Lessons from the Motorsports Cluster with Mark Preston

[00:00:00] Susannah de Jager: Welcome to Oxford+, the podcast series that takes you deep into the myths and truths of the Oxford investing landscape. I'm your host, Susannah de Jager and I've spent over 15 years in UK asset management. My guest today is Mark Preston. Mark has a degree from Monash University in engineering, which he initially applied to Formula One. Having run multiple teams engineering departments, he subsequently moved into strategy and executive management. More recently, he's focused on Formula E, leading the DS Cheetah team before founding StreetDrone in 2016. Mark is currently CTO of StreetDrone, a pre-seed company developing low speed, hyper-local deliveries in ports, commercial settings and local neighbourhoods. Mark, thank you so much for joining me today.

[00:00:50] Mark Preston: Looking forward to chatting in this lovely setting here.

[00:00:53] Susannah de Jager: Wonderful.

[00:00:54] Susannah de Jager: I'm excited to get your perspective because so far lots of the guests we've had have been focused on the university ecosystem and you obviously come with a different perspective. It might be really helpful for those listening to hear a little bit more about your background and how you ended up founding StreetDrone.

[00:01:13] Mark Preston: Sure.

[00:01:13] Mark Preston: So I'm from Australia, from a city called Geelong, which is actually the, kind of the Ford town in Australia, so I grew up around cars. After doing mechanical engineering, I joined GM in Australia, GM Holden, which is a part of the GM infrastructure, I suppose, around the world, as an engineer, then I moved over to a company called TWR, Holden Special Vehicles, so in project management and those kind of things. Then the guy who owned that, his name was Tom Walkinshaw, he bought a Formula One team in the UK, he's from Scotland, was from Scotland, he passed away. So I joined, came over to do F1 for two weeks or two years, and 25 years later, I'm still here doing all sorts of technology and motorsport and those kind of things. Worked at Arrows Grand Prix for about six years, then I went to McLaren F1 for a few years and then decided to do my MBA and that's the connection sort of to the university when I came in and did my EMBA at Saïd Business School and during the MBA, I started a Formula One team with Honda.

[00:02:13] Susannah de Jager: As one does.

[00:02:14] Mark Preston: Oh, yes, it was good fun. So that was my kind of first start-up, let's call it, big start up while doing, connected to the university, but doing a bit of both. So we started the Formula One team, which was a pretty crazy venture in Oxfordshire. Sadly, Honda pulled out of that and we bought the assets and started another company which is a composites company called FormTech Composites, which still operates down in Milton Park, so not so far away and then I got involved in the next big thing, which was Formula Electric, which Alejandro started way back in 2012, which now seems like a long time ago. I suppose in parallel, one of the connections there to the university was after my MBA, I wanted to see if I could help some other startups out of university, and they introduced me to two startups. One was Oxford YASA motors, which sold recently and I helped them to do the business planning and everything, which is how I got involved in electric motors and started to understand about what could be the future of automotive and transportation in the world, so that was my kind of big connection, I suppose, to the university by helping them to start up and, spin out. There was another one called T-TEC, which is tidal energy turbines, but that was a bit more of a bigger project, which we couldn't get off the ground because it's just such big engineering and I suppose UK is not quite so used to doing what I would call public works projects nowadays. But anyway, that was an interesting one as well.

[00:03:42] Mark Preston: So I got involved in Formula Electric and along the way started to look at what else was going to happen in my favorite world of automotive, which turned out to be autonomous. So with a colleague of mine, Mike Potts, we started StreetDrone to have a look at autonomous vehicles and support, initially some of the startups that were also happening in the UK with vehicles and that's kind of where we're up to now.

[00:04:04] Susannah de Jager: Wonderful. Thank you, that was a really excellent whistle stop tour of a, of quite a long and detailed

[00:04:09] Susannah de Jager: career.

[00:04:09] Susannah de Jager: I mean, I think it would be fair to say you've got a lot of experience and you very kindly touched on how it integrated with the university and more distinct from it.

[00:04:19] Susannah de Jager: Something when we met the other day that really struck me and it's my naivety I'm sure, not other people's, but you know, Oxford+ is talking about the university and outside of it and you actually articulated just on the scale of the motorsports cluster, you know, kind of near Oxford and I'm really interested firstly to hear a bit more about it, but also when the UK talks about trying to build clusters, I can't help thinking there's so much we could learn from the existing ones and I'd love to get your perspective on how it operates and what I suppose the distinct characteristics are that we should be trying to emulate.

[00:04:55] Mark Preston: Yeah, I find it really interesting, the whole cluster here. So there's, of the F1 teams, we're the ones that drive the cluster. So I'm not going to count how many there are at the moment, I can't remember if there's six or seven depending on whether they've got satellite offices here as well, so you may not realise that some of them still have offices here, even if they're not primarily based here and that sort of spreads from Silverstone, being the racetrack and then down as far as obviously McLaren in London, but up as far as Mercedes high performance engines, at least that's one of the more famous ones at the, in Northampton.

[00:05:29] Mark Preston: So there's about 40,000 people that work in the industry and it's probably driven, the thing that I found is the most similar to Silicon Valley is I think there's what they call high labour mobility, meaning if a project fails or stops, like we've had a few projects stop when a car company pulls out, it doesn't take long for all those people to get taken up into the next project or expansion or growth or something and I think that's quite key because it means people aren't afraid to lose their jobs, which sounds terrible, but it sort of shows that mobility of people means that it shouldn't be a problem to shut something down. That's not great, but it does allow for things to ebb and flow and grow change.

[00:06:11] Susannah de Jager: Well it's not backwater, is it? You're not trying to hire somebody into somewhere where they've kind of backed into a cul-de-sac if it fails and so I should imagine that attracting that top talent, when there's that optionality, just

[00:06:23] Susannah de Jager: that much more appealing. Like, oh,

[00:06:24] Susannah de Jager: well if it fails, at least I haven't moved my whole family somewhere.

[00:06:26] Mark Preston: Exactly and that's what you find a lot of people from all the countries around the world, including myself, lots of Italians and French and Germans and everybody that are in, Spanish, et cetera, that all come and live in this region, in order to work in motorsports and that huge supply chain is very high tech, very high end. We've had some startups, or helped a few things out of Oxford, where often Formula One will experiment way earlier than anybody else, so universities are known for doing the low TRL levels, so the Technology Readiness Levels, and F1 would often scoop those levels up really low down, so sort of three and four and have a go at them or play and see whether those things are viable and if they're viable, perhaps help them scale up or at least go from sort of four to six and then use it and then if it doesn't work, then pass it on or it then grows its own way because F1's helped to get it going. So it's great because it can afford higher priced products at the beginning, especially if they're high performance and so I don't know if we've used the opportunities well enough in the region to, it has been used, but I'm sure it could be used more in order to help, some companies spin out quicker.

[00:07:38] Susannah de Jager: Interesting. Just coming back to the elements, what you've described is a really high functioning and one of the main clusters and what we've described is one of the main benefits of that, so the talent cycling, and obviously the funding of sort of things coming out of the university, early stage technology with a natural buyer.

[00:07:57] Susannah de Jager: But if we want to create that in a maybe slightly different area, it sounds like potentially it's quite difficult because it almost relies upon a sort of critical mass in order to function, Not maybe the latter part, but the talent element. So are there sort of, I suppose, areas that are maybe stand alongside Formula One that we could kind of naturally be cycling talent into them and so there's a natural place to sort of point to that's adjacent, I suppose?

[00:08:25] Mark Preston: Yeah, I'm a big fan of, obviously do my MBA of the competitiveness of nations, you know, what you should be doing, what you're good at.

[00:08:32] Susannah de Jager: Yeah. Makes sense.

[00:08:34] Mark Preston: Like a kind of a joke that, you know, if you're going to buy surfboards, maybe you might buy an Australian surfboard, but if you're going to buy a car, I'm not so sure we should really have a big car industry in Australia. If you want to buy mining equipment maybe, or you know, so I think in some ways things should match what's going on there. There's certainly a lot of government strategies which follow along some of the main themes in motorsports, things like, advanced materials, so the machines to do the rapid prototyping and printing perhaps, you know, that becomes a separate stream, supported by the F1 teams who use them considerably now. So high value engineering, rapid manufacturing of parts, experimenting with things, things on the kind of bleeding edge. So I think there are a lot of companies that can benefit from being close to the F1 teams and then can help those technologies spin out.

[00:09:24] Mark Preston: I mean, there's a lot of discussion at the moment about synthetic fuels and other things which F1 is pushing for the 2026 season and so there are startups and there's obviously a lot of R&D going on in chemistry departments and those kinds of things at all the big universities. So again, there's ways in which those departments can link to some of the technology that's developing and then hopefully spin that over to F1 to kind of kickstart things and then maybe then find their way to, interestingly, the classic car industry in the UK, which is massive. So there's all these things that can then take that technology from the, let's say beachhead market, to the next market to the next market. So, this is certainly a lot of optionality here.

[00:10:08] Susannah de Jager: Really interesting, And you spoke about the fact that a lot of the companies might actually just have a satellite office, it might not be their headquarters that are here. In your experience of having worked in Formula One, could we be doing more to attract more headquarters here?

[00:10:23] Susannah de Jager: You know, I had a slightly depressing kind of sitting in traffic moment on the weekend, not even during the week, thinking, gosh, if you were looking to set up a company or a headquarters, this traffic issue in Oxford might, really put you off. That's a bit prosaic, but in your experience, you know, should the government be doing more to try and attract headquarters here so that they then supplement clusters and supplement what's coming out of the university?

[00:10:47] Mark Preston: I think the biggest problem we've come across is Brexit, again. I wasn't, was I doing F1? Yeah, I was probably doing F1 back in the days when we probably, some of the trucks would have to drive across Europe through borders where you required this thing called a Carne, which is a piece of paper that let, you have to list every single thing.

[00:11:05] Susannah de Jager: Not stealing the car

[00:11:06] Mark Preston: Yeah you to list every single thing in the vehicle and you're, in the truck, sorry, being delivered. Oh, sorry, it's delivering the cars and nowadays you also have to put where the origin of every part is and so you can imagine when a race team takes things from the UK to now back into Europe to go racing, the amount of paperwork and everything is just phenomenal again. So that's a big barrier we're having, we're actually looking ourselves at having an office in Europe. So that we can get around some of the having to import export. So we might buy something from Europe, do something to it and then send it back. So now we're looking at can we do, because we've got some things going on in Rotterdam at StreetDrone.

[00:11:47] Susannah de Jager: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:11:47] Mark Preston: So it'd be easier just to send that to Rotterdam and do the work in Rotterdam, then bring those parts over to the UK, do the work here and take it back. So there's all of that practicality and as I say I haven't experienced it recently in motorsports, but I know what we're having to do at StreetDrone, so therefore that is certainly very painful. Some of these big areas like Milton Park and what MEPC is doing up at Silverstone, growing the technology centers, we did look at, one point when we were looking to where to put an office with some of the tax breaks on some of the areas which are seen as free, is it free zones? Or there's areas where you can have business rate relief for a while to encourage someone to, you know, set up something here. A lot to do, of course, education and then the problem with sponsorship. Sponsoring people, actually getting enough people to work for you and then make it easy for us to bring people into the country. So, because we're in the high end areas, roboticists and all of that, you know, ourselves and other startups are taking a lot of those people, so it's, we do have a lot of, staff coming from overseas, and so the sponsorship side of things is just slow and difficult compared to before Brexit. So there's lots of barriers that have been put in place in the last number of years that slow us down and mean that we're having to do different things in different countries in order to get around them.

[00:13:10] Susannah de Jager: Yeah, slightly depressing to hear.

[00:13:12] Mark Preston: Yes.

[00:13:13] Susannah de Jager: I mean, yeah, the educational kind of, or the high value visas thing I've heard before from other people and it does seem to me that it's something there's been a bit of a noise on from the government, but not that much action perhaps just yet, and...

[00:13:27] Mark Preston: Yeah.

[00:13:28] Susannah de Jager: And fight for talent and bringing them in.

[00:13:30] Mark Preston: We've, we're certainly having to, you know, have people to help us get all of those visas sorted out and, you know, it takes a few months to get somebody overseas, can't react as quickly as you can, let's say if the person is currently at university and would like to keep working. There are some visas that allow that to happen reasonably quickly, but you also need to check is that person going to be allowed to stay after that degree that they're doing that allows them to work here for a little while.

[00:13:58] Susannah de Jager: Yeah, it's an interesting point. I think somebody told me the total number of global PhDs and it wasn't large. I mean, I suppose it's a really high level of education, so it shouldn't be that surprising. But I think it was like 10,000 a year and when you think of that as a sort of, how do we grab them?

[00:14:12] Susannah de Jager: How do we make sure that it's really easy and appealing for them to come here?

[00:14:16] Susannah de Jager: I think I even heard that, and I might get this wrong, but I'm pretty sure it was Qatar that was basically saying if you move to Qatar with a PhD, we'll pay you £75,000 a year just to sit while you work out what you might do.

[00:14:27] Mark Preston: Oh, okay.

[00:14:28] Susannah de Jager: Just what you might do here so that the talent will actually arrive. Brexit friction.

[00:14:33] Mark Preston: I thought I didn't realise you could call it Brexit fiction. Friction, sorry, that's a fiction maybe, but friction, yes. It was the

[00:14:39] Susannah de Jager: It was the fiction that the friction would go, wasn't it? That's the good joke there.

[00:14:44] Mark Preston: Yes.

[00:14:44] Susannah de Jager: So, we've obviously spoken about your experience of the cluster, but you have had some experience of the University too, if you'd be happy to share, I think it's quite interesting.

[00:14:53] Mark Preston: So when I started looking at the tidal energy turbines with the guys from the civil engineering department, a novel new technology, looks like a big lawnmower on its side, like old fashioned lawnmower, barrel lawnmower. But the problem with those type of turbines is they're very big and you have to step towards the kind of risk. So in the end, you want to do something like the Seven Barrier, which goes right across that area and have a huge natural energy turbine, or places like the Orkney Islands in the north and when you go and watch the power of the waves in the Orkney Islands, the problem is going from this sort of small demonstrator that's in the university's water tanks doing testing to this thing that would have to be 70 meters long at each section. You can imagine if something goes wrong and that gets washed away. It's not like you're testing something on land where, all right, if the wind energy turbine starts to creak and groan or something, you could probably go up and take a blade off. But in this, you put it in the water and then it could just get washed away and that's the end of that. So, the difficulty was looking at going from that right up to a full scale operation. We worked out the cost of capital would have to be so low that the only way you could do it we thought was doing it as a national works project, as they used to call them in the old days. So, almost going back to the days of Brunel and everything in the 1890s when we did so much stuff in the UK. It built so many big things.

[00:16:20] Susannah de Jager: Like speed railways or something. Just as an example. Yes, when China's building how many thousand kilometers per day or something. Don't!

[00:16:30] Mark Preston: So that is a bit of a disappointment that we couldn't find a way to scale up such a risky project, but the fact that how much tidal energy we have around the UK. So it would require a different way of thinking, I think, to get such a big engineering project over the line. Obviously, we've got a lot of wind turbines on and offshore, which is great, although that seems to be slowing slightly in the offshore ones. But yeah, the tidal energy turbines are another step in terms of their complexity, not really, but more risk as you build up to what you're trying to do.

[00:17:01] Susannah de Jager: And in terms of when you had that realisation that the capital required was just going to be massive and that it would have to be a completely different type of investor, did you actually then go and try and talk to government at all, or was it just something that you spoke to people and you said, well, there isn't the natural buyer of this?

[00:17:19] Mark Preston: I did actually go down to Westminster and have a discussion, I don't know which department it was. I can't remember now.

[00:17:24] Susannah de Jager: They've all changed Yeah, so it could be so, probably energy I imagine, just to actually ask them, did they ever see a point at which something like this could work and did they agree with me that this is the type of different thought process would have to happen? And they, basically agreed with me, we didn't find a solution. So I kind of said, okay that's, we're not going to be able to go any further unless we can figure out a way of getting past that hurdle, or there was another solution, which we at the time didn't come up with.

[00:17:51] Susannah de Jager: Yeah, I mean, it's interesting because in the project that I've been involved with for a while and it's now finished, we were talking to government quite a lot trying to understand if more pension capital could be released perhaps, you know, to create a larger, natural UK, not completely altruistic, but you know, at sufficiently large scale that there might be projects like you're describing, I think, that could fit within it and it did oscillate a little bit in the two years we were engaging with them, as I think things got a little bit less positive, but what was interesting was this sort of dialogue or rhetoric or kind of almost dogma, dare I say it, of that's a private sector problem.

[00:18:30] Mark Preston: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:18:31] Susannah de Jager: And we as the public sector don't think we should intervene.

[00:18:34] Mark Preston: Yeah.

[00:18:34] Susannah de Jager: And it's really interesting because it slightly belies the reality of other countries and what they're doing and again, with a slightly cynical hat on, state aid rules are viewed quite differently in different places and the way that they are interpreted and enforced in some countries is a bit more sort of, well that's fine and that we maybe hurt our own chances by being the most literal.

[00:18:59] Mark Preston: We have made use of the smallest size funding. So the Entrepreneurs Investment Scheme which...

[00:19:06] Mark Preston: ...works really wonderfully, that's for the very low level. If you match that with what actually an F1 team's like, you would say that we're still better at doing the early stage and not so great at the, you know, scaling up side of things. So getting it from tier level one up to eight, seven eighths, and then it seems to need a U.S. or maybe Germany or France or something to scale something to a really large scale. So one end is quite good, but it doesn't seem to be able to get across that valley of death into the next big scale up.

[00:19:40] Susannah de Jager: And I think you make a good point around SEIS and EIS is a really great scheme and actually I think the Tony Blair Institute have put out some interesting stuff on this recently just saying we need to effectively continue that virtuous continuum of capital by incentivising people and even perhaps go as far as, and again lots of countries do this, incentivising UK pension funds to invest for tax breaks in UK

[00:20:03] Susannah de Jager: based technology so that's a virtuous cycle and it's not a kind of giveaway. It's in order to create that virtuous ecosystem within the UK that benefits the UK. So it's not an expenditure on the kind of lack of tax take, it should be seen as an investment by the government.

[00:20:21] Mark Preston: The other problem is, of course, I come from, coming from Australia where we've only got now 25 million people now from how big it is, compared to when you look at someone like the U.S. obviously with the 300 plus and UK obviously here with was 80 now or something like that. But then we've just, you know, made the Brexit friction higher in dealing with the other big market that's right next to us and so I can also see why a lot of people go to the US because it's, I'm not gonna say it's easier, it's just, you know, if you write instruction manual in English and you're selling in California, which is the fifth biggest market in the world, isn't it? And then you can just take that to the states nearby without having to change all, not too many of your rules as far as I understand and therefore it's easier to incrementally grow in that first stage. So you're going from a place as big as the UK and you're expanding out quite fast if you can to a market that's then four times as big or whatever the number is, whereas we're slowing that down over here. So It's sort of logical that you can't scale up something as easily from the UK, unless, like I went back to that silly idea about surfboards, you can sell more surfboards in Australia. So what's that same area? We're pretty good at pharmaceuticals here for example, and obviously the university has a big chemistry and pharmaceutical side of things. So there are, I don't know. areas that we seem to be able to scale up, in some way. Not quite sure, I haven't sat down and tried to figure out why some things can scale and other things can't, but certainly high value, low volume products that seem to be okay. But then yeah, there's others that don't seem to be able to scale up from here.

[00:21:57] Susannah de Jager: And it's interesting because coming back to where we started the conversation, thinking about the cluster, you know, potentially when you have that experience of how to scale something and the ambition, because that talent has been able to stay here, because there is an existing cluster, even though, as you say, the friction is greater now because it's incumbent here, it's harder to move it perhaps than it is just to stay put. But, you know, something that I hear a lot about is that scaling talent isn't here for many other industries and so people's experience is that they need to go elsewhere because they literally don't have a playbook, or because the playbook is to go into another larger same language domestic market, i.e. the U.S., that sort of automatic moving and listing in America and then the lack of recycled talent that has the experience of that journey. So it's all a complete kind of, yeah, catch 22.

[00:22:51] Mark Preston: I mean, they talk a lot about smartphones in saying that, could you build a smartphone in America now? I'm not sure if you could because there's such depth to, I think they call it the creative commons, don't they? The tiers down below the main person, OEM who makes the main product like the phone. We're not having the people who know how to do the glass or the other things. It makes it harder to then scale something up. So obviously that's why there's a lot of discussion in the U. S. to bring back parts of the value chain. So you've got half a chance to scale some of those things. Obviously we've still got some car companies here in the UK, but there is more of them in the US. Although, you know, you watch Tesla, it's still been difficult for them to scale up something even in the US and they've almost gone bankrupt a few times, haven't they, on the way there. but if it weren't for Elon, they probably wouldn't have got there in the end and there's a lot of others struggling to get there. So even in the US, it's hard to scale up in some areas because there's not enough of the, yeah, the supply chain that's got its expertise nearby, let's say. So that's a curiosity. I'm not quite sure what you do about that exactly to, because then you have to think about picking winners and you know, what should we be scaling up in here and what shouldn't we be scaling up and what works best? I mean, I know the government does a pretty good job at it in terms of, there's a lot of things with Innovate UK and KTNs, the knowledge transfer networks working on which sectors that we should be looking at. So high value manufacturing and those kinds of things certainly do get a lot of help. There's a fair amount of research in batteries and all those elements which we see in F1, but then scaling it is the bit, I'm not sure we, the British fault didn't, I don't know where the British fault's up to now.

[00:24:38] Susannah de Jager: I don't think it's very good.

[00:24:40] Mark Preston: Yes. So...

[00:24:42] Susannah de Jager: Aren't they being courted by America? Wasn't that the last thing with the IRA? Yeah, the Inflation Reduction Act suddenly looking quite appealing to go elsewhere.

[00:24:49] Mark Preston: So one of those big scale ups that could have happened is also struggling. So, but that means you've got to have the natural volume to support, etc. So it's complicated, I suppose.

[00:24:59] Susannah de Jager: Yeah. I mean, the message I'm hearing is that, you know, and one sees this, that we're very good at creating sort of, I think it was somebody said, it might have even been Kwasi Kartang, you know, that we create the nursery bed for the rest of the world to then come and kind of cherry pick our best ideas and take them elsewhere and scale them and obviously, it's not the worst place to be, we're still coming up with great ideas, but we're not then reaping the benefits at the other end of it because they've gone elsewhere, relocated, that talent has gone elsewhere, and that entrepreneurial experience that we want recycled here is also not here.

[00:25:31] Susannah de Jager: Taking a slightly different step, I'd love to hear a bit more about your experience of StreetDrone and where you guys are up to and what the sort of completely other end of the spectrum at the moment, what the opportunities and hurdles that you're seeing on a more day to day level are.

[00:25:47] Mark Preston: Yeah, so with StreetDrone, we've actually benefited from a lot of the government funding. So, Innovate UK through CKEV and Zenzic, which are the groups that look after the connected and autonomous vehicles, you know, they've been very supportive there. We've been running a project up at Nissan in Sunderland, so the biggest manufacturing plant I think in the UK.

[00:26:07] Susannah de Jager: And in fairness, the government have done a lot to keep Nissan here. I mean, you know, even as a relative lay person, I've seen that in the newsflows. So, yeah.

[00:26:14] Mark Preston: So that's true, yes, and so we've been running an autonomous truck and now scaling up to four trucks up there as part of the next project, which is, called V-CAL. Funnily enough, that was actually sponsored by DCMS, so that was because they were looking at 5G and so the first truck was operating, they call it tele-operation. So being controlled over a 5G network, a private 5G network, so there was a lot of research and work done there to successfully drive a truck around, first tele-operated and as a second stage autonomously or a combination of the two as we scale up. What's interesting there is that actually we've had our first, I'll call it, export because we're now doing a similar project in Rotterdam. So from the export point of view, we've taken that knowledge and technology over to Rotterdam and currently running another truck over there as we scale up. It is still difficult though, to raise this next finance. We've obviously been talking all around Europe and US, but it's quite hard and slow process, especially with the, I suppose, macro-environment as it is at the moment.

[00:27:20] Susannah de Jager: Yeah, it's not an easy fundraising environment, but what are the main, not objections, I'm trying to think, but what are the main kind of questions that you come up with that people can't satisfy themselves with?

[00:27:29] Mark Preston: I think a lot to do with the technology risk still to be solved, which is when we see things in the U.S. with companies like Cruise having difficulty in San Francisco. Now we're trying to allay those fears by saying, look, we're running off highway. So meaning private roads, which mean we have different rules, we're running at slow speed, so we're taking it sensibly and slowly I suppose is the difference, but the sort of scale of funding is different in the U.S. and so there's a comparison to say well if Cruise is spending this much money in the U.S., Why don't you need that much money and we're saying well we're trying to minimise what we're trying to achieve in order to minimise the amount we need.

[00:28:08] Mark Preston: Certainly the governments are supporting the supply chain side of things. So also mitigating risk by having more of a, trying to help create a cluster again, actually, of companies around the UK so that we're all cross fertilising in a way. So we shouldn't be all doing the same thing over and over, that's pointless in some ways.

[00:28:26] Susannah de Jager: Sharing knowledge.

[00:28:27] Mark Preston: Yeah. Sharing or...

[00:28:28] Susannah de Jager: Creating a natural portfolio that's the head to the risk for all the investors.

[00:28:32] Mark Preston: Because at the end of the day, when you look at F1, one of the risk minimisations coming here is that there's a supply chain that can support you and so when we started up a Formula One team back in 2005-6, we knew that it was going to be way, well, almost impossible if we did it anywhere else in the world. But if we did it in Oxfordshire, it made it less than impossible, it made it just difficult, but that was fun. So I think that's the same thing, the government and certainly look, working hard on regulation because obviously the basis of our law is different to Europe. So we can approach the legal framework slightly differently.

[00:29:09] Susannah de Jager: Hurrah an opportunity at last!

[00:29:12] Mark Preston: Yes, so StreetDrone's been supporting the law commission and others to, BSI and others to work on the regulations, especially we're trying to help frame the ones that for off highway for ourselves, although we are also doing work on highway with some of our vehicles and some of the partners around the UK. So there's a lot going on, but there's a long way to go and having obviously a stronger in terms of, the VCs, et cetera, that are into this area and so the government's doing a lot to support, but they can only go so far, until you go back to it.

[00:29:45] Susannah de Jager: And does this fall into the remit of sort of the UK infrastructure bank or is it outside of it?

[00:29:50] Mark Preston: I am not the expert on those ones, but yeah, that'd be great.

[00:29:54] Susannah de Jager: We'll talk after!

[00:29:56] Mark Preston: Certainly, there's a number of, big startups in Japan and in Europe that have been funded by the, and I would be, I may be wrong, but I believe ECB and other things. So yes, there is a possibility that is something we haven't been able to unlock whereas others have around the world. Say certainly one of our Japanese, don't know about competitors, but certainly someone in this industry has been supported by that type of fund and then of course we talk about the Chinese side of things, which obviously get funded in a different way and have quite a lot of strong support behind them to compete around the world. So we are coming...

[00:30:33] Susannah de Jager: Well, they're not playing on an electoral cycle, are they?

[00:30:35] Mark Preston: No, so we are doing some, or we're proposing some solutions, RFPs, where we know the competitors are Chinese and so that'll be interesting to see how that would play out.

[00:30:45] Susannah de Jager: Really interesting.

[00:30:46] Mark Preston: So they'll be supported I'm sure, in certain ways and so we'll see if we can

[00:30:50] Susannah de Jager: It comes back to this thing of a sort of, it's not a level playing field and yeah, sometimes by being the most law abiding, and in some ways it's the best thing about Britain is the common law is why people want to do business here.

[00:31:03] Mark Preston: Yes, exactly.

[00:31:04] Susannah de Jager: But when you hold yourself to higher account than everyone else, it does make business perhaps quite tricky.

[00:31:08] Mark Preston: Yes.

[00:31:09] Susannah de Jager: Interesting. Mark, thank you, this has been such an interesting and broad ranging conversation. I've really enjoyed it, and particularly hearing the two experiences you've had from a much larger kind of part of the motorsports cluster and then your experiences as an entrepreneur coming out of Oxford. Is there anything else that you particularly kind of wanted to add before we round out? Because I've really enjoyed this.

[00:31:29] Mark Preston: No, I think it's been a great conversation. You can tell from some of the approaches, I would love to figure out how to join the cluster of motorsports up better with the university and startup side of things, that's been a bit of a passion. Haven't seen it work as well as I'd like to, maybe over the last twenty years or so here there feels like there's got to be a way of joining up this very unique, now in on the TV everywhere, Drive to Survive and everything...

[00:31:57] Mark Preston: ...Sport that's just around the corner and many of the people live in Oxford and around Oxford and in certainly Oxfordshire, as well. So that's one of those things where I'd love to join up all these bits of the puzzle that we've been discussing in a much more fluid way, I suppose and reduce some of that friction of the Brexit side of things would make it way easier for both the motorsport cluster and also the startup.

[00:32:17] Susannah de Jager: Yeah, both the large and the small.

[00:32:19] Mark Preston: Yes, see if we can find ways of joining those things up.

[00:32:21] Susannah de Jager: No, and listen, I think that's a very worthy and probably a good note, a positive note to end on is that there's more opportunity and obviously the goal of this podcast is partly to have these conversations in a public domain so that anyone that might be able to add thoughts or practical solutions can basically get in touch. So we would encourage that to anyone listening.

[00:32:41] Mark Preston: Sounds good.

[00:32:41] Susannah de Jager: Wonderful. Thank you, Mark.

[00:32:43] Susannah de Jager: Thanks for listening to this episode of Oxford+ presented by me, Susannah de Jager. If you want to stay up to date with all things Oxford+, please visit our website OxfordPlus.co.uk and sign up to our newsletter so you never miss an update.

[00:32:57] Susannah de Jager: Oxford+ was made in partnership with Mishcon de Reya and is produced and edited by Story Ninety Four.