The man who revolutionised performance driving: Racelogic's Julian Thomas

And he just kept jabbing his elbow into my ribs.

He came higher, higher, higher.

And he'd up paying more than anyone paid for DB6 before.

And it has done sense, I think.

Hello and welcome to a Evo podcast special with our guest,

Julian Thomas, who is the boss and founder of a company called RaceLogic,

which many people will know, produce the V-Box and a number of other

logging devices, very popular in motorsport.

So, Julian, how did it all start?

What was your intro to electronics?

Well, I started when I was about eight years old.

My father ran a electronics company that did the control systems

on in big industrial production facilities like the Kellogg's.

Yeah, a cornflake factory and the Coca-Cola bottling plant.

So he used to do the control systems that's detected,

whether the Coca-Cola cans were upside down.

And if so, it would then blow them off the production line.

But you do that by with little sensors, photoelectric sensors

that looked inside and looked at the depth of the Coke cans.

But it was all really coming of age.

It was just all the computers were beginning to be used in these kind of situations.

So prior to that, were there have been people there watching

and trying to spot that kind of thing going past?

And they'd have to slow it down for that

because people can't react as quick as a jet of compressed air, for example.

And they talked about massive numbers of cans going past.

Yes, the noise is just incredible.

I went to the factory in Milton Keynes and I was just overwhelmed by the noise.

And I think I was about 12 years old and I would walk up to these big machines

and start programming them because there was not many people

that were into computers at that time.

And there was certainly one anybody in my father's company.

But I loved them and really got into them.

So this was the progression of your dad's company,

men that electronics were starting to control things.

Yes. And he needed somebody to program them.

And you were a bit of a nerd at school.

I was, yes, yes. I loved all that side of things.

Did you teach yourself then to a degree?

Yeah, totally. Yeah.

I'd get computer magazines, read those.

There were some very clever guys at school.

We had, I think, four computers in the total.

So what would you have been working on then?

What kind of computers?

Because my personal computers were very, very new, weren't they?

Like ZX Spectrums and that kind of either ZX 80.

That's what that was my own personal computer.

But at school, we'd have like a BBC micro or a research machine,

an RM, a research machine, big black box thing.

And you would literally have to fight to get to use these computers

because there were so few of them.

There's probably there's only about eight of us in the so-called computer club.

I was going to say, it must have been quite a niche.

It was an eclectic group of people.

That's that's to be true.

But it but it came just something you picked up.

Yes, he has only a junkie with me.

I understood it was it was logical because your dad bought you

a very simple Christmas present one, you had me.

Yes, a simple.

It was just it was just a battery, a bulb and a switch and some wires.

And he showed me how to wire it up.

And I was just absolutely fascinated by it to have that control.

Yeah, just to the fact that you had something that was

inanimate and you had energy in it.

And you just you couldn't I couldn't get my head around that.

And the fact you connected up to a light bulb, which Sean Brightley

and got hot and you were in control of it.

It was like it's like an amplification process.

I think all I'm going to say all men, but a lot of people like

things that extend their capabilities.

So yeah, all the old stereos, you know, it's long nose lines,

you know, electricity that and trying to understand how that works.

And isn't that yes, isn't it?

Yeah, and controlling those things.

And it was fascinating and I blew a few lenses

and shorted a few batteries experimenting.

But it would just yeah, it was just a fascination for me.

So was there that that was you set on your path, presumably at that point?

There was never any consideration about what else you might do more.

I did that as a hobby at school.

You know, I studied physics, maths, chemistry, things like that.

I've always been fascinated by psychology and psychiatry

about the peoples, the way people react and how they react.

And so I was sort of half tempted to get into that.

But the lure of electronics and computers,

because it was just it was such an exploding.

I was going to say things must have been happening.

So they were.

Yeah, the technology was advancing so fast that to keep up with it

was just fun and interesting.

And there's new things.

You were there at the very start.

Yes, you get your 10,000 hours in very quickly.

Yes, and I did it.

Yes. Yeah, that's right.

And your dad was also into his cars, wasn't he?

He was. Yes. Yeah, very much so.

We used to go to Hill Climes, used to go to Silverstone,

Brian's Hatch, watch the Turin cars, Thunder saloons,

the Wendy Wolves special saloon car.

Yeah, I loved that.

So some of those cars were outrageous.

So where would that be?

Late 70s, early 80s kind of.

Yeah, that's right. Yes.

And you.

You get into lap timing, obviously later on as well with

rest logics V-box. Yes.

But very early on, you you managed to use one of your dad's sensors

on your own scale.

Extrics. Yeah.

Yes, he brought home a industrial control

is called a PLC, Programmable Logic Controller.

And he had one of these sensors that was sensing the depth of the

Coke can, which is about the width of the scale electrics track.

So I thought, I know, why don't I put that 90 degrees

across the scale electrics track and use the PLC to measure the lap time.

So I then dropped my lap time, kept doing it, going quicker and quicker and quicker

and then got it to a certain point and I was like, oh, what's next?

Do I need to make it go faster?

Well, how would I do that?

And so I I tried doing different things, none of it worked

until I thought, I know, I'll make some qualifying tires.

So I got the scale electric, the standard rubber tires

and I coated them with copydecks.

And I found that if you let that for about half an hour,

they become sort of quite tacky and they would last for about two laps.

But I could knock half a second off my lap time by doing that.

But then they'd destroy themselves

and then they'd be all over the place and you'd crash.

But it was just that chasing of lap time was I just found addictive.

Yeah. And so you weren't.

From fighting at school for time on the computers to university.

Yes. And that that was I found that very interesting

because there was a computer department up in Durham.

Yes. And again, there was competition for the time on it.

Yeah. And you you enjoyed yourself there.

You've been a nerd at school. I had, yes.

But then you were in your peer group.

I was. Yeah, there was.

I was surrounded by a lot of other nerds, but a lot of cleverer nerds as well.

So that really pulls you up.

Yeah. And you you know, I was really good at computers at school.

Everyone would ask Jules about the computers

and what you do with them to university.

I oh, no, I know nothing. Yeah, this is this is interesting.

So I catch up. Yeah.

But that was a good time for you.

And you had an interesting summer job as well.

With yes. Yes, I worked for Superchips.

This fledgling company.

Yes. I remember when they came along.

Yeah. Because it wasn't called Superchips.

So it was detection techniques or we we called it detonation techniques.

So we never she's what prompted the name changer.

Yes, yes, it did.

Yeah, that was that was a formative business as well, wasn't it?

It was. Yeah, very much so.

The the proprietor, the guy that started it, Peter Wales,

absolute genius, evil genius.

He was a sociopath, I think.

Were you one of his minions that I was?

I was, yes.

We got on well.

There's a lot of mutual respect, but a lot of shouting,

because we're both quite strong in our opinions.

But I look but he did teach me an awful lot of electronics and computers.

He could build a computer from scratch.

And that's sorry, John, did he have to do that?

In order to kind of interrogate

cars that you were working on, I guess there weren't any proprietary things

to do that, unless you were working in an OE manufacturer.

That's right. Yeah, you had to reverse engineer everything.

Some of it was quite straightforward.

This is the start of the turbocharged.

Yes, car era, isn't it?

Yes. So the ECUs would control the fueling and timing.

And if you wanted to get more power from the car,

you needed to turn the boost pressure up, for example.

But they they often had limits in there to protect the engine.

So the if you turn the boost pressure up beyond 10 percent more than normal,

it would just cut the fuel so you couldn't get any more power out of it.

So the very first task was to find where that limit was

and switch it off in the in the program.

So you had to reverse engineer all all the software.

So you're the code crack.

I was, yes, except I'm inherently lazy

and want to find a quick way around things.

So I invented something that would do it for me.

So normally when I before I was there,

Peaked Wales would sit there for three months, changing every single

well, op code that was a jump in this software to a knock jump

and see if it cut the and then you have to fire it up and try it.

And it just took a long time.

So laborious. You know, yeah.

So I did that for the first week and got to be bored.

So I made a little rig that did it for me.

And it would iteratively change all these numbers

and it would run it on the bench as though the boost pressure was going up

and it it would sit there and it would be relays would be clicking

and things would be flashing on the screen.

I'll be sat there and Peaked Wales walked into the into the room

and he said, weren't you working?

I said, I am working. It's working itself.

Oh, that's lazy. I went, oh, you wait.

And it took, I think two days.

I got it down from three months to two days to crack these.

And that was that was a good thing because the business was was good.

Yeah. You know, Cosworths and how to drive

all of the fantastic eighties machines.

Yeah. And.

The problem was that other tuning companies

could just take all your hard work.

Yes. And copy it.

Yeah, yeah, that's right.

I would I would build these really sophisticated rigs

and sit there watching it and changing things.

And some of them would take quite a long time

because you'd because it wasn't a standard bit of electronics.

You actually had to reverse engineer the electronics itself,

how the memory was created and formed to understand one way

you needed to go to find what you need to because some chips

you could take out and just put into a reader and copy them

and others you you had to sort of interrogate them.

And I found it very demoralising.

So when we first cracked the escort Cosworth,

I was the first one that managed to remove the boost limits on that.

And literally a week later, everyone else had ordered one.

Yeah, we ourselves went up for the first

of the month and then just tailed off.

So you became.

Poacher to start with, and then you became gamekeeper again.

Yes, you had to protect your work.

Yes, from other hackers.

Yeah, that's right.

I said to my boss, I thought of this way of protecting it

so you could get a standard chip, put it into a reader

and it wouldn't actually read the data.

It would be scrambled and he said, no, that's impossible.

It's like a red rag to a ball to me.

So that was a challenge.

So I did it in my spare time at home

with my own little soldiering iron and computer

came into the office with this device, put it in my car, showed

them that it started and ran and then now copy that.

You put it into the standard chip copying system

and it wouldn't copy it.

And he goes, oh, I thought I told you not to do that, but now it works.

Yeah, give it to me.

I went, no, sorry, I've done this in my own time.

So it was quite amicable.

I parted and said, look, I want to start up my own company

and this will be one of my products.

So for the first year or two years of business,

I sold protection chips to superchips

whilst I was building up my other side of my business

until he got someone in who managed to copy my copy protection.

It sounds like the nature of the business.

Yes, yeah, very much.

Which I guess plagiarism is part of most

any any industries with IP involved.

If someone's going to copy it, aren't they?

If it speeds things up.

Yeah, and he got a clever guy and he worked out what I'd done.

Did it in a slightly different way

and then they stopped buying them from me.

But in the meantime, it was seed capital

for me to run my own company.

One thing that I'm curious about, actually,

so when you first were first cracking the

management systems, how much information were they?

What rate were they adjusting, fueling and compared to something now?

Because I guess that was part of the problem

with what you were adjusting is there was enough time

between the inputs you could make that the engine could damage itself

because it wasn't doing everything in millisecond chunks.

So they were running fast enough from

each engine revolution.

It would then recompute a new figure for the for the fueling.

But they were very limited on what their inputs they could have.

You know, they boost pressure, engine temperature,

air temperature and throttle angle and a few others.

So there might be sort of four or five variables.

There is now there's hundreds going into the EU

and it's doing all kinds of clever things.

It was a little bit blunt at the very beginning.

I remember doing a superchips cosy at Milbrook.

Right. And the engine survived.

That one did survive.

I did drive a low compression Cosworth Beck from Milbrook, one type.

But they started off as a high compression.

Yeah, the engines survived, but the clutch didn't ride.

And basically doing standing starts and it just didn't go anywhere.

So drive shaft, no, not drive shaft.

We eventually got the bung off the bell housing.

Right. And all this hair fell out.

It was the decent stradded clutch.

The stradded, the first roads, yeah.

But we published that and I was in Motor Magazine back in

87 and 88, right, every start of things.

And we thought, well, we've got to publish it.

Yeah, there's a slot in the back.

So we do make and we did and we didn't get any bad,

you know, we didn't get a call from Peter.

Yeah, lambastigas, because his phone would not stop ringing.

Best advert for the is obviously developing the power.

It's like, yeah, it's all the time.

The clutch fantastic.

Yeah, I have one and more, please.

So, yeah, that was that was the sort of the lead into all this tuning race logic.

Wasn't that wasn't the business that you envisaged for yourself?

Was it the race logic means?

No, yes, I was I've always been to racing.

Been to race track since I was eight years old.

And at Supergips, I was lucky enough to work with some different teams.

And one of those was Andy Rouse, when he had the Calabasera

and he was developing the Monday, the Toyota Corina to begin with.

And I got involved helping him with different projects.

And would be I would work with him on the dyno,

where I'd be changing the engine management system.

And then we go out and the test drive.

Oh, he's famously analytical.

Oh, incredible.

Engineered stroke driver.

So I'm sure that what you could bring would have really.

It was fascinating.

Yeah, he was teaching me how to tune an engine on a dyno, basically,

because because I would sit there and I'd have the ignition map

and the fuel map in front of me and he'd go, right, you know, look at the

turbo temperature, it's like a 980.

That's too hot, you know, any more than a thousand is going to melt.

So we need to either increase the ignition timing like advance.

It's like, what, really, that drink brings the temperature down.

Yeah, because it burns the fuel earlier and if you retard it,

it burns it later in the exhaust and it gets hotter.

But that will then cause detonation.

So then you've got to make sure it also runs rich.

But then that loses power.

If this it was just a crash course in how to tune a turbo engine.

And it was absolutely fascinating because he made brilliant cars, didn't he?

He did. Yeah.

And he could drive them and he could engineer them as well.

Yeah. And so race logic wasn't necessarily about the tuning of the engines.

It was a holistic approach.

Yes. To the performance of the car.

Yes, that's right.

I developed with with him.

We developed an active clutch,

an act sorry, an active front differential for the front wheel drive cars

because he correctly identified going from a rear wheel drive turbo

to a front wheel drive normally aspirated that it's all about the drive

out the corner because you're turning and you're trying to power.

So we put wheel speed sensors on it and I did a computer system

that detected how much wheel slip there was.

So as you turned into the corner, it would unlock the diff completely.

And then the moment it detected any kind of slip,

it would then progressively lock that differential up.

That's pretty forward thinking back then.

That was his idea.

You know, it was he just described the problem

and I could then create the electronics to do that.

But it was it was fascinating insight into racing cars and electronics.

This is where you thought the business was going to be for you.

Traction control system.

That's right. Yeah.

Touring cars for rally cars.

Yeah, I developed a traction control system

and I developed it on my road car.

I had a Peugeot 205 1.9 GTI that was absolutely fantastic.

And I fitted wheel speed sensors to it and developed this traction control system.

And it worked really well.

It was just an ignition cut system or a fuel cut system.

Yeah. Yeah.

And I began to sell it into racing.

Touring cars, rally cars, hill climb cars.

But it got banned almost instantly, unfortunately,

along with the active differentials, they got banned.

Because it's too good.

Yeah, you're actually doing something right.

Yes, it was, you know, that active diff was worth a second.

I mean, during cars, that was like,

I'm as huge as massive advantage.

So they just kiboshed into it.

No, not loud.

No, no, wheelspeed sensors on the car.

And that kind of.

Where did your business go after that?

Well, I then had to look around for other outlets for this technology.

And that's where I then sort of got in touch with Aston Martin,

Bentley people like that, very low volume car manufacturers

who couldn't afford to pay Bosch 10 million pounds to develop a traction

control system for them.

But I had an off the shelf one and you could probably quite easily reach

the person you needed to speak to rather than some huge management hierarchy.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

So I then began to supply traction control systems for Aston Martin

and Bentley and Rolls Royce and people like that.

And then you you got into trying to measure the performance.

Yeah, which is which is a pivotal bit.

And that's where we probably come in as well, because as working for various

magazines, we tried various systems trying to get decent data,

including Datron's Corvette.

But yes, this that was the standard at the time.

It was a fifth wheel to start with, which you always run over while you were.

And then the hub mounted stuff and you tear the cable off

or the printer would run out of the little silver.

So they were all incredibly clunky systems, weren't they really?

Corvette Lightbeam, which is very clever, but was in the rain.

No. So all of these have compromises.

Yes. And then the reason I came across those was because

the development of the traction control system for four wheel drive cars,

you need a speed overground reference because all four wheels can be slipping.

Yeah.

So I looked in the market to see what was what was there.

And having seen the Corvette system in magazines, I was like, right.

So I contacted them and said, you know, could I use this for measuring

the speed across across the ground?

And there was lots of problems, you know, we couldn't run it on a rally car

because the rocks would smash the lens.

Yeah.

And I had just got into GPS because it was an interesting technology.

And I thought and I was speaking to a guy

that used to import our stuff into Japan and he said,

can you not use GPS to give you like a reference?

And I went, that must have been a great light bulb moment.

I don't know. I'm not sure it's fast enough.

So I did a bit of research and literally, I think that month,

someone had launched a GPS engine that updated 10 times a second.

He said it once a second. Yeah.

And I was like, oh, this could be it.

So I bought one and it was about five thousand pounds

for this GPS engine, which back then was a lot of money, wouldn't it?

Or for a lot of money.

And I remember I put it on.

We had a Toyota, was it a Corolla or something?

And I put it on this car and connected to a laptop,

mugged the data along a straight on our industrial state.

And I looked at it and I could see my individual gear changes

as I hit the clutch, the change in the speed.

And I was like, oh, hold on, this is a bit special.

This is really good.

And then I took it to Ford testing ground in Lommel in Belgium.

And I said, you know, I think I've got something here.

So we test it against your Corvette.

So we did that.

And they said, well, there's a bit of difference between the two.

How do you know which one's accurate?

And I said, do you have a measured distance?

And let's go and measure across that distance,

never having done this before.

I was thinking, oh, but it's my system.

Yeah, yeah, it's not true enough.

Oh, well, and we we turned up.

We've gone on to this mile straight and we did.

It was a kilometer.

And we did this measured kilometer.

And the Corvette, I think, came out at 993 meters.

I said, well, that's pretty good.

Mine came out as 1,000 point north, north.

And they went, wow, you're cheesy.

What did you do with your fingers?

Let's do it again.

And I said, OK, look, this time I won't touch my computer.

And we did it again.

And it came out as 999.99 meters.

And the test driver and I looked at each other and went, wow,

this is the future.

This is this is the way to do it.

Yeah. That must have been so exciting for you.

Because immediately it's going to.

Yes. Spark lots of ideas.

I had no idea at GPS was that accurate.

And I don't think anybody did at that time.

And was was that the birth of the V-Box?

Yes. So that was the thing that we used.

Lovely blue and a nice little box.

Yeah. I copied from. Copy from Corabit.

Yes, they had a beauty.

Well, 2D, wasn't it?

He's a John Grist, used to sell the 2D system.

And that looked beautiful.

Yeah. So that's red.

So I'm going to make my slowly his business and his aesthetic.

Yes. And then met him.

Yes. Yes. Quite by chance, which quite by chance.

I had taken these customers, copied his aesthetic,

used and abused him and he wasn't really happy with me at all.

And I got for my birthday, I got bought a cooking course down in Devon.

And I turned up and there was six of us on the course

and one of them was John Grist.

So for two days, we had to spend time in each other's company

with sharp implements and the guy.

I mean, we literally we were cooking together by the end of it

and having a good laugh about it.

But yeah, that was that was slightly awkward.

Yeah, wasn't there a pivotal moment

when the UK Galileo system came along?

Yes. Well, in 2000, May 2000, I think it's May 2000,

the Americans switched off the scrambling on GPS, because up to then

the actual position rather than speed speed has always been very accurate.

And from speed, you can get distance.

So that's how we measured this kilometer very accurately.

But your actual positional quality was deliberately

that because it grew in military technology.

Yes. So it was degraded to about 100 meters

so you could pop a bomb through the front door of the White House

using their own technology.

But then the Europeans said, right, we're going to make a system

that's more accurate than that, which prompted the Americans

to turn off this scrambling to try and stop the Europeans

from producing Galileo, which it put us back like 10 years.

Suddenly, the impetus had gone.

And that's why it took so long for the Galileo to Galileo to take on.

But it meant overnight, GPS went from like 100 meters to

and it was about three or four meters back then,

which was suddenly you could use it for track mapping of a race car.

And yeah, lots and lots of things.

You know, and one of my ideas was to locate

to map every single speed camera in the UK.

I was driving to Swindon race engines one day to work on a variable trumpet

on a red top for their touring.

Yeah. And that Swindon road had like six speed cameras.

Yeah. And I had a GPS system in the car for some other reason.

And I was looking at the speed cameras, look at the GPS system.

And I went, oh, I know.

But then the actual.

Amount of work to collate all of those speed camera locations

and make a box and market it was just too much, you know, very small company

at the time, but my salesman at the time was a guy called David Clark.

You probably remember. Yeah.

And he said, look, I like this idea.

Can I if I find a backer, can I go and make it?

And I went, yeah, as long as, you know, I make a small commission.

On each one. Yeah.

And he went and started Road Angel.

Yeah. Who grew into quite a large company.

Did quite well.

That was such a thing, wasn't it?

For a period, for a period of time before phones and Google Maps

and everything provided the same information, it was a kind of must have.

It was. Any car. Yeah.

Yeah, it worked really well.

Listen to Tiff telling you where the where the speed cameras were.

Yeah, that's right.

So the business is going quite well at this point.

Yeah, yeah.

Um, you but you'd appeared on Tomorrow's World.

Yes.

Um, so it started with the local go-kart centre,

James Hunt Racing Centre in Milton Keynes, as it was called at the time,

because he started that.

It's now Daytona, Milton Keynes. Yes.

And I thought I understood traction control and understood GPS.

And I thought, what if you put the two together?

And on the go-karts, you could make them automatically slow down

when they got to certain, you know, if there was a yellow flag down down the bottom,

they could enable speed limit or the pit lane or things like that.

And so we worked on that.

But I also thought, well, this could be used on the road, couldn't it?

You know, cars could know where there's a speed limit zone

and they could slow down automatically.

So I made a prototype.

I had a Mazda RX7, the old twin turbo.

Yeah. Rotary thing that was my friend or the guy at work

called it the chocolate shoe, because it was no good for anything.

And then it kept failing and, you know, eight miles to Galen

and very smelly and it was a toss. Absolutely fantastic.

It was, I loved it.

But I fitted the traction control.

He had traction control on it, of course.

And I fitted GPS.

I made it slow down into the into the local town, into Buckingham automatically.

And I contacted a few magazines that I know, a few people I know in that industry.

And it just sort of took off and went viral back then.

It appeared in the sun, the mirror.

I was featured on Tomorrow's World BBC News.

I was interviewed on radio, radio two, all of these things,

all about this sort of automatic speed limiter.

And that got you in touch with somebody you'd worked with before.

Yes. Yeah, that's right.

A guy who had run a big computer company

and it was he started off a small computer company in Buckingham itself.

A guy called Harry Twillier.

And he there were six of them at the time and computers had just become a thing.

And I was at school at the computer club and they rang up the local school

and said, have you got the keen students that could after school come down

and help us with the computers and write some programs for us?

And they went, well, there's only one really that you want anywhere near your premises.

And that's Julian and you've got a bike as well, so he could cycle down.

So I used to cycle after school, I used to cycle down to this computer shop

and sit there and take computers apart and program them and write software

for the for and stop control and other boring things like that.

Yeah. But he saw you on Tomorrow's World.

Yes. So that was when I was 12.

And then when I was running my company,

he saw me on Tomorrow's World and sort of almost spat his cornflakes out.

I mean, I know him.

That was that little geeky guy that used to come and help me.

And I happened to be, he didn't know it, but I was renting an office space from him

that he'd moved out of.

He came to see me and said, look, I've just sold my company for X million pounds.

And I'm looking for something to do. Do you need some help?

Do you need some help and advice?

And by then I'd grown the company.

I think we'd been going six or seven years, not grown it to a certain size.

But, you know, I'm into technology.

I'm not into processes and systems, accounting systems and cash flow forecasts

and all of that stuff that didn't really interest all the grown up stuff.

Yeah. And I said, yes, please, you know, I need help.

So I paid him to be a consultant and the company just sort of grew from then on

because I was free to do proper technology stuff that I was good at.

And the grown ups would make sure it actually made money.

And the best bit is you got to do more development by going racing.

Yes. So spending your time racing cars.

And yes, it was that that was down to James Hunt Racing Centre.

And that's how I met Dave Clark, actually.

I went down to the James Hunt Racing Centre and I set a lap time

and I popped up to the top of the charts.

I was like, yes, I'm a racing driver.

But someone walked up, this guy, David Clark, walked up to me,

said, which cart did you use?

I went that one there.

He got in there and went a second lap, quit the way.

He goes, yeah, they're all a bit different.

So, you know, thank you for finding the fast car today.

And then he's named it up here at the top.

So I began to chat with him and I said, you know, what are you doing?

How are you going quicker?

I want to know why am I a second of that slow?

What are you doing differently?

He goes, oh, I don't know.

So just a natural, just a natural.

Yeah, where are you breaking?

Where I need to break?

You know, how much throttle you're applying?

Well, I just sort of feel.

And I was like, that's not good enough for me.

So I made a little box to put on these go-karts

and I took it along and I said, would you mind driving with this on it?

And then I drove on it and then I could go

and then I wrote some software to overlay the two and look at it.

And I was like, oh, I see what you're doing.

That's a key moment, isn't it?

Yes, totally.

But you didn't realise it quite at the time?

I didn't. No, it was purely personal.

So when were this, what years of him?

This must have been something like 1998 or something like that.

1999, I'm not sure.

But from that, I then developed it and getting back in the cart

and I could never actually, even with all that data,

I couldn't actually get within those last few tenths of him,

which was that's talent, unfortunately.

Yeah, you can see what it is in black and white,

but doesn't mean you can necessarily do it.

Yeah, yeah.

But then that progressed to video e-box.

Yes, that's, I was trying to find those extra few tenths

and what the missing part of the puzzle was,

where are you on the track and what they're doing.

So he had phenomenal car control

and by then he was my salesman

and he was doing all our test driving of the traction control systems.

And yeah, he just had a natural ability to slide a car at any angle

whilst waving to a camera or something.

Yeah, some people make a living out of it.

So one day I filmed him because I tried to do it

and I'd spin and I'd spin and I'd spin.

So I said, I need to film him.

So I sat there and I filmed him whilst we were sliding around

Finmere market during the week.

It was a big sort of open, old airfield.

And watching what he was doing was the sort of light bulb.

Ah, you need to see what someone's doing to understand how to do it.

And it was, it was really simple what he was doing with the wheel.

But unless you can see it and study it, you don't actually know.

Was anyone else doing similar work anywhere in the world?

Not obviously, no.

And again, this was, it started off as just a device just for me.

Yeah.

And then I'd do some track days and go karting

and I'd have this camera system with the data involved.

And I'd progress really quickly.

And I thought, yeah, this is a, this is a product.

So then developed into what's going on.

It is a product.

Yes.

Most of the stuff you see on YouTube in race cars is your...

You can't imagine anyone going racing now or even track days.

No, you don't see it driving their car seriously

and wanting to improve either themselves or their car.

You can't imagine anyone not using an equipment.

There's other systems out there and they're very good.

But what I've done, because I'm the driver who's using my equipment every day

and using it to actually improve myself,

I worked out what the nuggets of information are

and what the important things are and what isn't important.

You go to an engineer and you say,

I want to put a data log on a car and they go, right, I'll log everything.

And I'll throw it up on this big screen with loads of squiggles and numbers.

Because there's all those sort of famous archive photos,

like they're a Ford with a GT40 or whatever it might have been.

And there's a box like this passenger seat that's logging information.

But it's not, that's just for them to understand the car, isn't it?

Yes, that's right.

Not the drive.

It was understanding how to drive it.

So I just concentrated the V-box on what the driver needed to know.

And I removed all of the difficult bits.

So you don't have to worry about directories and files and names and things like that.

It just does it all for you.

And you come in from your session and you push a button and there's your fastest lap.

And then you can compare other laps to it without having to think about too much.

And it's about cutting down the noise so the driver can understand what he needs to do and go quickly.

And it was Nigel Grinsall, who was your partner in certain driving scenarios later on,

who said, people would want this.

Yes.

And that was their sort of, oh, oh, guys, yeah, we've got a product.

Yeah, I met him at the motorsport show in Cologne.

And he came by and I said, oh, I've got this device and it does GPS and video.

But I didn't have any software with it at the time.

It was a bit difficult to use.

And he looked at it and said, right, you know, if you want to make it really simple and to do this and do that.

And you want to like a lap time display that gives you like Delta.

And I said, yes, Delta.

And he said, well, this is different, you know, you can have your fastest lap.

So I worked with him and I ended up going racing with him and he was teaching me.

But we developed this, the lap time display that gives you an instant feedback as whether you're going quicker or slower.

Kiss of death, isn't it?

You see you're up on your lap time and then you immediately lose two tenths.

Because you over try.

You think I've got two tenths.

I can find another two tenths by breaking even later.

Yeah.

But it's a very, very powerful immediate indication, though, isn't it?

Of where the car is or where your tyres are or where you are or drive different gear or yeah.

You can see where you might gain or lose.

And you get a dopamine hit when you see a negative sign.

Any racer that sees a negative sign is like you get a tingle.

It's like, oh, here I go.

Here I go.

Yeah.

I'm on for part all or yeah, I'm going to beat my teammate.

So that was that was slippery slope for most people, but you've enjoyed your ride of motor sport competing, haven't you?

Yes.

Yeah.

First thing was fun cup.

Yeah.

Well, I did.

I don't really want to talk about it, but I did a race in a historic Formula Ford when I was about 21.

Yeah.

I didn't go well.

Put your foot off.

Yeah.

I qualified second to last, which is not great.

And then I managed to take out the leader as he lapped me.

So we both ended up in the barrier and I had a written off Formula Ford and no money.

So I had no money and no talent.

And I was like, yeah, maybe this isn't for me.

But now armed with your data.

Armed with the data.

Yeah.

Because working blind on a track where you get, if you're lucky, you get a lap board that tells you what your previous lap time was.

Yeah.

It's so slow to for you to understand what you did right or what you did wrong.

Yeah.

To when you get an instant feedback and you can see, you know, coming out of a corner, well, you know, it's counting up.

I'm losing time.

Why is that?

Well, I had to lift a little bit because I went in too deep or something.

Yeah.

And it just gives you that reinforcement learning.

And FunCup is, it's a very, very competitive.

It's ridiculous.

It's very popular.

The last race was last weekend.

There was 30 cars and it's 70 plus drivers.

Yeah.

And you had people like Phil Keane and Johnny Mo.

It's where everyone goes, isn't it?

To keep themselves sharp.

Because you have to be sharp.

You know, if you can finish in the top five in a FunCup race, you know, you're a damn good driver.

Because you can be four or five tenths off the base and your tenth on the grid.

So yeah.

And in there four hour long races.

So you get, you know, if you do it with your two drivers, that's two hours of seat time.

Have you done the 25 hours?

I have.

You have done that as far.

I think three or four times.

Have you?

Yeah.

Very difficult that is to do well in that.

But it's a gruelling event.

Yeah.

Must be.

A lot of slipstreaming.

Yeah.

And if it rains, I think a FunCup tank lasts like two and a half hours.

Might say a lot of time.

At nine in the rain.

As we went.

Jethro got stuck in a car at the 24 hours of at Silverstone.

They wouldn't let him in, would they?

They wouldn't let him in.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

He just got stuck.

So it didn't fall.

I was in that race.

I thought you.

Yes.

Yeah.

My headlights failed.

Oh.

Yeah.

I was racing for Team Brit and the guy that ran the team.

So I found these fantastic massive big bright spotlights on the air bay.

They're 50 quid.

At which point I was like, oh, I winced.

I was like, oh, really?

Because you're amazing.

They're so bright.

Listen, anyway, I was doing one of the night stints and I was following a gaggle of cars

with all bright lights.

And I was right behind them and I picked my way through them and I got past the last one

as I went into cops, at which point I realized my lights had failed.

Up to then you had no idea because all the cars are around you and it was a little bit

fondly.

And so I went around cops a hundred miles an hour.

And I was heading towards Maggot's Beckets and I couldn't see a thing.

I probably didn't even see you coming.

No.

And I dealt for you.

And I, and I knew it was a left before a right.

So I gently braked and turned left.

And of course we know nothing to gauge anything on.

I just instantly went into a spin and I managed to bury it like a hundred meters into the

gravel in Maggot's Beckets.

It's not good.

No, it wasn't great.

But I was, I was properly terrifying because you just, it's like someone just put their

hand over the front of your eyes and it was foggy as well.

Yeah.

I remember the fog.

We ran a three seventy sir.

Yes.

Which just went ran, ran, ran.

Yeah.

No, it's good.

But yeah, the fog.

Yeah.

It's just sits over the circuit.

Yeah.

So where did you go from Fun Cup?

You probably got properly into racing in the Fun Cup.

Yes.

Competitive nurse, got sharp.

Yes, that's right.

You know.

I won that championship four, four times back in the day.

Yes.

So when was the first year you did it?

What year?

2010.

I think it was.

Gosh.

That's some consistency then, isn't it?

Yeah.

2014.

And then is that when you progressed into, you started?

Yes.

Historics didn't you?

Yes, that's right.

Yeah.

I then fancied an E type because I've always loved E type.

Yeah.

And I particularly liked the low drag.

Then, you know, the, not an original, of course, because I didn't have £7 million.

But I got a, yeah, low drag E type.

And I competed with Nigel.

Again, he taught me how to drive that.

And I competed with him.

It must have been quite different.

Oh, it was.

Yeah.

I, when I first drove it, I thought there was something wrong with it because it just

slid everywhere.

You know, it just wouldn't go in a straight line under braking acceleration turning nothing.

It was just constantly moving.

I came here, I said something loose in this car.

And I got in it.

It went like 10 seconds of that quicker than it got out and there's nothing wrong with

that.

That sounds very familiar.

So there's my first run in a TVI Tuscan.

Right.

Way back in the day.

Do they all do that?

Yeah.

Does it try to kill you?

It just has altitude all the time.

Yeah.

But yeah, and great fun.

Yeah.

Once you've got your head round it, it's just, yeah, joyous.

It really is.

Yeah.

Sliding an E type round, say Silveston Grand Prix.

It is just, just the best.

Yeah.

But when we visited you at your office, there's quite a lot of silverware up there.

Yeah.

Most of it comes from the fun cup.

I know that.

But there was one.

Probably about 20%.

Yeah.

Okay.

But there was one pot that you really cherish.

Yes.

And that came from what you did after the, after the E type.

Yeah.

So after the E type, when you go to a historic race meeting, it's like a three or a four day

event because you'll test on the Thursday.

Or you test on the, yeah, you test on the Thursday, you'll do some qualifying on the

Friday and you might race on the Saturday or might race on the Sunday.

So that could be four days in just one race.

So I thought it was time to buy some cars to fill in the gaps.

And I bought a Chevron B8 because I think they're just pretty.

They look fantastic.

And it was my first sort of proper race car rather than like an E type to a road car really

that's, it's always compromised.

But the B8 was a proper little single-seater racing car.

Beautiful thing with a lovely engine.

And I'll race that again with, no, that, that was with Callum.

Yeah.

Callum Locky.

And we did the Masters FIA historic championship and we won that.

So we were flown out to St Petersburg to, to the FIA do.

And there was, yeah, Lewis Hamilton, Sebastian Loeb, all the winners of that year.

And like a couple of guys in an old, in a 1968 Chevron B8, like sort of gay crash in the party.

But yeah, one, one moment.

It was.

Yeah.

It was absolutely fantastic.

And it was a, it was a fun time racing that car.

Now back at the business, you, you were still doing GPS stuff and you created something

which made your business much more profitable again.

Yes.

And in developing all of this GPS based stuff, we had to really improve the accuracy of our systems

because we were working a lot with the OEMs or the Porsches, BMWs, Ford, Jaguar,

every car company in the world nowadays uses a V-box.

But they, so they're pushing us all the time for more accuracy for better, better results,

more, more measurements using GPS.

I mean, with GPS, you can even measure the bumps on a track because the, because the speed is so accurate from GPS.

If you take the horizontal, the vertical speed and you integrate it to give you like a distance traveled,

you can see the bumps on the track.

And if you go down a straight, you can line up the traces by the bumps because it is that accurate.

But in order to check that and get that accuracy, you need to simulate it on the bed.

You can't just go and drive around Silverstone every day when you're trying to develop a product.

It's just prohibitive.

So we needed a simulator to, to test it out in the office.

And there was about one or two companies in the world.

And one of them was in England called company called Spire and they did this huge complicated box that was 30,000 pounds.

And this is sort of 20 years ago.

So it's awful lot of money back then.

And I bought it.

I took out a loan.

I bought it.

We used it.

It elevated our products.

It meant that we could calibrate our products so we could give a certificate with them.

And then we just needed more and more of these things.

And I wasn't paying 30,000 pounds every time.

So I thought, oh, there must be an easier, cheaper way of doing it because this is using quite old technology.

It's like a sledgehammer to cracker, not really.

So I thought, well, why couldn't you go for a drive with an antenna and record all the signals coming from the satellites and then just replay them on the bench?

And my technology director said, no, I can't do that easy.

Other people would have done it.

And I said, no, not necessarily.

So we rigged something up and we did it and it worked.

And we both sat there with our jaws open going, you know, this cost us 2000 pounds as opposed to 30,000.

So we like, ah, so we made a few of these.

We used them in-house that really helped us, elevated us.

And I was like, we could sell this.

Of course.

Yeah.

So we know that's a large, that's a 30 to 40% of our business.

Wow.

We sell these simulators and we moved it on.

It got a lot more sophisticated since then.

We now actually also simulate all the satellite signals.

I've got an absolute genius that works.

He's in Poland.

He's moved back to Poland.

But he sits there in a dark, literally in a dark and quiet room working to his own goodness knows what hours he works.

But he understands all the mass behind all the satellites and how they work.

And so we got this software that also simulates all the satellites.

So this is called LabSat?

It's called LabSat.

Yeah.

So it's a laboratory satellite.

Yeah.

Obviously.

V-box, velocity box.

So you just do it in your...

Yeah.

As if you're outside and you can log in.

You can simulate wherever you want to in the world.

Exactly.

Yeah.

You can just push a button and you can be driving around the Tokyo bypass in a thousand horsepower R32 or something.

Yeah.

Which I did once, but they forgot to tell me I had a thousand horsepower.

That's a different story.

Nearly killed myself.

But we now sell those simulators to Google, Apple, SpaceX, Qualcomm, Broadcom, Bosch, any Samsung, anybody making anything with GPS

and generally has one of these in his boxes.

SpaceX are our biggest customers.

They've bought 150 of these systems to test their satellites as they come off the production line and to develop them.

Yeah.

Well, it's a big business for them, isn't it?

It is.

I want to get it right first time.

Absolutely.

So you're constantly trying to improve your driving.

You've done quite well in the Chevron.

Then you get bumped out of Masters with the E-Type or something upset you about the organization of the Masters series, didn't they?

Yes.

They were picking on me.

My E-Type was going a lot quicker than they wanted it to go.

Why would everybody assume that you've got traction control?

Yes, they did.

They thought I was cheating with traction control.

The only reason he's quick in the way is because he's got traction control.

So that's why I've published a lot of my videos showing how sideways and how much I spun, proving that I couldn't have had traction control.

Yeah.

If I did, it was rubbish anyway.

Yeah.

So I won the Jaguar Classic Challenge one year in it, but Masters didn't want an E-Type beating the Cobras because back in the day they didn't.

The Cobras were much quicker than I was beginning to do that.

So they put a rev limiter on my car.

On E-Types, there was three E-Types.

Two of them were at the back of the grid and I was at the front, so it riddled to slow me.

It's how they did that with a lot of categories, wasn't it?

Yeah.

And I did it with Cortinas and a few other things as well, didn't they, to try and stop people spending loads of money on engines and calm everything down, which I guess is...

You can see the sense in it, but if you're playing fair and you just happen to be quick in a quick car, then that's...

That's true.

Analyzing the data and working out.

I mean, we only revved to 7,000.

They were convinced I was revving to 8,000 and that's why I was doing really well.

So they put like, wow, I give him 6,300.

So it dropped 700 RPM, but it meant that that was about a second and a half.

So suddenly we were in no way.

So I looked at all the different cars that competed in those championships.

I said, what's the fastest one?

And I'll show them.

So I went to Andy Wolfe, Wolfe Manufacturing, who's like top of the tree.

Absolutely brilliant engineer and driver, very much like Andy Rouse in that respect.

He'll quite like me saying that, I think.

It probably says a bit quicker than Andy Rouse.

He could be, yes.

And I went to him and I said, right, I want to build a Daytona Cobra because I'd seen Simon Hadfield and Leo Voizidis.

They were cleaning up.

So I said to him, can you build one of these?

So he's in your chance to put your stamp on it.

So I said, right, yeah, let's, you know, you've got all the time in the world.

Let's go through it.

Like the fine tooth control.

JPS.

Oh, ABS.

Don't worry about that.

I'll sort outside it.

Yeah, it's the sensors.

So they built this Daytona Cobra and had it in nice race logic.

Feedbox colors.

And raced it with, I started off racing with Catalan there.

I raced it on my own, but this thing is an absolute weapon.

And yeah, it's done quite well.

But yet the, you tell the story about despondent fellow competitors with the griffin.

Yes.

That's part next door.

Yeah, that's right.

Everyone.

Because the thing that struck me with you is you believe it's all on the brakes.

The speed is mostly on the brakes.

Most of it is.

Yeah.

Because that was Eugene and Mike Whitaker.

Yes.

The griff.

That's right.

A lot of people say there's an arms race, you know, producing all the engine to produce

ridiculous power and they got trick suspension parts.

But having studied data for a long time doesn't make an awful lot of difference.

You know, you've got to have a lot more power before you can really see it at that time.

And you've got to be able to drive it to get that.

And sometimes, you know, you might get power at the top end, but you've lost all the grunt

coming off the corner.

So you actually, you can add another 50 horsepower and go slower.

But a lot of people were sort of pointing fingers at like, oh, it's an arms race and

they've spent loads of money.

I didn't, I just said, just build it properly once.

We never developed it.

We've never touched it since.

But a friend of mine, Mike Whitaker was in the garage next to me in a TVR Griffith racing

with Eugene O'Brien, who's a fantastic pedal art.

Done quite a few things with Eugene over the years, like a brake light delay switch for

his tune.

Love that.

So I love Eugene.

He's so competitive and so sneaky.

He's great.

And he was after qualifying and I think I was two seconds left quicker than them.

And I went round to see him.

They're both sat there looking depressed, looking at the car going, we just can't get, we just

don't know how you've done that.

And I went, you've got a V-box?

Yeah, I'll give you my data.

They went, what?

So you're giving my data?

Really?

So Eugene looked at it and said, we're quickly on the straights.

We've got the same corner apex speed.

It's all under braking.

It's two seconds allowed.

It's just under braking.

And the problem was is they couldn't run any cooling on their brakes.

It was disallowed.

So I mentioned this to the organizers and I said, look, it's not an arms race.

Give them their cooling back on their brakes.

And now TBRs are beating Daytonas just about.

It's 50-50 now.

It's great.

How it should be.

Yeah, it's come how you want it, isn't it?

Exactly.

And it doesn't cost anything to put some plastic tubing on the car to cool the brakes down.

Which is good.

Very good of you.

So you've, your racing's brought you full circle, isn't it?

Because you've got a caliber RS500 Cosworth.

That's right.

Yes.

I used to watch that.

Back in its days to be my favorite car to watch these fire breathing.

Andy Rouses.

Andy Rouses as well.

He was one of my heroes.

And it came up for sale one year.

And yeah, I was lucky enough to be able to buy it.

Sold a few things and lied to my wife how much it costs on the normal.

What is Sierra?

But yeah, yeah, bought it and then yeah, I've been racing it.

They look like fantastic things to race.

But again, they're kind of, they look too fast for their own good almost.

So clearly you need to manage.

Yes.

When you deploy the performance and when you, when you don't.

Yeah, it's a ridiculous thing to drive because it's a Sierra 1.6L with a 550 horsepower.

It's really crude suspension.

Yeah.

But it's, yeah, we really got it handling really well this year.

I've been working with Andy Wolfe on the handling of it recently and we found some massive improvements.

But it's, it's hilarious.

You don't approach it casually.

It's not the sort of chuck it.

Yeah.

No, the day before the night before I'm sort of tossing and turning my sleep and my heart rates up a bit and we turn up and I

go, right, I can do this.

I can do this because it's, it's all down to you.

Yeah.

Because it doesn't do anything for you.

It's got way too much power and the brakes are a bit rubbish.

Because you're up against some quite interesting stuff, aren't you?

There's a few R32.

R32.

Skylines.

The BMW M3s.

Yes.

There's some real eclectic machines, fast machines out there.

The Sierra produces its lap time in very different ways to the, to the other, to the Skylines.

But it's, it's about bravery.

It really is.

It's about how early you can get on the throttle, how much speed you can carry around cops and places like that.

Is it fairly blunt as well, the performance delivery?

It's not anymore.

I think back in this day with the old Zitec engine management system that was very, very slow updating, you know, you could,

and it only had a few inputs into it.

Nowadays, you know, you measure a lot more things and you can control the boost a lot more accurately.

It's, it's a little bit calmer, but then it's all relative.

It's still, the tyres are about that wide.

Yeah.

They're five every 50 horsepower, aren't they?

Yeah.

1100 kilos and it comes in with a hell of a belt at about 5,000 RPM.

Yeah.

But it's, it keeps your new toes.

Yeah.

And the business is still doing extraordinary things with GPS.

You showed us around and.

Yes.

Tell us about the, the tunnel GPS system for.

Yeah, this is.

Australia.

This is based on our satellite simulation business that we, or the lab site that we, that we made.

And we were asked if it could be used to replace GPS in the tunnel.

And they're building a six kilometer tunnel in Sydney in Australia.

And modern cars have an equal system where if you have a crash, knows where it is.

Yeah.

Contacts the authorities, pinpoints where that accident is.

Of course in a tunnel, it doesn't know where it is.

So they wanted to put a system in so any car would know where it was if it had an accident.

So we've adapted the lab site to, to work in, in a tunnel.

So we have a literally just 80 lab sites in a big line down the tunnel.

And that creates that sort of.

Yeah.

Exactly.

Yeah.

It's, it's quite crude.

They just single positions.

So you, so the, but the car sat, they've smoothed that out because it's got wheel speed sensors and things.

So it, it appears as a continuous position.

But yeah, that's, that's one, one use of it.

And then the other thing you're doing is if anybody's watched outside broadcasts.

Yeah.

And the one you showed, I'd seen that on the telly where you have a huge scoreboard.

Yes.

Just hanging in mid air.

Yeah.

augmented reality.

Yeah.

It's cool.

And then you can fly around it.

You can fly around it in a helicopter.

Yeah.

And recently you've seen it on formerly one.

Yeah.

They have pictures of the two drivers with their lap times sometimes and the camera or pan

around that.

Yeah.

We do identical.

We did a lot better than them.

They're very unrestricted.

They can't zoom the lighting conditions.

James, they can't do anything.

He was competing.

So I was working any lighting conditions.

Yeah.

And you can zoom your heart's content on the camera.

But we did it first for the Superbowl.

That was, I wanted to do a quiet introduction to the technology.

But unfortunately, the first people that came came to us were Fox and they said, yeah,

this is exactly what we want for the Superbowl.

And so that was extremely stressful for breaking brand new technology, but it worked perfectly.

Was it the camera was what on the blimps on the sky?

It's called the sky cam and it is a cable.

There's two cables at 90 degrees and you can fly this camera up and down around the whole

stadium.

And there's traditionally, there's no good way of measuring the position of this because

the cable stretch and so you can't use sensors.

So using our system using GPS or we've done a replacement for GPS, which works indoors.

That's a whole big story about the fact technology that's probably one interest your readers.

But, you know, we're doing it now.

We did the ocean race the other week where there's a helicopter with a half a million

pounds with a camera and gimbal hanging off the side.

And we measure we've got a system GPS on that camera and gimbal.

So the camera knows exactly where it is in 3D space, where it's pointing relative to

anything else you want to drop in.

Yeah.

So like a start line on a motor race is two boys.

But when you're, you know, 300 meters away in a helicopter, you can't see those boys.

So the perspective is very different, isn't it?

So you superimpose the start line and some graphics and scores and things on that in real

time.

And that's using GPS.

So what's the next?

I know technology is always evolving, isn't it?

AI and in any context, but can you see the next trend or the next thing that's going

to unlock another idea in your?

Not sure.

They normally just sort of come to you in a quick, quick flash one day and got your apex

finder.

Oh, yes.

Yeah.

That's something I worked on this weekend in the Fun Cup.

I realized from watching myself vainly on YouTube at the Silverstone Festival when I

was in my Daytona racing with, against Olivier Hart, which was a fantastic battle, that I

wasn't hitting the apexes like I thought I was hitting it.

In the car, I'm fantastic.

I'm super accurate.

But when you watch on the outside, especially on the really fast stuff, I was just missing

them by sort of 50, 60 centimeters.

And you watch someone like Nigel Greens or Alcalam knocking, you know, they're bang, they're

on it.

Doesn't matter if it's 150 mile an hour corner or 50 mile an hour corner, they've hit that

apex.

That's why they're pros.

So I've made something using GPS that measures instantaneously in the car how close you've

got to your apex and then lights up like a scorecard for you.

That was a six out of 10 or that was a nine out of 10.

Well, that's in the heaven.

You've just taken the wing off as happened.

Well, it didn't take the wing off, but it left a really big black mark on the wing at

the weekend when I went over that apex, hit the tire stack a little bit.

And that's all go back, analyze the data, find the time.

Yeah, but it's it's real time in the car.

So you turn into the corner and you hit the apex and bang, you got your lights, you know,

tells you whether you are each lights five centimeters.

So if you've if you've got you've left five unlit after coming out the corner, that's

25 centimeters.

And that's, you know, that's 300s of a second in a front cup.

It's a long time.

Yeah.

It is worth it.

Yeah.

So you could put an exit as well.

You could.

So you used all the.

Yes.

All the track.

Yeah.

In theory, in theory, it could be used for track limits, but I don't want to be the priest.

I don't want to be the bad guy.

That's great.

Do you remember when we started Evo?

We were going to give out things and there was a thing called the apex hunter.

Do you remember that?

Yeah.

Which is basically is just going to be a little bit of a fluoro thing, wasn't it?

Okay.

And you could nail into your, the apex of your favorite corner.

And it had an Evo logo on it, didn't it?

So you were at road.

Yeah.

So, but then there was certain liability issues.

Yeah.

So off of use only.

High bottom of that.

Back to the way from that.

Right.

You can get away with all that stuff and you can't use these.

Apex Hunter.

That's quite a good name actually.

Yeah.

The small amount.

Okay.

Yeah.

A little licensing fee or let me use that because I haven't come up with a name yet.

There you go.

Yeah.

Because there's already a product called an apex bro that's got nothing to do with apexes.

But it's to do with racing.

So I can't use that.

So yeah.

What else is in the race car garage?

I know there's one other car that you've, you're going to have to GT3 racing there,

haven't you?

Yes.

I've got a, I must admit I've never been a fan of Audi's in my life for various different

reasons.

But the Audi R race always, I've always had a soft spot for.

Yeah.

And they, they're now historic cars.

Some of them.

No.

Historic cars, which is crazy.

It says 2011, I think my car is.

Yeah.

But I've just got into GT3 racing because they've been having races for these older cars.

And the first, I've done some racing in GT3 cars back in the, in the past and didn't get

on very well.

I exited one in flames at Daytona.

Daytona once.

Not?

Yeah.

Porsche.

Exciting.

Super Cup car.

I rented another one and did all right in the race, but it was touch go though.

I just got on a plane and went home.

So I didn't really get on with them.

But then I drove a friend's Audi R8 at a recent winter test.

He said, oh, could you do some laps in it for me?

I said, yeah.

Okay.

Got out of it and went, wow, that's fun because they move around.

Yep.

The Audi is a really fun to drive.

They're really nice balance.

And it does reward like a brave driver because they're a little bit tight.

They're a little bit pointy.

Yeah.

They've got a bit of a reputation.

Yeah.

But that's, I like that.

Yeah.

I've raced one that never been in 24 hours, but ending in 2011.

And I thought I'm never going to be able to race this 24 hours.

Yeah.

Clenching my teeth.

They are.

Absolutely.

They are a knife edge car.

Yeah, they are.

And it was set up, the guy said, we've set it up just like the leading cars.

Oh, good.

Oh, thanks.

It's a little operating window.

You have to keep it in.

Yeah.

Found out, I spun it, I think, three times on my first test.

Would get it out of the way there.

Yes, exactly.

I'll do it.

Yeah.

I broke the gearbox, but no.

Oh, put apart from that.

Because I went backwards and I was left for braking.

I started to go backwards.

And my natural instinct was to punch the clutch, but my foot was on the brakes.

I punched the brake instead of the clutch.

So the, oh, and then I took my foot off and the gearbox went backwards.

Oh, no.

Really, really clumsy.

Horrible.

So, yeah.

I only did that once.

Yeah.

So there's a few things in your road going toy box as well.

But tell us about the Aston, because that is such a great story.

So, yeah, my dad was into his cars.

And as his company grew and did better, he decided to buy himself his dream car.

And it was an Aston Martin DB6, 1967.

And I used to work on it with him.

We used to spend the weekends doing it, restoring it, fiddling with the engine, taking bits off.

And then we'd go to a hill climb and sometimes he'd compete in the hill climb himself and

I'd watch him.

So it was a real sort of formative experience.

And I loved this car.

But unfortunately, my father got motor neurone disease and passed away.

And my mum had to sell the car because, you know, this, I was, I think, 17 at the time.

And there's no way I could afford to run or keep this car.

So she sold it.

And then I've been running these cars in historic racing and a friend of mine said,

you need to invest some of your money in shares.

And I can help you because he's a financial advisor.

So I said, I'm not going to do that.

I'm not going to do that.

That's boring.

I'm going to buy a classic car, I reckon, that would go up in price.

And he said, oh, what would you get?

And I said, well, I'd love to get an Aston DB6 like my dad used to have.

What do they look like?

And I mean, I said, I'll Google it.

I Google an Aston DB6 and I showed him, oh, yeah, they're nice.

What colours were your dad?

I said, it's a very unusual colour.

It was called mink, but it was like a champagne-y colour.

I'll tell you what.

I'll Google the number plate.

So I googled the number by MJW70780.

I said, just you never know.

And I'd never done this before.

And I went, enter, and it came up, Bonham's auction, four sale, MJW70780 Saturday.

And this was Thursday.

And this was Bonham's auction in Newport Pagnell just down the road.

And I turned to look to him and I went, I'm not investing any with you.

I'm sorry.

And this is, yeah.

So I took my cousin along who knew the car back in the day.

And he just kept jabbing his elbow into my ribs, going higher, higher, higher.

I ended up paying more than anyone paid for a DB6 before and has done since, I think.

But there you go.

And yeah, and I got it.

And it was actually the guy my mum sold it to 25 years ago.

And all he'd done, yeah, he'd done 300 or 400 miles a year.

He'd put it in the garage, just done all the little tarty bits on the outside.

And nothing major.

No, so it was just a crazy thing to possibly beat.

Because I was really worried that, I don't know, it would be fully restored.

It would be a wreck, in which case it wasn't.

But it was time warp, as though.

That's amazing.

Wow, that must have made the hairs go up on the neck.

Yeah, it did.

And like, you know, there was a little hole in the dashboard where when you put the keys

in, the keys used to swing.

Yeah, they'd swing around.

My dad put a little clip there that you could put those key fob in to stop it swinging.

Obviously.

So you did?

Yeah.

You know, just drill the dash of an Aston Martin.

But yeah, that hole was still there.

And there's a special cut-off switch that I knew about.

So I went to pick the car up.

The guy goes, oh yeah, it's a bit difficult to start this car.

I said, I know.

Yeah, small switches here.

Click, click, there we go.

He's like, is Jor open?

Yeah.

He has my dad's old car.

Where?

Yeah, so I've had that ever since.

Yeah.

That's right.

Very special.

Have you had to do much?

Are you sort of looking after it without?

Yes.

Without?

The same kind of thing.

I drive nearly 300 or 400 miles a year.

And I just do all the nice, you know, just keep it tidy.

But it's the same bodywork, same interior, everything's.

Yeah, they're only like that once, aren't they?

They are.

Yes.

Only original ones.

Yes.

Very good, Julian.

Thank you very much for coming to chat with us.

No problem.

Just feel massively underachieving in my life now.

That's amazing to go from like an eight-year-old computer geek

to...

Yes.

The deeks shall inherit the earth.

Yeah.

Still based in Buckingham.

Yes.

Still in the area.

Yeah.

Still got grown-ups running the company for me.

Yeah.

So I play with technology.

Well, can't wait to see...

Stopping on an oscilloscope and resistors and diodes in my office still.

Can't wait to see what you come up with next and be fascinating.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

Cheers.

The man who revolutionised performance driving: Racelogic's Julian Thomas

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