It's not an obvious leap
going from racing cars that go over 200
miles an hour to something that does
six kilometres per hour.
The F1 background has really helped
because it's in our mindset
to be able to create things
that look right that fully function,
but it also gives us a network
and infrastructure that we know about
and that we're able to capitalise on
in order to deliver a final product.
I was at Toyota Formula
One, for three years I think it was,
with their Advanced Projects group.
One of my claims is that everything
I invented, everything I designed there
got banned.
I don't know if the FIA
who are the organisation that run it
maybe thought, well, if my name's on it,
it's got to be a bit too clever.
Yeah, the mindset does support
more efficient operations, the GoFAR’s
being used in its initial rollout,
for berry transport in polytunnels.
So it's there as a quite a basic platform
but it arrives to pickers
who are picking and filling crates
and they're loading them up
and it takes those back.
It's a prototype vehicle.
You need novel
thinking. You’ve got to understand it.
In Formula One, you understand
the regulations, so you can maybe spot
a little loophole that allow you
to get that competitive advantage.
It has to be right first time.
you know,
when the when you create the vehicle
design it, it gets built,
it gets put down and they race.
So when someone comes to us
to have a new vehicle,
that is the skill set that they want.
They don't want us to be messing around
for years on end.
They want the first one
that we make to work.
Performance Projects started in 2010.
We originally started up as an engineering
consultancy specifically for motorsport,
but then that rolled
into niche automotive,
and now we cover agritech
right through to motorsport
and any other sort of interesting vehicles
between.
People come to us
if they have some engineering challenges.
Typically design,
whether that's from the Formula
One teams who they know what they want.
They just need us to get on and do it
to other people
who have maybe bespoke projects
and they have no idea how to do it,
and we have to take them
through the whole process of design,
getting things made
and get the things tested.
There's a bit of a running joke.
We're very good at making other people
very rich, We’re centred around
engineering design so nearly everything
we do has some bespoke design in it.
Racing cars, they are niche vehicles.
They are one offs they’re
effectively prototypes.
that car, when you design it, when it hits
the ground, it has to work So the F1
mindset is very specifically
it's about high performance obviously
but it's also about speed of development.
So it's getting things out, it’s
getting them tested and it's getting them
fully functional.
So for us,
the mindset is all about rapid development
and fully functioning applications.
So in Formula One, obviously, it’s
a quick turnaround.
You're designing a new car
every year, albeit an evolution
of the previous year's car,
So the F1 mindset is very objective driven
and so there's a specific goal,
there's a specific event,
there's a specific target.
And so for us that, that helps
greatly in our project management
and it helps in, in being very focused
with what our customers would like. They
generally want an item that does something
at a set time and that's perfect.