Profile

I have always been of an engineering mindset, coming from a long line of engineers in my family. My grandfather was the lead engineer at the British Hub Company, supplying hubs for motorcycles such as Triumph etc. from Birmingham. My other grandfather was a toolmaker. My father is an Electronics engineer, but I like nuts and bolts!

At around 13 I started building Shell Economy Marathon cars and competing with them, completing runs at around 300mpg!

Shell Economy Marathon Car

I then discovered Formula Student, a motorsport competition run by the IMechE for universities, so chose my university (Brunel) based on being able to do that. I made great friends there, building race cars and learning the engineering skills that makes them fast.

BR12 Formula Student

I worked for a year at Jaguar Land Rover working in the Performance and Economy department, halfway through my degree. However, the motorsport bug had bitten me, so I decided to pursue that with a role at Williams Grand Prix Engineering (the Formula 1 team). I started work there in 2012, and moved over to the Williams Advanced Engineering team, designing parts for customers in motorsport.

Around that, I love interesting motorsport, cars, bicycles, cooking and being outdoors.

I’ve just had a daughter and she means the world to me. She’s already showing an aptitude for taking things apart so may well become an engineer!

At Williams Advanced Engineering I joined the motorsport team, a small group working in the Formula 1 team’s office designing parts and systems for customers. It’s a great role because we bridge the gap between the optimised but incredibly focussed and narrow world of Formula 1, and bring it into other sports and products. I’ve helped a team win 3 world championships in a top level series, had parts and systems of mine racing in Formula 1, a Japanese race series, and helped design the battery for the first fully electric race series – Formula E.

Formula E Battery Gen1

In my career so far, I have worked on a breadth of mechanical design areas, such as:
Hydraulics
Transmissions
Suspension
Bodywork / Aero
Brakes
Rechargeable Energy Storage Systems (RESS or “Battery”)

All of which occur on modern racing cars like the ones below:

Manor Formula 1

& lots more! Even a gold medal winning paralympian’s bike!

Karen Darke Handcycle

For the past year I’ve been working on the Next Generation Formula E battery, which has been a huge stretch of what’s technically possible. A lot of people think you can just buy cells, put them together in a box and connect up the positive and negative terminals to the car. I can tell you that there is a huge engineering effort to put those cells together properly, and extract the absolute most from them. It’s not just mechanical design either, there’s Battery engineers, thermal engineers, structural analysis engineers, procurement, project management, manufacturing groups, quality. It really is all encompassing to build a battery!

Every day is different… “Groan”. Projects tend to go through phases, and my day changes based on the phase:

Winning the work – design studies, review similar systems, new ideas, rough costings and planning how much effort is required.
Won the customer’s order – start designing parts, realise why everything we did before was wrong. Tear it up and make it much better, add detail to parts, costings, timeline, start thinking about prototypes
Design Verification – receive prototype parts, plan how to test them, test them, report findings, make recommendations on changes.
Design Release – This is the most brain-intensive part. Collate all the data, ensure the designs are in a good place, check everything multiple times, and push to release parts so that procurement can buy them.
Build – I will always make time to be down on the factory floor, with the technicians building the batteries, ensuring they put them together how I intended, or if they make improvements I build them into my next project!
Test – Be there for testing, monitor data coming in from the race track or test rigs, draw conclusions, write reports, ensure the product is working properly. Monitor faults and put in place corrections.
Lessons learned – ensure that we review the project, look at what went well, do more of that, and what went badly and how to avoid doing it badly again!