.
He may have looked relaxed but the pressure is on. Wearing the brand's papaya and black colours, the young Briton will be hoping to compound his success at last week's Austrian Grand Prix, against his team mate Oscar Piastri.
More than 480,000 people are expected to attend the sold-out event, 160,000 of them on Sunday for the main race.
Hype around racing is even more frenzied than usual, driven by Brad Pitt's new film, F1, co-produced by Lewis Hamilton, in which he plays Sonny Hayes, Formula 1's most promising driver in the 1990s until an accident nearly ended his career before he stages a comeback.
Although the excitement surrounding the F1 racing event is the most obvious aspect of its impact on the economy around Silverstone, its influence extends well beyond the weekend crowds and into the broader British tech ecosystem.
Sport has long been a driver of technological innovation as teams strive to get an edge over one another, and nowhere is this more so than in motor racing.
Over its 75-year history the premier motorsport series has brought some extraordinary inventions, including developing a breathing device in only four weeks during Covid, applying pitstop techniques within Great Ormond Street Hospital to cut errors after surgery on infants and introducing regenerative braking on London buses to cut emissions.
The financial impact is huge. UK motorsport and engineering services turned over £16 billion in 2023 and employed 50,000 people, according to a report by the Motorsport Industry Association (MIA) and Grant Thornton.
From next year, ten of the eleven Formula One teams will have either headquarters or a base in the UK: Cadillac F1 and Audi F1 will both be joining the grid next year and opening facilities in Britain. More than 50,000 people are employed by the 4,500 companies that make up F1's supply chain. Off the track, the popularity of ESports, virtual or 'sim' racing, is gaining ground and proving another lucrative source of income.
To capture some of this energy, a group called the Silverstone Technology Cluster was started in 2017 by Pim van Baarsen to foster engineering, software and electronics businesses located by the track, which is nestled almost exactly between Oxford and Cambridge, an area dubbed UK Motorsport Valley.
More than half its businesses are in motorsport and automotive but others are harnessing the innovations born out of motorsport to push the boundaries in fields such as aerospace, energy and healthcare.
One example, based in the business park around the track, is Dumarey Flybrid, set up in 2007, which developed a small flywheel system for building sites. Its product stores kinetic energy and works alongside a traditional generator to power tower cranes. It started because Formula 1 implemented an 'engine freeze', a rule that stopped further pushes to improve engines and instead challenged racing teams to develop hybrid power systems, and it was the first business to use kinetic energy in motor car racing.
Another is Wirth Research, which specialised in computational fluid dynamics, computer simulation used to study flows around objects, in F1 car design. The idea is to help engineers to understand how air moves over a car or how water flows through pipes so they can design things more efficiently and solve problems before building them.
Wirth has used this expertise to branch out into products used by supermarkets to improve the efficiency of their chillers and cut energy consumption.
British car racing champions play a central role in this halo effect of tech, especially one of the world's most successful: McLaren. Once dubbed the Manchester United of the sport, it was founded in 1963 by Bruce McLaren, a New Zealand-born racing driver who was killed at Goodwood aged 30. Ever since, it has become a global powerhouse in motorsport, winning numerous championships in the 1980s and 2000s with drivers including Ayrton Senna and Lewis Hamilton.
It is recognised for its cutting-edge technology, engineering expertise and contributions to the broader automotive and tech industries. The brand is also a magnet for others who want the cachet of its association, and its partners include Dropbox and Lego.
Dan Keyworth, director of business technology at McLaren Racing, said the emphasis on tech was only increasing: 'I think it's seen as one of the major battlegrounds across the teams … a lot of the teams will be continuing to focus on the technology race off track: who can bring the best tools, systems, software to the game.
'We have a great phrase here — for every pound we spend on the car, we spend a pound on tools, methods and technology — because there has to be an equitable investment in what we do,' he told the TechRadar website.
Racing is not an easy world to be in. McLaren has been under financial strain over the past few years and underwent a substantial restructuring in 2020, cutting more than a thousand jobs, compounded by Covid as supply chains were upended. Then there were problems with its new Artura hybrid sportscar.
The latest accounts for Maclaren Racing, filed in September, revealed that it made £431 million in revenue and a profit of £30.4 million for the year ending December 2023. In March last year the Bahrain sovereign wealth fund Mumtalakat bought the McLaren Group, which includes McLaren Automotive, which hand-builds lightweight supercars, and a majority stake in McLaren Racing.
Airports such as Heathrow use technology developed by McLaren to receive real-time data on departures and arrivals, allowing them to predict delays and manage congestion.
High-performance luxury UK car companies such as Aston Martin, McLaren and Morgan account for a mere 4 per cent of UK car production but are responsible for 12 per cent of its value and employed 15,000 people, according to a recent study by the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders.
Norris is the most likely British driver to win the Grand Prix but another Brit, George Russell, could also have a chance of victory, with the cooler conditions in England lending themselves to his Mercedes, which struggles in the heat. Hamilton, the nine-time winner, is aiming forten; he is yet to stand on the podium for his new team, Ferrari.
Spectators' eyes will be on the hotly contested 2025 British Grand Prix at Silverstone, but there is a far more complex engine under the bonnet, which continues beyond the wave of the chequered flag.