When people sit down in front of their televisions on a Sunday afternoon to watch the latest Formula One race, few will realise that 16 of the current 24 cars on the grid are designed and manufactured in the UK in an area known as ‘Motorsport Valley’, which stretches along the M40 corridor, encompassing both Oxfordshire and Northamptonshire.

The fact that eight of the 12 Formula One teams base themselves here, including Renault at Enstone and Williams at Grove, is a testament to the skills of people in this country.

While F1 may be the most public face of motorsport, there are literally hundreds of companies in Motorsport Valley, like my own, Prodrive, also designing and manufacturing competition cars and components.

Indeed, the motorsport industry is now so large that it employs 40,000 people, most of whom are highly skilled engineers and some of the most talented you will find anywhere in the world. It also contributes £6bn to the UK economy with more than half of that in exports.

And the nature of our industry means that, on average, 30 per cent of the turnover is spent on research and development (R&D), far higher than either the pharmaceutical or IT industries.

It is this approach to R&D and investment in new innovative technologies that is giving the industry a reach far beyond sport, into sectors such as automotive, aerospace, marine and defence, to name a few.

Increasingly, companies in these sectors are looking to motorsport for technologies that can be evolved and transferred into new applications and, just as importantly, our philosophical approach to innovation.

I don’t think there is a better place to find a solution to a technical problem more rapidly than giving it to a group of motorsport engineers. Motorsport is all about continuous innovation, creating new ideas to either meet changes in regulations, or simply to beat your competitors.

At Prodrive not only are we constantly challenging ourselves to make our products, our Aston Martin race and Mini rally cars, more competitive, but we are also being given similar challenges by our customers.

Two years ago, a manufacturer of winches for racing yachts, including those in the Americas Cup, wanted us to take a fresh look at the entire design and manufacture of their units.

We started with a clean sheet of paper and no pre-conceived ideas and, within a few weeks, had met the brief and were manufacturing the units here in Banbury using the same composites and machining operations we use for our race and rally teams.

Another company wanted us to help develop an ultra-efficient domestic boiler, which used the heat normally lost through the flue to drive a small engine to generate up to 3kW of electricity.

Our focus was on making this ‘Stirling’ engine, a concept originally developed in Victorian times, work efficiently on a very small scale, and we achieved that.

A leading British sports car manufacturer wanted the interior of its latest car made entirely from carbon composite.

This in itself is nothing new. However, they wanted the carbon panels to be unpainted and demanded a perfect high gloss finish without the customary use of lacquer to achieve this. Our composites team delivered this, and the firm is now one of our biggest customers.

We are now making everything from £50,000 carbon fibre loudspeakers, to ultra-lightweight horse racing stirrups, panels for imaging satellites, bodywork for unmanned aerial vehicles, carbon fibre wheelchairs, parts for commercial jets and even nuclear submarines.

We are also leading the way in developing innovative approaches to creating more efficient electric and hybrid cars, one of the biggest challenges for vehicle manufacturers across the world. Almost every day I hear from my team about something new.

There is so much more to our motorsport industry than meets the eye. The next time you are watching a race or rally on the television, think about the huge British success story behind it, and the fact that the innovative ideas going into these cars have a huge influence on many items we all use in our everyday lives.

o Contact: Prodrive, 01295 273355.

Web: www.prodrive.com o This page is co-ordinated by Oxford Innovation: www.oxin.co.uk