CONFERENCE PROGRAMME

Technical Sessions

Explore the latest thinking from industry leaders across performance engineering, motorsport, advanced manufacturing and materials.

Please note: The conference programme is subject to change as additional speakers and sessions are confirmed. For conference enquiries, please contact Sindy Cain.

You present your final slide. Two words on it: "Thank you". You've been talking for an hour. The OEM politely thanks you and says, "We'll get in touch". He won't.

This is not a marketing problem. It's not even a capability problem. You likely have the right tech that the OEM needs.

It is a visibility problem, happening long before anyone makes a choice. By the time the RFQ is written or the funding round opens, the shortlist already exists in people's heads. The names on it earned their place earlier, by being understood. This session closes that gap. Not with more slides or louder marketing, but with one practical tool you can use the moment you leave the room. We will rebuild a pitch live, together. You will not watch a theory. You will help run it. You will leave with a method you can apply to your next pitch, event, RFQ, or investor conversation. Bring the project you most need someone to understand.

Key Takeaways
  • Design presentations around what your audience needs to believe.
  • Recognise when engineering is misunderstood before decisions are made.
  • Create stronger RFQ, investor and customer presentations.

Are you thinking about attracting the eyes of investors, raising bank finance, scaling up or diversifying your product portfolio? With the arrival of serious money into the sector, motorsports and low-volume automotive OEMs are evolving into a serious alternative asset class and a production capacity opportunity.

Join this conversation that cuts through the noise to give you clarity into the business and commercial opportunities as well as the tribulations to be mindful of you venture on this business development journey. How has the market dynamic changed in recent times, what are investors looking for, to the risks of moving from low volume to serial production, and the opportunities to use your skills base to serve other non-automotive sectors.

Key talking points:
  • Motorsports and high-performance automotive engineering as an alternative asset class: Why are investors interested and what do they want?
  • Is it a case of careful what you wish for: What are the cautionary tales of growth for motorsports and high-performance automotives OEMs looking to scale or diversify?
  • Finding liquidity and working capital when considering expansion and growth, especially working with larger sector players with much higher volume demands, with the issues of capex and tooling
  • The opportunities to diversify away from automotive into aerospace, defence, energy, data centres, and other communities
  • What are the production processes, governance and manufacturing capabilities we need to preserve in the UK and why?
  • Use it or lose it – what that means here
  • Sticky wickets to consider when moving from low production runs to long, high-volume production runs to ensure production processes, methodologies, controls and metrics are in place to monitor shop floor performance
  • Dealing with due diligence requirements from lenders and investors

As the 2027 season regulation cycle demands faster, higher-fidelity data pipelines than ever before, hear how columnar data formats, specifically Apache Parquet, are quietly revolutionising the way race teams ingest, store and interrogate telemetry at scale. With over a million data points collected per second across hundreds of onboard sensors, the challenge is no longer just capturing the data; it's structuring it so that simulation engineers, vehicle dynamics leads and strategy teams can query race-weekend datasets in milliseconds rather than minutes.

Key talking points:
  • How data architecture decisions and interoperability capabilities are evolving and making a difference in the speed of engineering decisions
  • Local versus cloud – evolution in usage, how data is shared, and why teams still relying on row-based formats
  • What the 2027 technical ruleset means for teams that haven't yet modernised their data infrastructure
  • How is this technology transferrable to the low volume automotive OEMS and other sectors?
  • Trade-offs between real-time streaming ingestion and batch processing
  • Hear practical examples of improved data architecture making decisions faster, more reliable and more scalable.

For engineers building high-performance, low-volume and motorsport-derived vehicles, the emissions compliance landscape has never been more complex or more technically demanding.

Small OEMs building low-volume, high-performance and electrified vehicles face a compliance landscape designed for mass manufacturing volumes, one that adds cost, complexity, and risk entirely disproportionate to their real-world environments. This is both an engineering problem, pushing for the absolute limits of performance and a regulatory one. This session brings together low-volume vehicle makers, powertrain specialists, and policy-aware voices to cut through the regulatory noise and explore what practical reform could look like for low volume OEMs in the UK and their trade in local, European, and US markets to ensure viability, commercial resilience and growth. Expect frank conversation, real examples, and a push towards identifying where the industry needs to speak with one voice.

Key talking points:
  • Navigating a legislative framework built around mass-market volumes: Where the risks sits, where the opportunities are, and what UK manufacturers can do now to protect and grow their position
  • Is it compliance or technology the primary barrier stopping low-volume OEMs from bringing innovative electric and high-performance vehicles to market?
  • The exposure landscape faced by specialist manufacturers building to order
  • The UK's Zero Emission Vehicle Mandate, Evaporative Emissions Systems (EVAP) and beyond: Where are the regulatory and compliance pressure points and what are the steps to navigating them as a low volume OEM?
  • Is a viable coalition to be built, where collective industry advocacy is more likely to move the needle with governments than individual company lobbying? Then what is the message?
  • Best of British and the international trade market – from tariffs to certification pathways which route is viable for low-volume, specialist, and track-only products?

For engineers building high-performance, low-volume and motorsport-derived vehicles, the emissions compliance landscape has never been more complex or more technically demanding.

Hydrogen internal combustion engines represent one of the most technically intriguing frontiers in motorsport powertrain engineering. With many exploring hydrogen as a route to decarbonisation without abandoning the acoustic and mechanical drama of combustion, join this session to understand the latest in hydrogen ICE engine design, fuel systems, cooling, hydrogen purity, batteries, injectors and storage solutions, and the working through of the engineering challenge.

Key talking points:
  • Hands-on: Explore hydrogen ICE components, behaviours and fuel system solutions from UK developers
  • How hydrogen changes combustion chemistry, and what that means for engine design and management systems
  • Nox emissions and developments in advanced aftertreatment solutions
  • The road to Les Mans 2030
  • Making the hydrogen economics, the range, and levels they need to operate work

With rising demand for lightweight and high-performance automotive components pace and sale of need, coupled with signals to reduce production time and developmental costs, additive manufacturing growing its scope in where it can provide solutions. From improved efficiency to reduced material waste, to production grade load bearing, performance-critical components AM has come out to play. Join this touch it, feel it, see it session on manufacturing what was formerly impossible with traditional methods.

Key talking points:
  • Understanding the design principles, material science, and process parameters that make additive manufacturing viable
  • What the 2026 F1 additive manufacturing regulations mean for part design and certification
  • Beyond margin gains: The fundamental shifts in how performance components are designed, iterated and produced, from placing material only where is it needed to filling the tooling gap, lowering the final mass, improving the stiffness-to-weight ratio and optimising performance
  • From weeks to days: Mind-blowing examples of rapid prototyping and design validation to compress development timelines
  • Where is additive manufacturing changing the rules for high-load mechanical parts, complex geometries and improving fuel efficiency not possible with traditional methods?
  • Cross sector examples: Additive manufacturing in defence, aerospace, and automotive — where the technology is maturing fastest

The ECU has evolved from engine management into the central nervous system of a performance vehicle, with the rate of change accelerating. With transitions to zonal and central computing architectures that help enable more scalable, SDVs that support advanced features, today coupled with the integration of gen AI and machine learning, magic is coming to life, with performance engineers in the pit lane. The 2027 seasons winners will be those who can crunch the heavy data, interpret it, and decide the fastest. For engineers sourcing or specifying control systems for new programmes, understanding the electronic architecture available, and what they unlock, join this session to explore the latest in cutting-edge ECU capability and AI-assisted calibration capabilities and real-time adaptive strategy.

Key talking points:
  • Modern ECUs: Key applications where high computational capacity and AI electronics architecture are replacing mechanical solutions?
  • Get hands on with the latest ECU calibration software, data system components and real-time performance development tools
  • Problem solving – where are the present-day ECU rubs and innovations in filling the holes in the power band
  • Enabling greater reliability in safety critical vehicle operations – from dealing with huge data loads to AI operating across various vehicle subsystems
  • What the software-defined architecture conversation means for low-volume road car programmes?

The UK Motorsport Valley employs 41,000 people across 4,300 companies and holds 80% of the world's top motorsport engineers. That density is the industry's biggest asset, and its biggest vulnerability. Everyone is fishing from the same small pond, and the pond is shrinking exactly where it matters most. Join this outside view of the sector on approaches to skills investment, regional skills coordination as an investable, measurable programme rather than the present-day fragmented approach that it is.

Key talking points:
  • An outside in perspective on how other sectors structure regional talent, apprenticeships and recruitment
  • What effective regional coordination between employers, universities and training bodies looks like in practice, and where does it most often break down?
  • How to use the Motorsport Valley's density as a recruiting advantage rather than losing your best people to the company next door or worse, to another sector entirely?

Metallurgy is one of the oldest sciences which continually advances as manufacturing methods and material technologies emerge. Sadly, the literature and design data on the subject is not frequently updated and the availability of the information can be outdated, fragmented or difficult to access. This leads to the division of knowledge across the supply chain. Downstream users are unfamiliar with manufacturer’s full capabilities, limitations and service offering, whilst manufacturers may supply material that is fully compliant but not optimised for real world challenges faced by specific applications or industries. The conversation will explore how industry can bridge the gap between material producers, engineers, designers and end users to improve confidence in material selection, strengthen supply chain reliability and achieve more consistent end-product performance.

Key talking points:
  • Balancing an almost infinite range of modern materials against limited guidance that create over or under engineering caused by reliance on aged or incomplete data
  • Lead times, material availability and grade obsolescence
  • Real-world performance vs laboratory data vs AI-generated statistical modelling - the variations, validation of data and building trust in raw materials
  • The importance of consistent manufacturing processes from control of chemical composition, impurities and trace elements to repeatability between batches to enhance downstream processing and end-product reliability

The boundaries between racing, defence, deep tech to clean energy and beyond are dissolving. Cross sector synergies are increasingly acknowledged as fields align, and more industries value how our sector problem solves complex engineering constraints to produce the most rapid innovations. This stargazing session explores where the technology has already gone, where is it going next, and what is coming back into our world from others? Featuring cross sector engineers, entrepreneurs, and leaders who have personally navigated the transfer from pitlane to operating theatre, battlefield, wind farm, and satellite.

Key talking points:
  • The technology transfer that has already happened: From F1 telemetry monitoring human cardiac events in real time, to Williams-derived EV powertrain technology decarbonising mining haul trucks, to high-performance battery systems powering last-mile military operations and drone propulsion
  • Mapping the pipeline: How does F1 technology travel from race application to production part to defence contract, or clinical tool?
  • Defence is coming to Motorsport Valley, and the £2 billion question which SMEs are ready?
  • Technology transfer return signal. What is space, medicine, energy and other sectors giving back to the industry?
  • Stargazing ahead: The technologies being developed in adjacent sectors today that will reshape performance engineering by 2035?

AI agents are moving into the engineering workflow. Autonomously running simulation sweeps, interrogating test data, accelerating design iteration cycles that once took weeks and now integrating seamlessly with engineering tools like simulation software. This session explores how motorsport and high-performance vehicle teams can and are deploying agentic AI across CFD, structural analysis, and vehicle dynamics to compress development timelines without compromising engineering rigour, evolving engineering teams methodology.

Key talking points:
  • Current state of AI Agents at automotive OEMs and suppliers
  • Practical thoughts: Where agents deliver genuine deliver value and competitive advantage today
  • Where the hype outpaces the reality?
  • How engineers should trust or challenge AI-supported outputs

Becoming central for engineering organisations: connecting fragmented test, simulation and operational data; reducing manual analysis bottlenecks; and using AI to accelerate engineering workflows without removing the need for human judgement and validation.

Practical engineering discussion around where AI genuinely improves speed of learning, where validation remains essential, and how engineers should trust or challenge AI-supported outputs

Get up close with the machines, the parts, and the people. Meet the tech gurus, materials experts and engineering specialists who make the impossible routine. Join this session to explore what keeps this cluster at the top of the world. From the tolerances and lead times that OEMs and Tier 1 suppliers in other industries simply cannot match to the latest advancements in materials, engineering and technology operating at the limits of temperature, load, wear and performance.

Within the automotive industry, multiple teams within a single organisation often use different simulation software tools to represent various aspects of vehicle behaviour. It’s common for these tools to rely on their own native tyre-model implementation, validating the compatibility of these tyre models across multiple tools is inefficient. This presentation demonstrates how these fragmentation can be solved by packaging tyre models as FMUs creates a single, reusable component that's compatible with most simulation workflows. This novel approach streamlines validation, improves confidence in simulation results and enables simpler integration of third-party add-ons.