Since I last wrote this blog back at the beginning of August I seem to have spent more time in Asia than Europe. My wife and I were lucky enough to get to Beijing for a few days during the Olympics. Aside from watching some very exciting sports, this was a chance for me to check out the competition to Formula 1, as The Games are the sport that attracts the biggest single television audience, although they only happen once every four years. By contrast, my sport is the largest global sporting event that happens every year, with hundreds of millions of people tuning in to each of our 18 races over the course of a season. I was very impressed by the Olympic Village in Beijing – the Bird’s Nest and Water Cube are both iconic structures that had created great excitement in advance of The Games, and it was an honour to watch sports in them. I had a wonderful time there but did rather miss the roar of a V8 engine propelling a car to 300 kph in just a few seconds.

A few weeks after we got home, I was travelling East again, to Singapore, for Formula 1’s inaugural night race. All of the track action happened after dark, so that the race itself started at 8 pm local time, or 2 pm in the key European television market. This meant that all the AT&T Williams team personnel tried to stay on European time, so avoiding jet lag by working until 3 or 4 am and then sleeping until 10 am or even midday. All that is, except me! AT&T and were kind enough to invite me to address one of their Innovation Day events, in the stunning location of Raffles Hotel, but starting at 8 am local time, a very anti-social 1 am in the European time zone! I’m pleased to report that I survived this short sharp shock to my body clock and was wide awake for qualifying on Saturday evening, which saw both of our drivers qualify in the top ten on the grid for the first time this season, which was great news. Sunday evening was even better – Nico Rosberg led one of the most exciting races of the season for many laps before eventually finishing in second place, ahead of Championship leader Lewis Hamilton. This was a great result for AT&T Williams, our best this season, and great for Nico, the best of his career to date. As the race didn’t finish until nearly 10 pm it turned out to be rather a late night…..

Two weeks back in the office and then off to Shanghai for the Chinese Grand Prix and my third chance to sample outstanding Asian hospitality in as many months.

Just before I left for China I was privileged to present the UK Manufacturer of the Year Award at a ceremony in London, sponsored by RBS. I trained as a mechanical engineer and have been working in various UK manufacturing Companies for the last 25 years and so was delighted to have the chance to talk to the assembled representatives of UK manufacturing about our work at Williams. I spoke about how we design and manufacture a new car for each year and then push through numerous upgrades to the car throughout the racing season. We do this with the support of our partners, and the connectivity that AT&T provide from our base to all of the test and race tracks we use around the globe, is a great example of this. We know we can rely on a fast connection so that engineers in the UK can look at data generated on a car on a circuit thousands of miles away, as the data are generated. This helps us to drive our phenomenal rate of product development and improve our competitive position.

I’m now done travelling for a while – the so-called off season is actually my busiest time as we have a few short months to complete the design and manufacture of our challenger for the 2009 season. There are many changes to the rules for next year and so plenty of opportunity to move forward and do a better job than our competitors.