Let’s get up to date and move on to Force India.
So, seven years with Honda, then Honda decides to leave F1 and because I was more of a Honda man than a Brawn man, I left with them. Then I had a year of time off. In that year off, I developed the F1 App. And then Vijay (Mallya) called me and asked what I was doing. It was at the time that Force India had done a deal for Mercedes engines and McLaren gearboxes. With the gearbox deal came a senior manager (Simon Roberts) to run Force India for a year. After a year he was given the choice of staying or going back to McLaren and he chose to go back. So Force India needed someone and that’s when they called me.
Let’s go back to the App, how come it’s called “SoftPauer?”
It’s a play on words; Soft because of software and Pauer is an amalgamation of Alex Powell and Otmar Szafnauer. My partner the techie guy, his last name is Powell.
It had the distinction of being the most expensive App in the world ever ever ever…
Yeah, twenty pounds.
You haven't forgotten
No I think of it all the time! When Honda left, for the first time, I had to go out and buy my own mobile phone. I was talking to my wife and saying I fancied one of those new iPhones. This is in 2008 when they had just come out. Later that year I had the iPhone and when I was at a wedding, I wanted to check the football scores. I went on the web and found the Chelsea-Arsenal score. I am at the back of a church waiting for the bride to come in and I know the football scores. I thought it would be nice if we could get all the information we can see on the pit wall in your hand, in case you are at the back of a church and you want to know what’s going on in Formula 1.
So we could say you had a religious vision, an epiphany.
But Apple told me to stick with the pricing. But I ended up charging a pound a race, which is where the £19.99 came from.
©WRi2
Bernie’s involvement with the App?
I’ll tell you what it is and I think it shows his genius. I came up with the App in October and I went to see Bernie then and again in December to show him the prototype. The first time we had data from Bernie’s servers going up into the sky and back to me watching the race live on my phone was as soon as Monaco 2009. I was on a boat in Monaco and we were watching the race on a big screen TV. I showed the people the part of the App that showed every car’s position on the track and these people were amazed. That was in May and by October I was here with Force India.
When I came to the factory last winter what struck me was that when Force India talks about not operating on a big budget it’s true. You’re sitting in Eddie Jordan’s office, that looks more or less the same as it did back then, the reception desk is the same as when he owned it. You even live in Oxford, do you live in EJ’s old house?
I don’t but it’s not far away. We are judged by our performance on track, not judged on how pretty is our office. My philosophy is that any surplus cash must go mainly into car performance. Sometimes that means keeping your employees happy, because if they’re not happy you don’t get the best ones and that affects car performance. So there has to be some balance and level of spend on the factory because that’s where they work, so the toilets have to work and the lawn out front mustn’t be full of dandelions or snakes. Stuff that’s important to the employees, but my desk, who cares? It’s not a priority.
And you seem to keep your staff…
That’s very important. We’ve recruited well and my philosophy which is easier said than done, is to have this be a very good place to work. That can mean different things to different people: for some people that means getting paid the most, but not to everyone, for others it means being treated with respect or that when things are not going well at home we don’t kick them. The managers have to understand what it means to each individual. I try and instil that into everyone, because you spend so much time at work.
Say you are a designer, you are going to work ten hours a day everyday, except in the peak periods when it’s fourteen hours. If it’s a miserable place to work and you spend 14 hours a day there that’s not good. I experienced that with Ford with bad and good bosses. As a young man I went from misery to heaven within the same company. So that’s when I learned – I was 24 at the time – if I’m ever a boss, it has to be like this, because happy employees, you get so much more out of them. It’s still hard to do, hard to keep people, but there’s a core with whom we’ve done a decent job.
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