Tom Stallard: Piastri’s Olympic-medallist race engineer

F1: Beyond The Grid

karenellenbevan

Leisure, Sports, Technology, Automotive

4.8 • 5.2K Ratings

🗓️ 15 October 2024

⏱️ 63 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Tom Stallard, Oscar Piastri’s race engineer and McLaren’s Director of Human Performance, is a man of many talents.

As a professional rower, he won an Olympic silver medal and became World Champion. As an engineer in Formula 1, he’s won races with some of the sport’s most talented drivers and has played a huge part in McLaren’s transformation into title contenders.

So why did Tom make such a big career change and how does working in F1 compare to rowing?

Speaking to Tom Clarkson at McLaren’s headquarters, Stallard talks about his gruelling fitness regime as an Olympic rower, what a race engineer’s relationship with their driver is all about, working with the likes of Jenson Button, Daniel Ricciardo and Carlos Sainz, how Oscar Piastri is galvanising the team now, and much more.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	We hear this man's voice a lot on the radio.
0:06.0	Yeah, Dwight.
0:07.0	Lovely.
0:08.0	Lovely job, Oscar.
0:10.0	Great afternoon.
0:11.0	Fantastic.
0:12.0	He's a former Olympic silver medalist and now he's hoisting a
0:16.2	loft, a trophy that means that the Clarin lead the rest of the constructors in
0:21.5	the pinnacle of motorsport.
0:23.0	On the podium with McLaren and Oscar,
0:26.0	I felt very conscious of the number of people in the team
0:30.0	who worked towards that.
0:32.0	So I felt really proud to kind of represent that group of people up there.
0:37.0	In rowing, Tom Stalard won Olympic silver and world championship gold.
0:46.0	In Formula One, he's won multiple Grand Prix as an engineer with Jensen Button, Daniel Ricardo, and now Oscar Piaestry.
0:54.0	In both sports, teamwork has been essential to his success.
0:59.0	One of the nice things about rowing is that you can't play your weakest
1:03.7	person out of the game if one person checks out then is game over so you're only
1:08.9	really as good as your your weakest man to be honest my favorite bit about rowing was the teamwork and working together.
1:15.6	I think that building strong teams was one of my strengths in rowing and I think that generally
1:21.9	speaking that's been the case at McLaren as well.
1:25.0	Tom knows exactly what it takes to win at the highest level of professional sport
	...

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