He’s the successful entrepreneur who made tens of millions of pounds from the sale of his biotech business, before embarking on a career as a high-flying politician in the Blair government. And now Lord Paul Drayson has another ambition – to become a top-class racing driver, promoting green technologies along the way.
But it’s doubtful that any of these achievements would have come about if it wasn’t for Drayson’s background as an engineer. He believes engineering gave him a sound technical background, allowing him to make crucial business decisions at just the right time. “It’s often said that engineers don’t make good business executives – but I think it’s quite the opposite. That sort of technical background gives people many of the skills that are needed to launch and build strong companies.”
Drayson’s interest in engineering arose through a geographical quirk. His family home was near Brands Hatch, and the thrill of the track was a temptation. As soon as he could get a licence, he was riding a moped. His first car soon followed, sparking an interest in how engines worked. “For me, engineering was always about cars,” he says.
That association influenced his academic choices. In 1978 Drayson won sponsorship from British Leyland to study engineering at Aston University, while beginning an Austin undergraduate apprenticeship at the Longbridge car plant. During his final year at Aston, he did a robotics project at British Leyland’s technology laboratory. “The new west works at Longbridge was where the new Mini Metro had been launched, and the production line had a lot of robots. That seemed a great opportunity for a young engineer, and it led to an offer to do a PhD in robotics at Aston. The decision to accept turned out to be crucial.”
This was because it gave Drayson his first experience of manufacturing techniques in the food industry. And the PhD helped to foster his entrepreneurial talent.
“Even in the early days at university, I had an ambition to have my own factory,” he says. “The PhD meant I was my own boss: I defined my research area and discovered that I loved that freedom and responsibility.”
His career as an entrepreneur had begun in earnest. Soon after completing the PhD, and using the knowledge he gained throughout it, Drayson went to work for food manufacturer the Lambourn Food Company, where he led a 3i-backed management buyout, becoming managing director from 1986 to 1991. The years spent building Lambourn also saw him acquire a direct competitor, growing the group substantially. He sold the business in 1991, aged just 31.
That led to a stint on 3i’s management buy-in programme, and it was during this time that Drayson met an academic who was to have a profound effect on his career. That academic was Brian Bellhouse, a medical engineer from the University of Oxford. Bellhouse had developed the concept of formulating medicines as small particle powders, and accelerating them at supersonic speed so they could be painlessly injected through the skin. Drayson saw the potential of the needle-free technology, and co-founded PowderJect Pharmaceuticals as a start-up. At that time PowderJect had three employees: Bellhouse, Drayson and his wife Elspeth, who worked at the university.
“I had to learn about pharmaceuticals and biotech from scratch,” he says. “But I could see how advanced the technology was. It also had a strong patent, and the fact that it had come out of Oxford University science meant a lot. The potential for PowderJect was huge.”
The three colleagues set about building the company, a journey that would take 10 years. One of the main strengths of the PowderJect technology was that the concept of needle-free injection was easy to understand. Its advantages were also obvious. The drug delivery method also opened up the potential for the development of new medicines. So, although the company was tiny, its strong patent and innovative technology meant that it had great potential.
Drayson says that looking back, he realises just how important it was to have a strong patent upon which to build the business. “It is important as an engineer in business to think about what are the claims in the patent, and to ensure that it gives you sufficient ownership of the market. What that means sometimes is having a conversation with your patent agent: not just ‘I’ve invented this – please write it down’ but ‘I’ve invented this – tell me what’s weak about it’, so you can go away and do more research and experiments to strengthen it.”
Another key to the success of PowderJect was the licensing strategy, which saw the technology licensed to pharmaceutical companies for the delivery of their medicines on a molecule-by-molecule basis. PowderJect became a licensing company rather than a medical device company.
“That was an important early decision, because it determined the risk/return and how much we had to invest – how much capital we needed to prove the technology and to do the experiments to prove that it worked. It also helped us work out how quickly we would start generating cash flow. As an entrepreneur, the most important thing is to have an idea of how much cash you need to get to where you need to be. That’s what I think I brought to the business.”
One way of growing the business was to float it through an initial public offering. Taking a company public can mean having to deal with new priorities and concerns, such as meeting shareholders’ demands. But Drayson took the change in structure in his stride: “I enjoyed running a public company. We never went below our IPO price, and we made a lot of money for our shareholders. We went from three members of staff to more than 1,000 employees; and from no turnover to £125 million and making £25 million profit. For me, it was a great experience.”
That sort of growth doesn’t go unnoticed. And in 2003 a much larger medical firm, Chiron Corp, made a hostile takeover approach. It was rejected. But about six months later, Chiron came back again with a better offer.
“I will always remember the conversation with my shareholders, who simply said ‘well done, Paul – goodbye’.” That was that. But there was no hard feeling: PowderJect was a great success.”
After the sale of PowderJect, Drayson was suddenly a wealthy man and, aged 43, he found himself at a crossroads. He had never viewed himself as a political beast, but he did have an interest in campaigning as a result of a stint as chairman of the BioIndustry Association. At that time, some of his colleagues were being threatened by animal rights extremists who were determined to stop all forms of animal testing in the UK.
“I got cross about this one issue: people I knew in my industry were literally being attacked by these faceless people who wanted to stop what they thought was wrong. Testing of medicine on animals is required by law. You cannot develop a pharmaceutical product without doing it. So it seemed to me unfair that as a company you were required to do this testing, but if you did it these people thought it was legitimate to threaten you.”
His engagement with this issue saw Drayson becoming more interested in politics, particularly science policy, innovation, biotech and pharmaceuticals. He decided to concentrate on politics full-time, and became a rising star in Westminster circles. He was appointed to the House of Lords in 2004, and a year later became under-secretary of state and minister for defence procurement in the Lords, eventually publishing the Defence Industrial Strategy. In 2007, he was promoted to minister of state in the new Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform. He also did a stint as minister of state for science and innovation at the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills in Gordon Brown’s government before stepping down.
He had made the transition from full-time science entrepreneur and businessman to full-time politician. “Those two careers were about as different as any two careers could be,” he recalls.
“Firstly, in business everything you do is cumulative – step by step, if you are making progress, you can build a successful business. In politics, that is not the case. It’s more about what you have done in the past 20 minutes and what are you going to do in the next 20 minutes. You can go from hero to zero in a heartbeat. That creates a sense of intensity which is unlike anything else.”
Drayson would feel frustrated that politics was often more about what people said than what they did. “I had grown up in a world where what you said was kind of irrelevant – it was what you did that mattered. Indeed, civil servants often found me a bit strange – because I cared about managing the implementation.”
But despite this alien culture, Drayson says he is proud of what he achieved as a politician. He thinks the publication of the Defence Industrial Strategy made the Labour government far more aware of strategically important manufacturing industries, making it think more carefully about continuity of orders for large-scale pieces of equipment such as submarines. But he fears the legacy could be squandered. “Unfortunately, the difficulty of having a defence industry strategy is that the time horizons involved are longer than any single parliament. And that’s where the reality of politics collides with the reality of planning.”
He was also directly responsible for the introduction of the patent box legislation, which will see tax reduced on patented technologies from 26% to 10%. The legislation has been carried through by the current government and comes into effect in six months’ time. Drayson feels the patent box will have a profound effect in persuading high-profile companies to carry out research and development in the UK, and to locate their manufacturing facilities here, too.
“The patent box was my idea,” he says. But it wasn’t an easy sell: “I spent a year explaining to Treasury officials the process of wealth creation in high-tech industries and what sort of thing affects a decision to locate a plant here.”
It was that kind of strategic understanding that Drayson thinks he helped foster within government. He looks back on his political career with pride and still thinks it was a good career move. “Politics can, at its best, be a huge force for good. I would encourage engineers to get involved, because we need more people in politics with industrial experience.”
But even while he was in politics, his real passion was still burning brightly. Drayson had never shaken off his love of motor-racing. Indeed, he was given leave of absence while in office to compete at the Le Mans championship in France. He was born blind in one eye, but he never let this disability stop him from racing. Quite the opposite, in fact: he was instrumental in getting the FIA (Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile – the governing body for world motorsport) to overturn a long-standing rule that had prevented drivers blind in one eye from being granted an international licence to race.
With such a passion, it stands to reason that Drayson would eventually focus all his time on motor-racing. He and Elspeth have formed Drayson Racing Technologies, combining their interest in fast cars with their concerns about climate change. The main thrust of the business is to pioneer the development of green technologies, initially racing vehicles with second-generation biofuels, and now the emerging field of electric racing.
“Around 2007, when climate change started to be an issue, I thought: we are racing around in circles, burning fuel – it’s not right. It seemed to me that motorsport needed to be part of the solution rather than the problem. We needed to use it to develop new technology. I could see there was a business opportunity in using motorsport as a racing laboratory for green tech. That’s led to what we do here with electric cars.”
The electric car in question is the B12/69EV, powered by lithium nanophosphate battery cells (see box on page 25). The car, which can reach speeds of 320km/h, acts as a demonstration platform for the novel technologies being developed by a project consortium that includes Lola and BAE Systems. The plan is to use the car to break lap records for electric vehicles at tracks around the world, and to generate business opportunities for Drayson Racing Technologies and its partners.
So what have been the challenges of developing such a car? “The need to achieve the right weight-to-power ratio has been critical in optimising performance. This has involved ensuring that the component elements in the vehicle have been packaged in precisely the right way,” says Drayson.
“In our role as systems integrator, we had to first identify the right partners to bring this project to fruition and then work closely with them to specify how the key elements of motor, batteries, inverter and control hardware could be combined and fitted to achieve optimal performance. Safety has also been a key factor to ensure that the car battery discharges on impact and that there are no fire safety risks.”
The car made its debut in the summer at the Goodwood Festival of Speed, with its electric drivetrain delivering 850 brake horsepower. Drayson was at the wheel: “It handles just like a conventional Le Mans car. But the thing that is so different is the way the power is delivered, and the lack of sound and vibration.
“The torque is completely linear from zero revs. So it's not like with an internal combustion engine, where as a racing driver you are always managing where you are in the revs band. With this car, there is no rev band. The acceleration is the same. So the thing you notice is that it just launches. There is incredible acceleration. All the way up to top speed, it is accelerating at the same rate. That’s quite something.”
The second big difference, says Drayson, is that it’s hard to measure speed. “So there you are travelling at 150-200mph, and it really doesn't feel like it. In a Le Mans car, when you approach a corner at 150mph you have all the vibration and the noise from the engine giving you feedback. You don't need to look down –you just know roughly what speed you are going and what gear you are in.
“In the electric car, firstly you've got no gear and not much noise, so your judgement of speed is the landscape going past. That means it's easy to approach corners too fast. It takes a while to get used to that. But it's really cool. And when you exit a corner, you are not used to having the same acceleration rate. I think it will make for great racing.”
The car is now being refined in preparation for the FIA Formula E Championship, which will be launched in 2014. This will be an exciting challenge for Drayson, who thinks electric vehicles have a bright future on and off the track. And he expects to be at the forefront of that development.
“While estimates of penetration vary, it’s clear that electric vehicles will be a big part of the car market in the future. As engineers in the UK, we need to be a prominent part of that revolution. We are the world leaders in motor sport, and we need to be the world leaders in electric motor sport.”
An electrifying performer
The Drayson Racing B12/69EV is an electric ultra-high-performance vehicle based on the current Lola LMP1 chassis.
The car is powered by electricity stored in advanced lithium nanophosphate battery cells, which are housed in a battery pack that drives four axial flux motors via inverters. The motors are mounted in a similar place to where the engine would have been located, and then fitted to the driveshafts and the wheels in a similar fashion to that for a traditional racing car.
The car does not change gears: it has a single reduction gear linking the drive from the electric motors to the driveshafts. The charging is delivered through a Qualcomm Halo wireless induction system, which uses coils in the floor of the car. These enable recharging when the car is positioned over a recharging pad.
The car’s power is around 640kW and it weighs 1,000kg. The overall control system for the car will be supplied by Drayson Racing Technologies in partnership with Cosworth.
The Cosworth system interprets the signals from the throttle and brake pedals, and manages the flow of electricity from the batteries to the 640kW electric drivetrain, to provide power and braking.
As well as having a new electric drivetrain, the car will benefit from aerodynamic features being developed by Lola with BAE, and a recycled carbon-fibre technology developed in-house by Lola.
Performance characteristics include a top speed of 320km/h, 0-60mph in 3.0 seconds, and 0-100mph in 5.1 seconds. Power in qualify mode is 640kW/850bhp and running time in race mode is more than 15 minutes.