Feature: Racing engineers

Dr Anthony Abbot has been part of Formula One teams that boast nine double world championships in a row.

IN PURSUIT OF THE PERFECT FORMULA

Wits-trained engineers have quietly contributed to innovation in Formula One over the years.

BY JACQUELINE STEENEVELDT

Dr Anthony Abbot (BSc Eng 1988, PhD 1996) remembers his childhood surrounded by the vehicles his late father, John, loved. John was an accountant with Williams Hunt, one of the oldest vehicle dealers in Johannesburg and John built a reputation for servicing, restoring and building classic Porsches.

“I was sort of destined to become an engineer … I remember our home in Parkview, the two rear garages had two cars in progress in them. The cars were built-in essentially. There was a wall and a fence and all sorts of stuff in place. I remember the day we had to demolish the fence to get the car out,” Anthony recalls. He chats from his home office in Ravenstone in Milton Keynes as the founder of Abbot Evolution, which converts classic cars into electric vehicles for an active, growing and elite market.

“I always worked in the workshop; it was a brilliant facility. I was always dabbling and fiddling around with mechanical stuff. I built some crazy beach buggy and when I was doing my PhD at Wits I used to arrive in this bright lime-green beach buggy, with an exhaust that stuck up over the back roof. It used to spit flames and do crazy stuff like that.”

Anthony is a youthful-looking and lean 54-year-old who wears rectangular tortoiseshell glasses, with playful turquoise touches at the temples. He’s balding, and remnants of his sandy hair stick up at the back in tufts. He’s retained his South African accent, although he’s lived in the UK for the past 15 years. He doesn’t quite match the glamorised Formula One characters portrayed in the successful Netflix documentary series Formula 1: Drive to Survive.

He does, however, have an enviable CV, having been part of teams that boast nine double world championships in a row: four with Red Bull Racing from 2010 to 2013 (with Sebastian Vettel) followed by another five at Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One racing from 2014 to 2018 (with Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg).

FRIENDSHIP IN A LAB

Anthony credits his introduction to Formula One to fellow Witsie Dr Giles Wood (BSc Eng 1991). “He was in his final year and was a few years younger than me.”

They shared space and equipment in an engineering lab on campus in the early 1990s. Anthony was working on his PhD in fluid mechanics, supervised by Professor Edward Moss (BSc Eng 1971, MSc 1974, PhD 1985). It required building an experimental apparatus and developing “computer modelling, control and data acquisitions from first principles”. Anthony self-deprecatingly says it was no more than being a “glorified plumber”, but the skills acquired were hugely powerful and lie at the heart of engineering.

“Giles was doing a flow study using an iris diaphragm, to pinch the flow and see what it did in an unsteady state. We built a huge experimental rig in the North West Engineering building. I was in the corner that faces Senate House [now Solomon Mahlangu House]. There was a lovely balcony, it was a great place. Giles was an incredibly astute and driven chap. He started out looking at violin string vibration and then changed to something more practical in control theory.”

Today Giles is a technical engineering manager at Apple, working on the company’s autonomous systems. “I absolutely cannot say anything about what I currently do,” he writes from San Francisco. Among the long list of awards he received at Wits were the Chancellor’s Medal for most distinguished graduand across all faculties in 1992 as well as the Eskom National Engineering Award for academic excellence in engineering or science at a major South African university.

Dr Giles Wood in his home office in San Francisco.

After Wits, Giles pursued postgraduate studies at the University of Cambridge and became principal software engineer at the software computing company MathWorks. The company’s two leading products, MATLAB and Simulink, produce an environment for scientists, engineers and programmers to analyse and visualise data and create complex simulation environments. He successfully completed major projects in the areas of vehicle dynamics (F1 and Nascar), robotic simulation and control, and tank and weapons system modelling. It was with this background that he moved into Formula One, as simulation lead at McLaren Racing in 2004.

“Giles got me into motor racing – he was at McLaren at that stage, in the early 2000s. There was an opportunity to do some contracting work. It piqued my interest because I had always been interested in motorsport. That gave me an opportunity to meet some people such as the final team principal and chief engineer of Mercedes, Paddy Lowe (who went on to Williams and now is on his own).”

In 2007 Anthony met up again with Giles, who had been hired by Red Bull Racing, which was still a cheeky start-up. “It was a joke, fun team, but they had just acquired serious engineers such as Adrian Newey, who in turn acquired Giles.”

Newey references Giles in his memoir How To Build a Car (Harper Collins, 2017) as “one of the cleverest people I know…Giles had contributed a lot to the McLaren driver-inthe-loop simulator, so he was the perfect person to drive the simulator project forward.”

Anthony was in South Africa, “weirdly working in software at Standard Bank,” he recalls, but jumped at the opportunity to join the Red Bull team and head the software and simulation architecture development for their driver-in-the-loop simulator, vehicle dynamics modelling, hardware-in-the-loop and race strategy systems. He left South Africa for the UK with his wife, Caroline, née Redman, (BA 1994, BA Hons 1996), and their two daughters, who were eight and 10 at the time.

“The trust element is vitally important. The UK teams didn’t know anything about Wits. Giles’s trust in Wits engineering education was so important. The power of Wits then, I still see it now. With my current business I’ve just employed a young Wits graduate. I am so impressed by the continuity of the manner of thought – despite all the challenges – that Wits has had. I can see that I can trust him and he asks the right questions and he’s been taught by the people I was taught by.

There’s a continuity of excellence. We punch above our weight. It’s a really good engineering school.”

As the current head of the school, Professor Rob Reid (BSc Eng 1989, MSc 1992 PhD 2009), puts it, graduates are ready for anything, including the “hyper demanding world of motor sport”.

FORMULA ONE ENVIRONMENT

Giles (initially as head of simulation and later as chief engineer of simulation/analysis) and Anthony (as principal software architect) were central to the Red Bull team that developed the computer system which modelled the Formula One car for the design engineers. “This simulator was successfully deployed in 2009 and represented a significant step beyond the capabilities of other F1 teams and was a major contributor to four successive world championships,” writes Giles.

It allowed engineers to work more efficiently using mathematics and it’s a model that has been replicated.

“The whole thing to get the car to go faster is like an optimisation problem. The Formula One car is like a switchboard with about 500 dials on it that you can set, and the car will go fastest when all 500 dials are in the right position. You can’t twiddle one at a time. In the modern world the modelling has been driven into the mathematical realm. My role with Giles was working on the infrastructure to support that. It drives the car in a computer around a virtual track with a million permutations,” Anthony says with a look that seems a mixture of nostalgia and awe.

“Thirty years ago, it was easy to get a second off a lap time … nowadays these guys are fighting for 100ths of a second.”

Giles led the simulation and analysis group with a remit to improve and extend modelling and analysis techniques until June 2014. Anthony moved on to the Mercedes-Benz AMG Petronas Formula One team, building on the work done at Red Bull, while Giles set his sights on the US.

COMING FULL CIRCLE

Anthony bid farewell to Mercedes in 2019 after 12 successful years in Formula One, choosing to return to his roots, like his father, of building cars and tangibly interacting with the materials.

“The electric vehicle world has the same feeling as early software development companies in the late 1990s. It’s open to innovation and opportunity and it’s just plain interesting. I am hoping to do it a lot better.

“It’s also re-establishing myself as an engineer. I want to see out my days in a hi-tech workshop that I can touch with my own hands. I’ve taken the essence of what I learned at Formula One and am making it my own. I’m more of an artist painting with the tools of physics and maths. Ultimately, you’re judged by the laws of the universe.”

WITSIES CURRENTLY IN FORMULA 1:

Shau Mafuna

Image: Instagram

Johannesburg-born Shau Mafuna (BSc Eng 2016) announced that he had joined Mercedes- AMG High-Performance Powertrains in November 2021. This is the team that supplies engines to the four teams (Mercedes-AMG, Aston Martin, McLaren and Williams) that Mercedes-AMG powers. He matriculated from St Stithians College before his studies at Wits. He moved to the UK and completed his master’s in motorsport engineering at Oxford Brookes University, which is in Motorsport Valley, a vast cluster of firms based around Oxfordshire and the Midlands which supplies cutting-edge technology to Formula One.

He said on his Instagram account: “As much as I may be lost for words at this point, I can finally announce that I have managed to secure a full-time role as a Mechanical Engineer at Mercedes-AMG High-Performance Powertrains in the F1 division! This is a dream that a certain few know how hard we have pushed to reach this position! The last 12 months on the Work Experience Academy have been challenging but insightful and have prepared me to take up the permanent role with a lot more confidence.”

Yolandi Watkins is based at Mercedes-AMG Petronas

IT WASN’T AN EASY JOURNEY

Yolandi Watkins, née Potas (BSc Eng 2017) joined Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One team as a cost analyst in September 2021. She writes from Milton Keynes that: “The culture at the Mercedes-AMG Petronas F1 Team has far exceeded my expectations and it’s an incredible environment to work in.”

However, her dream to get there has been far from perfect. “I took a bit longer to complete my degree and worked at various companies in South Africa before moving to England. I spent some of my free time volunteering at a local Formula Ford team.” She says it was only once she started her master’s degree in advanced motorsport engineering at Cranfield University that her career in Formula One was launched.

“Studying engineering at Wits is an enormous undertaking. Academically it’s the most challenging thing I’ve ever done and for a long time it was a love-hate relationship. My time at Wits was filled with late nights and early mornings but I made a few really good friends who are still a part of my life today. Working in the engineering lab during my thesis, climbing on the wind tunnel to set up our vehicle model and seeing my theories come to life are some of the best memories I have.

“The course itself was very demanding but instilled a culture of hard work and dedication that prepared me for the fast-paced and demanding world of Formula One. My lecturers were passionate about different subjects. I particularly enjoyed fluid dynamics and had a knack for relating every lecture back to Formula One aerodynamics. This of course drove Prof Craig Law (BSc Eng 1994, PhD 2002) insane sometimes. But he was always happy to help me understand things better.”

Other Witsies currently working in Formula One: Jonty Culwick (BSc Eng 2008) Senior specialist structures engineer at McLaren Racing; Joshua Shear (BSc Eng 2013) Composite suspension design engineer at Sauber Motorsport; Rowan Carstensen (BSc Eng 2015) Operations manager at Prodrive Composites; Stephan Engelbrecht (BSc Eng 2013) Senior engineer – vehicle integration, Group Lotus

Ferrari driver Michael Schumacher celebrates victory with Ferarri Chief Designer Rory Byrne after the San Marino Formula One Grand Prix held in Imola, Italy in 2002.

RORY BYRNE

As a child, Rory Byrne (BSc 1964 DSc honoris causa 2005) was attracted to competitions involving self-designed and constructed model gliders. He was fascinated with aerodynamics and lightweight structures. His first job was as a chief chemist in a polymer manufacturing plant in Germiston. During this time, he converted his Ford Anglia 105E into an Onyx production car with the help of friend Graham B Ross (BSc 1967, BSc Hons 1968) and another friend, Eric Adamson, doing the driving. Despite an absence of formal training or experience in automotive engineering, he showed real flair, with the mathematics and experimental methodologies that he learned at university.

• In 1973 Rory set off for England, where he assisted a friend who was racing in the British Formula Ford series. At the end of 1973 he was offered the job of chief designer at the Royale Company, where he was responsible for their championship-winning Super Vee Cars in 1974, Formula Fords in 1975 and 1976, and Formula Ford 2000 in 1977.

• In 1978, Rory was asked to join Toleman Group Motorsport. This resulted in the very successful design and development of the TG280, which finished first and second in the European Formula 2 Championship.

• In 1982, Rory ventured into Formula One and aerodynamics. He designed the TG81, with its new engine, new chassis and new tyres and did not meet with immediate success. But he persisted, improving the design sufficiently to enable Toleman to score points in 1983.

Toleman TG280

• In 1992 he joined Benetton and his career took on a new dimension when Michael Schumacher arrived, using the car Rory had designed to win the Driver’s Championship. Schumacher’s success was repeated in 1995, when Benetton also won the Constructors Championship.

• Rory was persuaded by Schumacher to join him at Scuderia Ferrari in Maranello, which he did at the end of 1996, in time for the 1997 season. His first car was the 1998 Ferrari which took Schumacher close to the driver’s title.

• Rory’s dedication, passion and understanding of design ultimately paid off when he took Scuderia Ferrari to their first Constructors Championship in 1999. This was followed by the Driver’s Championship for Schumacher from 2000 to 2004.

• In 2005 he was awarded an honorary doctorate in science by his alma mater because he had “put South Africa on the world map of excellence in mechanical engineering”.

• In 2018 he was inducted into the South African Hall of Fame.

He lives in Phuket, Thailand with his wife, Pornthip, and their two children.