Nothing serious just some happy opportunities.
West Surrey Racing ran a successful Touring Car team as well as a very successful Formula Three team which raised some great drivers.
https://www.wsr-racing.com/ Hakkinen, Coultard, Senna, and others. At that time I was pretending to race a Dolomite Sprint in a junior league and they were tuning it for me. I met a really nice guy when I was there one day and he was an F3 driver in their team. I got an invite to his house one weekend to fix his computer, he was called Maurício Gugelmin, at the time I had no idea. Anyway I went to the place he was renting and sorted out the computer and we had a chat. Next thing I know Ayrton came running into the room and announced he wanted to go for Christmas. I am not printing what happened next. They were friends for some time and were sharing the house. I went back a couple of times. He was a huge character, when they talk about having an aura I could almost feel and cut it. The day he passed really hit me.
Professionally it started when I worked at Sun Microsystems in the Professional Services arm just pre 2000. Sun was a sponsor of McLaren when it was on the up. The logo was on the back of each mirror. The rumour was a £1m a mirror and all the hardware and software it could eat. They was a LOT of equipment. I did some of the plumbing to join it up. This led me to meet some of the people which is how the rest of it started.
One thing I do remember was the attitude of the different teams. Williams felt like a family in some ways, still so polished you could see everything in the reflection but a little more calm and gentle than others. At the time Buzzin Hornets was quite troubled but working with them was a real pleasure. I supported them as I could see what they were achieving with the level of funding through skilled hard work. Everyone thought they were the most important (I did not have Ferrari so clearly did not have THE most important team 8) and demanded the best price allowing us to say they were a customer as a result. Buzzin Hornets got the best deal!
At one point in my role in Computerthingys I was involved in the wave of Enterprise WiFi and worked for a US startup which did high end security focused WiFi stuff. I got into a couple of the teams and also FIA/FOM - the TV studio system that did the work at all the circuits based in Biggin Hill. We introduced a new feature which listened for other wifi things and if it found them it would actively interfere with associations and connections to suppress it. It was for a certain customer but we did not hide it in the menu. One of the teams did an upgrade, found the switch and thought it was cool so turned it on. The entire pit lane borked and one of the other teams with our kit phoned in a state of panic, then another etc. We worked out what had happened and told them all to turn it off. It also happens to be illegal to do this which was a bit of a bind. A new release fixed this by removing it from the menu. If you knew what to type you could still cause a lot of trouble.
I bought a beautiful W216 CL600 coupe pre-owned and it looked seriously posh. I turned up to the AMG Petronas team in Brackley and as I was approaching the gate it swung up and they directed me straight to one of the VIP slots on the front door! They did not have enough meeting roms so we held our IT meeting in Ross Brawns office just above reception in the circular goldfish bowl. Half way through the meeting Ross comes strolling in on the phone asking security who parked the "effing panzer in his slot" which made me laugh (very quietly, inside) . It was just after AMG had bought the business and the guard could be heard saying he thought I was from HQ!
More recently I was involved in the MDM market (software that manages iPads/iPhones etc) and our software was used by a team I will not mention. One of the IT engineers kept ducking the training and we got worried as he tended to lick the sticky bit of the envelope. Anyway he was trying to "adjust" something and wiped all of their devices in one hit. We had a term "the flash to bang time" in terms of how long it takes from the flash of the explosion to the bang of the blast as everyone panics and calls support. Fastest I have ever seen, that team was hardwired to its devices!
