Prior to joining Ultimate I had worked at
McLaren for 17 years and held three positions within the company, starting out in the composite department before moving on to be a mechanic on the test team and then onto the race team. The thing is, in a major
Formula 1 team like McLaren there are so many people and so many jobs that there’s so much you just never get involved in. You get to do your little bit that’s in front of you, and that’s it really. Someone else deals with the rest of it, so I have had the experience of working there but it hasn’t really given me the qualifications to do the job as such.
On the flip side, there is obviously the work ethic at McLaren – that if you are going to do something you do it properly – which is something we have instilled at Ultimate too, and everyone has bought into that. It is hard work, but at the end of the day it’s the right approach. If everyone in the factory is doing a good job then that ethos works its way down to the attitude of the drivers too and everybody is in the right frame of mind.
Obviously we are running with a brand new car. We could have gone and got a Dallara chassis, but that would have been the easy way out and I don’t think we would be doing what we are doing right now if we had gone down that path instead.
