We are now well into the 2010 racing season, having completed eight of the nineteen scheduled Grand Prix. We have been to the Middle East, Asia, Europe and North America in the last three months and are now back in Europe for the next little while.

I was lucky enough to go to the Monaco Grand Prix again this year and to see the cars running through this most historic street circuit. A Grand Prix weekend usually runs for three days, with practice on Friday, final practice and qualifying on Saturday and the race itself on Sunday. The only exception to this timetable is Monaco, where practice takes place on Thursday and there is no activity on the track on Friday. This means that attending all the track sessions requires an extra day away from our headquarters in the UK compared with other circuits. This makes it difficult for me to get to Monaco for practice and so I had originally planned to travel on Friday evening to be present for final practice on Saturday morning, allowing me to conduct my monthly finance review in the UK on the second Friday of the month, as usual. Happily I was able to change my plans, get to Monaco to watch the cars on Thursday and still have my monthly finance review in the UK on Friday a few hours before a rather good dinner with AT&T and their guests.

How is this possible? Have I discovered the secret of teleporting? In a way, yes, I have, although I call this magic AT&T Telepresence Solution(sm). For those of you who have not used telepresence, let me enlighten you. Telepresence is video conferencing that’s all grown up and ready to leave home; a telepresence session is usually held between two dedicated telepresence rooms, each one containing one or three very large screens, cameras and a surround sound system. The high band-width, speed of transmission and reliability on the AT&T network then allows high definition pictures and crystal clear sound to be sent from one room to the other with practically no delay, so allowing those present to conduct a perfectly normal conversation as if they were in the same room, the only differences being that they can’t pass each other coffee or shake hands. Large corporations have been installing these telepresence rooms in their offices and holding meetings over them for some time; another of our partners, Accenture, told me that, after they put them in London and Chicago, the rooms were booked out for at least 12 hours a day, every day, and they saw a marked reduction in the number of flight bookings between these cities as more and more internally meetings took place over this wonder new technology.

In response to this, in March we installed an AT&T Telepresence Solution(sm) room in our headquarters in the UK so that we could link to the growing number of our partners who have access to one. This was ready just before the ash cloud from the Icelandic volcano brought all air traffic to and from the UK to a standstill, when our race team were in Shanghai for the Chinese Grand Prix, leaving many of them stranded out there. Our Head of Marketing Services, Matt Jones, was with them but most of his colleagues were in the UK. He needed to have urgent meetings with them to feedback from the race weekend and to make plans for the up-coming European races and so he travelled to Hong Kong and used the telepresence room in the AT&T office there to convene these meetings and keep the business moving.

One of the less-talked about changes in Formula 1 this year is that all of the teams have agreed to restrict the number of technical staff that we take to each race, to keep a lid on costs. Clearly the mechanics who physically work on the cars have to be present and so we have had to leave behind engineers who would previously have been at the track, reviewing data that is generated by the cars during practice sessions and contributing to the various meetings that take place to decide how best to prepare the cars for qualifying and the race. We were keen to keep their contribution to decision making and so asked AT&T to invent mobile telepresence especially for us. We now have something that I believe is unique, a telepresence unit that travels with us in our motorhome, which we take to European Grands Prix. So that was my secret weapon in Monaco – I had my finance review via telepresence; I was the one in a motorhome overlooking all of the yachts in the harbour in Monaco, and the finance team were in the telepresence room in Grove. To be honest, I think I had the better half of the deal.

As you may know, we have a different set-up at the track for races outside of Europe; because we air freight the cars and their support equipment, we do not have our motorhome present. This means that we had not planned to have the AT&T Telepresence Solution(sm) available for the fly-away races, as we call them. I was asked to speak at two AT&T events in Montreal in June, one on the Wednesday before the Grand Prix of Canada and another on the Saturday. So how to do my finance review on the Friday in between? It is a trait of the racing community that once we have something new available to us we adopt it quickly and then simply can’t do without it, so I told my IT group that, after my experience from Monaco, there was no way I could be in Montreal without a telepresence solution and they simply had to find a way. Lucky for them, some new software has just become available that allowed them to link an HD webcam on a laptop in Montreal across the AT&T MPLS-enabled network that we have at every circuit, to our telepresence room in the UK. Problem solved, again!

Turning attention to the track, we are having another exciting season on the track, with the lead in the Drivers Championship changing after virtually every race. Red Bull and McLaren are locked in a fierce fight for the Constructors crown which looks set to continue for the whole season. At AT&T Williams, we are putting a great deal of effort into developing our current car to be more competitive and have some significant upgrades coming to future races. We are also looking forward to 2011, when there will be substantial changes to the aerodynamic regulations and a further tightening of the financial restrictions that the teams have agreed, no doubt leading to more change in the running order.

Keep watching the races this year and thank you for your support of AT&T Williams.