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.
Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images
Morgan’s impressive career has led him to become head of McLaren Automotive’s customer motorsport programmes
“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…
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