The 2022 Autosport Awards winner using Esports as a launchpad

The Williams FW44 is blasting along the pitstraight at the Red Bull Ring. After sweeping through the rapid final double right-hand sequence that ends the lap, it picks up even more speed powering past the pits and grandstands and heading up the hill to the Turn 1 right. But here, it swings wildly left and traverses the braking zone over the kerbs lining the outside of the track in a way Alex Albon and Nicholas Latifi would never do. Autosport is perplexed…

“The Esports drivers can run kerbs a lot more aggressively than you would in the real world. And, aside from that, you also wouldn’t do that in a real car because you’d probably break it after 10 laps!”

We’re hearing from Michael Preston, an up-and-coming engineering graduate who has spent the past year working with Williams’s professional Esports team. He’s standing next to a group of eight simulators running the F1 2022 game for a gang of journalists to sample (unfortunately there is some Autosport friendly fire when we have a go later – apologies to Jonathan Noble and Luke Smith, but not Stuart Codling!).

There are even more sophisticated rigs lining the room, with giant, very comfortable sofas on which to watch the various rounds of Event Two from F1’s 2022 Esports Series, which is taking place at the same time. We’re in Williams Esports’ HQ.

Two months on from this conversation, Preston will be awarded the revamped Autosport Williams Engineer of the Future prize at the 2022 Autosport Awards. The Award had to be paused during the opening years of the COVID-19 pandemic and is being fully relaunched in 2023. Then, a group of budding engineers will compete in a series of tests that have been modelled on Preston’s 2022 part-time work, which ended in him being recognised with last year’s prize solo.

Given Preston spent much of his time working across the categories in which the Williams Esports team competes, this year’s Award applicants can expect the same approach. This, Williams feels, reflects the nature of the changing routes into many motorsport roles, including engineering.

“It’s told the innovation story for us,” says Williams director of Esports Steven English of the thinking behind the Award changes. “It’s like it’s [now] decided, ‘Here’s a really futuristic way to build a pathway for engineers.’ And a lot of it is down to Michael and the work he’s done and the value he’s brought to the team, to show that we’re blazing a new trail here.”

Preston has been honing his skills as part of the Williams Esports setup

Photo by: Williams

Preston, who quipped on stage at the Autosport Awards that “this time last year I was delivering Christmas trees”, was head of race engineering for the Southampton University Formula Student team during his time at the institution. A friend from the same squad went on to be hired by Williams and, when they heard about the Esports team requiring an engineer, asked if Preston wanted to be considered.

He did, and “then I got touch in with Steven in September 2021-ish”, Preston explains. “And then it took a couple of months from his side to work out where engineers would go and the initial structure he wanted. And then, January of this year, it finally came together – we started getting some people in place and went from there. Never looked back.”

Now that he has experienced engineering Williams’s drivers through their virtual competitions in Formula 1, NASCAR and others including the Le Mans Virtual Series, Preston is best placed to explain precisely how engineering in the virtual world translates so easily into work on real-life cars.

"You use the exact same software whether it’s sim-racing or real-life racing. So, sim racing in that sense is a really good practice for engineers, because you can just build up hours and hours and hours practising using the tools that you’d spend looking at on a weekend" Michael Preston

“A lot of it is really very similar,” he says. “The only things that sim racing really lacks is the sort of physical g-force that is going through a car and a driver. And the danger.

“Everything else – all of the data-logging of driver inputs – is the exact same. And you use the exact same software whether it’s sim-racing or real-life racing. So, sim racing in that sense is a really good practice for engineers, because you can just build up hours and hours and hours practising using the tools that you’d spend looking at, say in a 30-minute practice session on a weekend.

“And then, obviously with the number of drivers that a team like Williams has, there’s so many hours of data to process and things like that. It’s not something that the drivers want to sit and go through and work out – the perfect strategy and stuff like that. So, that works quite well, where engineers can benefit from the experience that they gain in Esports. But, also, the Esports side benefits from just the data-handling that engineers can bring to the motorsport [discipline], effectively.

“It’s the same data channels that you’d get off a real car that you can have in sim racing. In many cases, you can have even more in sim racing because it’s a simulation – it’s just a pure physical model. You can get more channels like forces and stuff that you’d have to create maths channels to work out in a real car. You just get those as channels in the sim world.”

Preston was head of race engineering for the Southampton University Formula Student team prior to working with Williams

Photo by: Carl Bingham / Motorsport Images

Looking ahead to those who will follow his path as part of this year’s Award programme, Preston says they shouldn’t “be afraid of long hours!”

“Especially going into engineering,” he adds. “People aren’t going to give you things. You have to go out and look for either a result and ask somebody else to help you get there, or look at how to learn to do something specific. I’d guess that’s good enough advice!”

In addition to his Esports work, Preston also spent the season-ending Brands Hatch and Donington Park weekends working with the Carlin squad during its GB3 campaign, as well as engineering driver Will Tregurtha in GT racing. In addition to receiving his Autosport Award statue, he will begin a full-time engineering role at Williams Esports and attend a 2023 F1 test to spend a day shadowing a race team engineer.

But what of the long-term future for Preston? Just two weeks before we met, Autosport observed Peter Bonnington – Lewis Hamilton’s race engineer at Mercedes and the voice on the radio through all six of the Briton’s world title wins for the Silver Arrows – unpretentiously signing autographs for fans leaving the track at the Singapore Grand Prix. Even if fame isn’t a goal, what about the role?

“I guess a race engineer in F1 is probably the ultimate goal,” Preston concludes modestly. “But equally, since starting sim racing properly and getting involved with engineering in sim racing, I’ve been working a lot more on endurance-style racing and started getting a lot more into the Le Mans 24, Sebring – those sort of tracks that you don’t really hear a lot about if you’re just an F1 fan.

“There’s so much that goes on in motorsport that isn’t F1. I think it would be a shame if you just only ever get to work in F1 and don’t sample everything that there is to offer.”

Preston has built experience of real-life scenarios working with Carlin's GB3 team

Photo by: Carlin