Quick thinking
Quick thinking
Known for his track record in Formula 1, former Brawn GP owner Nick Fry is speaking at this year’s ICAS Annual Conference on whether AI can ever replace accountants. He talks to Ryan Herman about his work at Motion Applied and the truth behind Brawn’s 2009 fairytale championship win
In any career, there is often a moment when an opportunity arises and if you don’t take it, you could be left wondering “what if…”. For Nick Fry, that moment came in 2009 when he and engineer Ross Brawn decided to buy a Formula 1 (F1) team.
Brawn GP was born out of the existing Honda team, after the Japanese manufacturer pulled out of F1 amid the fallout from the 2008 global economic crash. Fry, previously the Honda team’s CEO, and F1 engineer Brawn purchased the team for a nominal sum and renamed it.
The previous owners had left some money in the bank, and Fry and Brawn ploughed in whatever funds they could get their hands on to ensure they could compete in the 2009 F1 season, knowing the cash would run out more or less the moment the season ended. “Operating without a safety net may be dangerous, but it doesn't half focus the mind,” says Fry today.
“Never in the history of humankind has the development of technology made everyone redundant”
It is a sentiment that many CAs who choose to go it alone, setting up their own practice or business, can relate to. What happened next has become part of sporting folklore. Japanese aerodynamicist Masayuki Minagawa, a member of Brawn GP’s F1 team, talked about the concept of a “double diffuser”. In layman’s terms, a diffuser creates the airflow conditions that allow an F1 car to go around corners at higher speeds – and a double diffuser would add a significant advantage.
Brawn and Fry discovered there was nothing in the rules to prevent them from installing it. In a sport where the concept of marginal gains can boil down to a hundredth of a second, being quicker into every turn meant that the Brawn GP F1 car, driven by British racing driver Jenson Button, dominated the early part of the season. He won six of the opening seven races that year, going on to win the 2009 World Drivers’ Championship, with Brawn winning the Constructors’ Championship.
The idea of these two men putting everything on the line against the likes of Ferrari and McLaren, and beating them, is wonderfully compelling, especially in a sport which Fry readily admits is “unashamedly capitalist”.
However, when that story gets retold a few key elements tend to get overlooked. In fact, three F1 teams were using double diffusers at the start of the season – not just Brawn. Toyota and Williams had also figured out the loophole, but their cars simply didn’t perform as well as the upstart competitor’s.
More importantly, the heart of Brawn’s success was a brilliant team of 400 people, many of whom had spent years learning their trade. “We had a level of doggedness about us, teamwork and focus,” Fry says. “Every one of our 400 people was totally focused on winning, because it was either win or you won’t have a job.”
Team player
That gave them a special camaraderie. “To become a successful team means doing your own job to the best of your ability,” Fry says. “When you’ve done that, you help the next person along who may be struggling with theirs to do a brilliant job as well. If you lose, you learn from it and move on, as opposed to a culture of blame, detailed post-mortems and firing people.”
Fry says this is something every business can do – if they are disciplined: “Somebody may be reading this and saying to themselves, ‘Well, we do all of that.’ But you may not do it with intensity or focus, or as repetitively as you need to. Formula One teams are incredibly good because they are relentless.”
In any career, there is often a moment when an opportunity arises and if you don’t take it, you could be left wondering “what if…”. For Nick Fry, that moment came in 2009 when he and engineer Ross Brawn decided to buy a Formula 1 (F1) team.
Brawn GP was born out of the existing Honda team, after the Japanese manufacturer pulled out of F1 amid the fallout from the 2008 global economic crash. Fry, previously the Honda team’s CEO, and F1 engineer Brawn purchased the team for a nominal sum and renamed it.
The previous owners had left some money in the bank, and Fry and Brawn ploughed in whatever funds they could get their hands on to ensure they could compete in the 2009 F1 season, knowing the cash would run out more or less the moment the season ended. “Operating without a safety net may be dangerous, but it doesn't half focus the mind,” says Fry today.
“Never in the history of humankind has the development of technology made everyone redundant”
It is a sentiment that many CAs who choose to go it alone, setting up their own practice or business, can relate to. What happened next has become part of sporting folklore. Japanese aerodynamicist Masayuki Minagawa, a member of Brawn GP’s F1 team, talked about the concept of a “double diffuser”. In layman’s terms, a diffuser creates the airflow conditions that allow an F1 car to go around corners at higher speeds – and a double diffuser would add a significant advantage.
Brawn and Fry discovered there was nothing in the rules to prevent them from installing it. In a sport where the concept of marginal gains can boil down to a hundredth of a second, being quicker into every turn meant that the Brawn GP F1 car, driven by British racing driver Jenson Button, dominated the early part of the season. He won six of the opening seven races that year, going on to win the 2009 World Drivers’ Championship, with Brawn winning the Constructors’ Championship.
The idea of these two men putting everything on the line against the likes of Ferrari and McLaren, and beating them, is wonderfully compelling, especially in a sport which Fry readily admits is “unashamedly capitalist”.
However, when that story gets retold a few key elements tend to get overlooked. In fact, three F1 teams were using double diffusers at the start of the season – not just Brawn. Toyota and Williams had also figured out the loophole, but their cars simply didn’t perform as well as the upstart competitor’s.
More importantly, the heart of Brawn’s success was a brilliant team of 400 people, many of whom had spent years learning their trade. “We had a level of doggedness about us, teamwork and focus,” Fry says. “Every one of our 400 people was totally focused on winning, because it was either win or you won’t have a job.”
Team player
That gave them a special camaraderie. “To become a successful team means doing your own job to the best of your ability,” Fry says. “When you’ve done that, you help the next person along who may be struggling with theirs to do a brilliant job as well. If you lose, you learn from it and move on, as opposed to a culture of blame, detailed post-mortems and firing people.”
Fry says this is something every business can do – if they are disciplined: “Somebody may be reading this and saying to themselves, ‘Well, we do all of that.’ But you may not do it with intensity or focus, or as repetitively as you need to. Formula One teams are incredibly good because they are relentless.”
Jenson Button
Jenson Button
Button steering Brawn to victory
Button steering Brawn to victory
Front row, from right: Nick Fry, Button, Ross Brawn, celebrating victory in the 2009 drivers’ and constructors’ championships
Front row, from right: Nick Fry, Button, Ross Brawn, celebrating victory in the 2009 drivers’ and constructors’ championships
Jenson Button
Jenson Button
Button steering Brawn to victory
Button steering Brawn to victory
Front row, from right: Nick Fry, Button, Ross Brawn, celebrating victory in the 2009 drivers’ and constructors’ championships
Front row, from right: Nick Fry, Button, Ross Brawn, celebrating victory in the 2009 drivers’ and constructors’ championships
The human element of Brawn’s success is especially important, given that the main purpose of our conversation is to talk about the impact of AI. Fry will be one of the panellists at the ICAS Annual Conference 2025 in November in a session titled, “Will AI replace accountants – or elevate them?”
Fry has always worked at the forefront of new technologies. Best known for his track record in F1, he grew up obsessed with motorsport. He had a degree in economics and could have joined Proctor & Gamble, which has been the starting point for a string of successful CEOs, but instead joined the sales and marketing team at the Ford Motor Company. He moved into F1 in 2002 when, as Managing Director at advanced car engineers Prodrive, he took over the BAR Honda team, as it was then known.
Fry, who has also worked with Aston Martin and Mercedes-Benz among others, has irons in many fires these days, spanning AI, data security, healthcare and more. His current roles include Non-Executive Chairman at Motion Applied, formerly known as McLaren Applied, which was an offshoot of the McLaren F1 team. As he explains: “We take technology from Formula 1 and then try to find its commercial benefits. Why develop all this clever stuff and just use it in an F1 car?”
To give one example, take the all-too-familiar issue of inconsistent wi-fi when travelling on a train. “The wi-fi is almost like a household system on wheels,” says Fry. “Getting data off a train which is going under bridges, past trees and through tunnels is quite difficult.”
Motion Applied has been working on a solution akin to the one they developed in F1, because “getting data off a car going at 200 miles an hour around a circuit is also difficult”. “We’ve applied our technology to the rail industry, and it’s being rolled out to train operators across the world.”
Fry was originally brought into McLaren Applied in 2021 when it was sold to a private investment company called Greybull and restructured in the wake of the pandemic and a global slump in car sales. “They [Greybull] had spoken to me before that with a view to helping them on a number of projects,” he recalls.
Aside from improving internet connections on the train from Edinburgh to London, Motion Applied provides high-level electronics to premium motor sports including F1, Nascar and IndyCar. “We also provide a data visualisation system called Atlas [advanced telemetry linked acquisition system]. All those wiggly graphs that you see on an F1 pit wall are generated by our system. We allow the engineers to see 15,000 streams of data in real time.”
Making sense of the data
One issue for businesses, says Fry, is that they generate lots of data, but don’t know what to do with it. “They [Motion Applied] provide a tool which turns the data into graphs that they can understand and interpret.” At present, he acknowledges “we can’t provide them with all the answers”. But the next step, “which we’re working on strongly at the moment”, is to do just that.
The human element of Brawn’s success is especially important, given that the main purpose of our conversation is to talk about the impact of AI. Fry will be one of the panellists at the ICAS Annual Conference 2025 in November in a session titled, “Will AI replace accountants – or elevate them?”
Fry has always worked at the forefront of new technologies. Best known for his track record in F1, he grew up obsessed with motorsport. He had a degree in economics and could have joined Proctor & Gamble, which has been the starting point for a string of successful CEOs, but instead joined the sales and marketing team at the Ford Motor Company. He moved into F1 in 2002 when, as Managing Director at advanced car engineers Prodrive, he took over the BAR Honda team, as it was then known.
Fry, who has also worked with Aston Martin and Mercedes-Benz among others, has irons in many fires these days, spanning AI, data security, healthcare and more. His current roles include Non-Executive Chairman at Motion Applied, formerly known as McLaren Applied, which was an offshoot of the McLaren F1 team. As he explains: “We take technology from Formula 1 and then try to find its commercial benefits. Why develop all this clever stuff and just use it in an F1 car?”
To give one example, take the all-too-familiar issue of inconsistent wi-fi when travelling on a train. “The wi-fi is almost like a household system on wheels,” says Fry. “Getting data off a train which is going under bridges, past trees and through tunnels is quite difficult.”
Motion Applied has been working on a solution akin to the one they developed in F1, because “getting data off a car going at 200 miles an hour around a circuit is also difficult”. “We’ve applied our technology to the rail industry, and it’s being rolled out to train operators across the world.”
Fry was originally brought into McLaren Applied in 2021 when it was sold to a private investment company called Greybull and restructured in the wake of the pandemic and a global slump in car sales. “They [Greybull] had spoken to me before that with a view to helping them on a number of projects,” he recalls.
Aside from improving internet connections on the train from Edinburgh to London, Motion Applied provides high-level electronics to premium motor sports including F1, Nascar and IndyCar. “We also provide a data visualisation system called Atlas [advanced telemetry linked acquisition system]. All those wiggly graphs that you see on an F1 pit wall are generated by our system. We allow the engineers to see 15,000 streams of data in real time.”
Making sense of the data
One issue for businesses, says Fry, is that they generate lots of data, but don’t know what to do with it. “They [Motion Applied] provide a tool which turns the data into graphs that they can understand and interpret.” At present, he acknowledges “we can’t provide them with all the answers”. But the next step, “which we’re working on strongly at the moment”, is to do just that.
For example, in F1 each team is allocated a specific amount of time to test and improve the performance of their cars in a wind tunnel, which can simulate race conditions. “If you can use the data to only test things in the wind tunnel which will be the most efficacious, then your performance is going to improve,” he explains.
Fry gave a talk at Google back in 2019 where he said the capabilities of an F1 car need to improve by approximately 12% year on year. What effect might AI processing all this data have? “It could improve the car by another 50% or more because you’re able to do the data analysis so much quicker and more efficiently than ever before.”
There are parallels here across other walks of life and sectors, including accountancy. AI hopefully won’t take all our jobs – just those parts we want it to. “There will be consequences but never in the history of humankind has the development of technology made everyone redundant,” says Fry. “What it has done is change the shape of things, so people are redeployed and that can be from less interesting jobs towards more interesting jobs. I think the doomsayers will be wrong.
“For example, is it better to have a doctor with a range of knowledge and capability, or use a tool which can access the whole of humankind’s knowledge in a specific area? I think it is probably the latter. But you still want to speak to a doctor.”
“AI probably will end up doing the grunt work, but it’s not going to give you that accidental bit of genius on top”
On the other hand, some jobs may not require the personal touch. “I’m sitting here looking at my VAT return. Do I really want to spend my time doing that? No. But if there’s an AI tool that’s able to do it for me, and I just file it and sign it off, then I’ll be a very happy man! I think the ‘low-level’ accounting tasks will go but the high-level stuff probably won’t.”
To further illustrate the need for the human element, Fry concludes with an example of something brilliant that sprung from an error: the kind AI would probably iron out. “I saw a fantastic video of someone speaking who was the sound engineer on David Bowie’s song Let's Dance.
“He describes one of the track’s distinguishing features, the guitar reverb, which came from a mistake. David Bowie and [producer] Nile Rodgers were struggling to give the song more distinctiveness. Then the guy on the sound desk made a bit of a blunder, and they both said, ‘You've done it!’
“I think that AI probably will end up doing the grunt work, but it’s not going to give you that accidental bit of genius on top.”
Nick Fry will be speaking at this year’s ICAS Annual Conference on 5 November.
Book your tickets now
For example, in F1 each team is allocated a specific amount of time to test and improve the performance of their cars in a wind tunnel, which can simulate race conditions. “If you can use the data to only test things in the wind tunnel which will be the most efficacious, then your performance is going to improve,” he explains.
Fry gave a talk at Google back in 2019 where he said the capabilities of an F1 car need to improve by approximately 12% year on year. What effect might AI processing all this data have? “It could improve the car by another 50% or more because you’re able to do the data analysis so much quicker and more efficiently than ever before.”
There are parallels here across other walks of life and sectors, including accountancy. AI hopefully won’t take all our jobs – just those parts we want it to. “There will be consequences but never in the history of humankind has the development of technology made everyone redundant,” says Fry. “What it has done is change the shape of things, so people are redeployed and that can be from less interesting jobs towards more interesting jobs. I think the doomsayers will be wrong.
“For example, is it better to have a doctor with a range of knowledge and capability, or use a tool which can access the whole of humankind’s knowledge in a specific area? I think it is probably the latter. But you still want to speak to a doctor.”
“AI probably will end up doing the grunt work, but it’s not going to give you that accidental bit of genius on top”
On the other hand, some jobs may not require the personal touch. “I’m sitting here looking at my VAT return. Do I really want to spend my time doing that? No. But if there’s an AI tool that’s able to do it for me, and I just file it and sign it off, then I’ll be a very happy man! I think the ‘low-level’ accounting tasks will go but the high-level stuff probably won’t.”
To further illustrate the need for the human element, Fry concludes with an example of something brilliant that sprung from an error: the kind AI would probably iron out. “I saw a fantastic video of someone speaking who was the sound engineer on David Bowie’s song Let's Dance.
“He describes one of the track’s distinguishing features, the guitar reverb, which came from a mistake. David Bowie and [producer] Nile Rodgers were struggling to give the song more distinctiveness. Then the guy on the sound desk made a bit of a blunder, and they both said, ‘You've done it!’
“I think that AI probably will end up doing the grunt work, but it’s not going to give you that accidental bit of genius on top.”
Nick Fry will be speaking at this year’s ICAS Annual Conference on 5 November.
Book your tickets now
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