Richard Hopkirk – from the F1 Pitwall to Land Rover BAR

by Land Rover BAR on 2 Dec 2015 If you wanted a poster child for the potential glamour of a modern engineering career, you'd be hard pushed to come up with a better candidate than Richard Hopkirk. A graduate of Cambridge with a first class MEng degree, he won a scholarship to Harvard where he gathered a second Masters, before joining the McLaren Formula 1 team straight after his academic career.

The kind of ability that Hopkirk had for maths could well have opened lucrative doors in the City, building financial models for hedge funds, but he wanted something more practical. 'I like making stuff – as a kid I used to tinker around in my shed and make rubbish contraptions. I love maths and theory, but it's much more stimulating when you're using it to make something.' Something like a Formula 1 car, or an America's Cup boat.

Hopkirk's role as Head of Systems and Analysis, bringing in his experience from the world of Formula 1 is just one small part of the knowledge transfer that the team is undertaking. It's a department that didn't exist in Cup teams ten years ago and it speaks volumes to the spectacular increases in computing power that it now ranks as one of the fundamental pillars of performance development.