Given he’s now in his third stint at McLaren, it should come as little surprise that Ian Morgan has a deep passion for the Woking-based giant he first worked for over 25 years ago.
“The fact that I’m here now says a lot about the company and why after my initial foray in 1998 I’ve been drawn back every time,” the director of motorsport at McLaren Automotive tells Autosport.
Morgan ran Nick Heidfeld to the 1999 Formula 3000 title as a race engineer with its West Competition junior squad but found it difficult to rise up the ranks of its Formula 1 arm during a period of stability on the engineering front. “It was dead man’s shoes a little bit in those days,” he remembers.
A highly successful spell at Red Bull’s F1 team followed, but Morgan felt a strong pull to return and duly did so as chief engineer at Andrew Kirkaldy’s CRS-run McLaren GT operation before car development and servicing was taken in-house in 2017. Now at the helm of that process, having rejoined the Automotive division in 2019, Morgan has found that his “biggest challenges weren’t ones that I’d had to worry too much about, up to that point in my career”. Plainly, optimising the performance of a given product trackside is very different from taking a bigger picture view of a manufacturer’s customer racing programme.
“This role is very holistic, I have to see every area of the business and the biggest challenges are ones that are slightly outside of my normal comfort zone I guess,” he says. “But that’s what I like about this type of position, because it gives me a chance to think about things in a different way.”
However Morgan is clear that the holistic philosophy is one he has sought to apply in all his previous positions too, since starting out at Reynard as a graduate of mechanical engineering from Coventry University.
“It’s very easy as an engineer to get very focused into the area of performance that the car gives the most and put a lot of your effort into that, but I’m a big believer that it’s the whole package that needs to be very strong for something to work well,” he explains.
“Every aspect of a car, a driver and a team. Every bit of that, the communication, the planning, the way you go about it, keeping your eyes open for weather and changes and all the rest of the stuff going on, so I think the important thing is to get that whole, rounded view.
“Wherever I’ve operated and worked, you do take an interest in every bit of the business because it’s interesting, and you see where the weaknesses are, the strengths are and what you can do as a collective to make the whole total better. I’ve always been thinking about every bit of the business and how it worked.”
The young Morgan had a strong grounding in engineering practice courtesy of his father David, who ended his stint as chief development engineer at Aston Martin in the early ‘80s when “he was one of four people that started Aston Martin-Tickford as it was at the time”. Based in Milton Keynes, it became an engine preparation specialist that achieved success in F3000, with the Middlebridge team achieving podiums every year between 1989 and 1991 with its Cosworth DFYs.
"I was just a sponge at the time trying to absorb as much information as I could. At the same time, I’m competitive so you want to learn and get on and do it quickly" Ian Morgan
“I spent my Saturday mornings in the development department at Aston Martin while he was doing work, watching people bend panels and use hand tools,” Morgan recalls. There were frequent weekend trips to Silverstone too, and many an evening was spent rebuilding Formula Ford and Clubman’s engines.
“From probably seven or eight up until early teens I spent most of my weekends with my hands dirty doing something,” he adds. “Whether it was rebuilding an engine or taking it to the dyno, I was spending Saturday mornings at work with him or racing at the weekends. I guess it becomes part of the norm from quite early in your life.”
Having written to all the production racing car manufacturers, including Ralt and Lola, a freshly-graduated Morgan was offered a job at Reynard “where they put all of the guys through each of the departments to learn a bit and I just happened to be in the right place at the right time when they set up their own Reynard R&D Formula 3 team”. His formative single-seater experience was one he relished, running Philippe Favre and Steve Kempton in the 1987 British championship, and soaking up knowledge from “some really good people”. He cites Reynard’s technical guru Malcolm Oastler as “a bit of a mentor of mine”.
“I was just a sponge at the time trying to absorb as much information as I could,” Morgan says. “At the same time, I’m competitive so you want to learn and get on and do it quickly and they allowed me to do that.”
Oastler introduced him to the similarly driven Keith Wiggins, who hired Morgan to his Pacific Racing outfit that won the British championship in 1988 with JJ Lehto before advancing to F3000 with Lehto and Eddie Irvine the following year.
“To set a Formula 3 team up in one year and then go into Formula 3000 the next year was crazy, no one had done anything like it at the time,” Morgan reflects. “And we were doing it from a small little unit in Snetterton circuit, it didn’t have any heating, we had space heaters through the winter there and it was pretty harsh. It was a massive challenge.”
A 1990 season running Peter Kox in British F3 followed with Bowman Racing, which he dovetailed by engineering future tin-top legend Laurent Aiello to French F3 wins in the Grand Prix support race at Paul Ricard and the following round at Dijon.
“We did a test at Lurcy-Levis, we turned up at the French Grand Prix support race with his team, one person on the team spoke a little bit of English, the rest were all French,” Morgan chuckles. “I spoke a little bit of French, I’m in the middle of an F1 pitlane trying to remember the difference between understeer and oversteer in French and we won the race and we did the same the next weekend at Dijon with fastest lap! He was one of the real superstars that I think should have gone further because his natural talent of just getting in the car and doing it.”
Morgan spent 1991 at West Surrey Racing working with Jordi Gene, then for 1992 was hired by Edenbridge Racing boss Peter Briggs and given the “opportunity with a clean sheet of paper to do it exactly how I wanted”. Things clicked in 1993 when Oliver Gavin arrived at the team and Edenbridge reaped the rewards of a decisive early switch to Dallara with a run of four consecutive wins mid-season.
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Gavin ultimately lost the title to Paul Stewart Racing rival Kelvin Burt, but after a 1994 season when few got a look in amid Jan Magnussen’s dominance for PSR, Gavin returned from a disappointing F3000 stint in 1995 and took the fight to PSR’s latest hotshoe Ralph Firman. Gavin came out on top by season’s end after each had scored six wins in a closely-fought campaign that Morgan describes as “one of the most satisfying programmes I’ve been involved with”.
“We had 150 grand to try and do the job, we were having to scrimp and save and find performance around the back of cupboards,” he says. “We were so determined to do what we needed to do and Olly was someone I worked with in such a way that we were kind of in each other’s heads.
“We knew how we were thinking. I knew when he was having a bad day, when he was having a good day, how to get him back up again if he was down and how to give him confidence. I could convince him it would make a difference to do what he was trying to do, whether it was going flat through Riches in qualifying or whatever, and then he’d just go and do it because he had that confidence in the team and we had the belief in him. The sum of the parts was so much more and it was a really nice, warm, friendly environment.
“Everyone put so much effort in and to win a championship against big budgets from Paul Stewart and the like at the time was super-satisfying, one of the most satisfying things for me personally that I’ve ever done. Technically I was given full reign, so it was nice to do whatever I wanted at that time. Those four years with Edenbridge was a lovely part of my life.”
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Afterwards Morgan decided he’d walk away from motorsport and worked for Tickford as “it was going into a second phase of their life, and they wanted me to look after stuff for them”. But he was lured back in when he was headhunted to join McLaren’s F3000 arm, led by David Brown. Initially, he ran Nicolas Minassian, before in 1999 teaming up with Heidfeld, fresh from his narrow defeat to Super Nova’s Juan Pablo Montoya the year before.
The first year for the new Lola B99/50 regularly attracted over 40 entrants per round, and with so many cars the field was split into two qualifying groups with no opportunity afforded for practice. That meant there were plenty of opportunities to slip up, but in a season Heidfeld needed to dominate to keep his F1 dreams on track he didn’t disappoint. Nobody else came close to mounting a proper title challenge as the German wrapped up the championship with two races to spare by finishing second to Stephane Sarrazin in Hungary.
“Obviously a lot of pressure to do the job, but we came out of the blocks really at a sprint when everyone was getting up to speed,” remembers Morgan. “It was very controlled in that Nick was in a brilliant place, the team was very confident in the second year. We just had to do all our jobs well and keep chipping away, and we kept going better and better.
Morgan stresses that he would never have left McLaren had there been a role within its F1 set-up he could have taken up and so accepted Christian Horner’s offer of heading up the newly-rebranded former Jaguar team’s test operations
“Nick was the key in terms of being super, super sensitive with the car and having a real trust in the people around him and that worked very well. That championship was one of the most straightforward I think, because it all went to plan and with a few small exceptions we did exactly what we planned to do.”
Hopes of repeating that success with Sarrazin in 2000 proved fleeting and he was replaced by Tomas Scheckter midway through a season that yielded just a single win, as Tomas Enge led Scheckter in a 1-2 at Hockenheim. The team was shuttered at season’s end, which Morgan concedes wasn’t a surprise. He believes an “absolutely amazing” experience was made all the more so by the depth of experience at McLaren as many of his colleagues “had worked at McLaren for some time” across F1 and its F1 GTR programme.
“Many of those guys still work for McLaren now, so I think the thing that ties the whole thing together really is the people,” he says.
Afterwards Morgan “did a little bit of work for the Formula 1 team, but at that time nobody moved, the race engineers were there for life and it was hard to get the role I wanted”. Over lunch with McLaren legend Gordon Murray, Morgan was invited to assist him on the McLaren-Mercedes SLR project “and worked on the development of that all the way through until I got the opportunity with Red Bull”.
Morgan stresses that he would never have left McLaren had there been a role within its F1 set-up he could have taken up and so accepted Christian Horner’s offer of heading up the newly-rebranded former Jaguar team’s test operations. Progress, both for Morgan and the team, was fairly swift.
Adrian Newey was also tempted away from McLaren and other key hires including Peter Prodromou, Jonathan Wheatley and Giles Wood had been embedded by the time Sebastian Vettel arrived at the senior team from Toro Rosso for 2009 to replace the retiring David Coulthard. Morgan had been promoted too, from the head of test and development with a chief test engineer remit, “so I was trackside all the time but never at a racetrack doing my job in anger”, to become head of race engineering overseeing Guillaume Rocquelin and Ciaron Pilbeam.
“The team grew heavily over the first few years and at the end of 2008 I felt we were in a position where we’d be a lot more competitive,” says Morgan. “But no-one really expected us, within Red Bull at least, to be winning races as early as we did in 2009.”
Although Red Bull didn’t have a double diffuser when the dawn of new technical regulations ripped up the established order, Red Bull had laid the groundwork and began its first period of success with Vettel’s breakthrough win in China 2009. Morgan remembers that weekend well because driveshaft issues had meant Vettel could only complete one flying lap in each segment of qualifying.
“And we stuck it on pole and it was like, ‘how do you do that with that much pressure?’” he says. “I saw him adapt to certain things that other people had never, ever had to even think about.
“Watching Vettel at the time was incredible. You’d make technical changes to the car that were really significant, and he’d want to know what it was. When he got in it and drove it, something that would blow other driver’s minds, Sebastian got it sorted.”
There were three more wins in 2009 as Vettel finished runner-up to Brawn’s Jenson Button, before a run of four consecutive world championship doubles began in 2010. Morgan however would depart mid-way through 2012, and says “it’s no surprise that I ended up back at McLaren because that was where my heart was”.
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“All of the reasons that I left F1 in the end were the same as I was reluctant to go into it in the first place,” he reasons. “It’s very big teams, lots of people, very hard to build a cohesive team, so you end up having to build a team inside a team.
“I was looking after all the race engineers and performance guys and trying to keep them focused and not distracted with stuff that’s going on outside is a challenge. The distractions with marketing and everything else is huge. At the same time, to bring all of those people to a track, to get a result every week and then you repeat it the next weekend is amazing. I don’t think any of us expected that going into 2009 and the next few years where everything came to us, it was a perfect sweetspot really.
“But in terms of personal satisfaction, I don’t feel anything like the same satisfaction as the F3000 championship or an F3 championship just because the teams are smaller, you’re doing it with your mates because that’s who you’re living and breathing with at that time and it’s all down to you.”
"It’s not easy in this business to make money doing customer racing,” he says. “We’re not running these programmes to be profitable, we’re running them because we want to have our customers racing McLarens" Ian Morgan
Morgan spent five years with McLaren GT and, after two years away that involved short spells at Aston Martin and Carlin, came back to the Automotive division’s motorsport department initially as head of engineering in 2019 before becoming its director later in the year. Customer-focused racing, he explains, is “a completely different way of thinking about things” as the manufacturer doesn’t have “complete control over everything, you’re just trying to give the best to the customer”.
The past few years has seen considerable challenges in the form of the COVID-19 pandemic, which meant the motorsport department “had to really contract to something that was affordable” before pushing on again. But Morgan is proud that the “volume of cars we’ve produced in house is pretty immense”, with the new Artura GT4 racer coming on stream this year to join a proliferation of track-focused products the company has developed.
“It’s not easy in this business to make money doing customer racing,” he says. “We’re not running these programmes to be profitable, we’re running them because we want to have our customers racing McLarens. It’s challenging to make it work as a business, keep the products successful year-on-year, keep the teams out there racing.”
Morgan has evidently found his “right place” at McLaren. And with the marque returning to Le Mans next year in the LMGT3 class with United Autosport, there are several more chapters waiting to be written in the Ian Morgan-McLaren story.
Advice for engineers from Ian Morgan
- One of the most important things is to listen. Listen to the people around you, listen to the driver, listen to the people with experience. You don’t have to do what everyone says all the time, but just take that experience on board and then use it in your own way. Get it through your head, filter it and make sure that decisions you make are the right ones given all of the elements that are there; not just focused on where you expect the highest bit of performance to be. If you do that, you’ll leave performance on the table and miss out on other aspects of it.
- When I started off, we had no data logging, the very first few seasons you were reliant on the driver to tell you their end of straight revs and mid-corner RPM and then you’d work it all out from there. So you had to listen to the driver, go out on track and look and do all those things. It’s easy now because of the data around for people to get so immersed in it, they don’t look up. So from time to time, shut your laptop, get outside, have a look at all the elements because if you don’t, you’re going to miss out. At times forget about the data, listen to the driver, listen to the other engineers and get a feel for what’s going on and then see how some of that fits back into the data rather than it all being fully data-driven.
- You’ve got to enjoy what you’re doing. It’s very hard to give your all if you’re not enjoying what you’re doing and to enjoy working with the people around you, so it’s all about finding your right place. In my early career I found that I had to move on to find environments I was more comfortable in. And for me, that’s a very important aspect because you’ll give so much more if you find that position.
- To be successful as a race engineer, you need to be able to visualise the car and try and understand when you’re making changes, why you’re making those changes and how they react.
