Piecing together the puzzle of motorsport from afar
Elite Race Engineering founder Tim White helps high-end motor-racing teams from around the world improve their performance, all from his office in Cromwell. PHOTO: ELLA JENKINS
In the the high-stakes world of endurance motorsport, where every millisecond counts, Tim White is breaking new ground from an unlikely location.
Based in the quiet town of Cromwell, Mr White has become a pivotal figure in Ferrari's GT programmes, harnessing advanced remote engineering to deliver world-class performance on the global stage.
As founder of Elite Race Engineering, the mechanical expert offers cutting-edge advice to racing teams and car and tyre manufacturers alike about how to get the best performance out of their cars or tyres, proving that innovation and precision know no geographic limits.
A love of pulling things apart and seeing how they work as well as a mechanical apprenticeship got Mr White interested in mechanical engineering.
In 2013, he graduated from the University of Canterbury with his undergraduate, and in 2016 achieved his master's.
Mr White founded Elite Race Engineering at the Highlands Motorsport Park in 2022, having developed a desire to stay in Central Otago after working in Queenstown.
With the opening of the workshop in Cromwell, Mr White has also diversified his work
into performance consulting, the maintenance, preparation and race support.
Mr White's consulting work involves solving problems regarding performance with often incomplete data.
"We have literal objective logged data, squiggly lines, dots and data points, which is relatively speaking clean, but pulling that out has a certain perspective, a certain amount of information it can give you — but that's only part of the picture."
The data available only painted part of the picture, Mr White said.
The other pieces of the puzzle were driver feedback, on-board video and team dynamics.
"You are always working with incomplete information, so like the real skill of the job is it's not just a purely technical endeavour.
"I mean it is very technical, but it's like being good with people and being able to pull all kinds of synthesised, lots of really different types of information to get the result, which is high performance or winning races or whatever it is at the end of it."
He was proud to be representing New Zealand at a high level in motorsport.
"I'm proud to like be a Kiwi doing really high-end engineering and honestly some of the coolest racing championships in the world."
ella.jenkins@odt.co.nz
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