Dave Pollard is the data and instrumentation engineer at INEOS Britannia. He grew up in Cheltenham in the UK, sailing as a teenager, before going to university in Bristol for eight years. It was initially to study aerospace engineering, before completing a PhD in robotics, focused on 3D printing.
Dave continued to work in 3D printing research with his first job after University, joining UltiMaker in the Netherlands we. He then moved into working offshore for Huisman, another Dutch company, commissioning and testing large cranes and wind turbine installation systems. It was 2021 when he saw the AC36 racing during the Covid pandemic, and as he was looking to move back to the UK, thought it might be a good place to work.
“My dad was into sailing when he was younger, and he was talking about it and I said I’d have a look. It was on YouTube and it’s great racing, I watched INEOS Britannia not do so well for a few races. And then they suddenly came back, which was really cool. So, I looked on the website and there were no interesting jobs advertised for INEOS Britannia. So, I sent Will Bakewell (Lead Testing and Validation Engineer) a message on LinkedIn. And then next week, he put up some more interesting jobs and I applied for one.
“My role here is data and instrumentation engineer and that covers everything on the boat from measuring boat shape, parts of the wing, how the sail flies during sailing using LIDAR cameras, organizing cameras and data. There are many other sensors that we have around the boat so the performance guys can find out how well the boat’s performing, the fluids guys know how the boat’s flying, and the sailors know how fast the boat’s sailing.
“I look at all the data we get from the boat to make sure all the sensors are reliable and providing good information. It’s then a matter of analysing and routing the information to the teams who use it. We have lots of people who want all the information about the boat, as soon as it’s off the water. There’s a lot of pressure to get all of the information out to everyone in a timely manner, but we also need to make sure that the data is good. We don’t want to tell people that we are going this fast when we are actually going at a completely different speed. Everyone needs to know which data is reliable, which data we can trust, and which data we should ignore for now.
“It's a challenge, working in such a high-performance environment. People are really passionate about their work. They're really good and at the top of their fields but they're quite demanding in terms of what they want. And we need to be demanding in terms of what we want from ourselves to get data to them. And they want the best data, they want all the data. And sometimes it's difficult, we can't measure literally everything on the boat. So, we just measure as much as we can.
“One of the highlights is just being able to work on the boat, it's a really cool bit of equipment, there's lots of really good design work that's gone into it, and lots of really cool solutions that have come out. So being part of making it work as well as it can and perform at the highest level is really satisfying.
“One thing I brought with me from my previous work is to keep pushing when you need to learn new things. When you're working offshore and something needs fixing and you've got no idea how to do it, it's just expected of you that it's going to get fixed. The same sort of thing is happening here; if something's not working, you need to learn how it should work, and how to make it work and then apply the fix. I already had that confidence that you can learn something well enough to fix whatever you need to fix, and learn something well enough to make whatever needs to happen, happen.
“I like to push myself in sports, and obviously, my work. I do a lot of cycling, probably not as much as I did when I was doing a PhD, when it was all about triathlons, but I try and keep cycling. It’s about getting the best out of myself, and that's not really something that many people get the chance to do. I’m fortunate to be one of the people pushing the boat, making sure that it's in the best possible state. Everyone's just very supportive that it's a lot of work to do, it's quite long days. But what we get out of it at the end is a cool boat and the chance to say that… ‘I worked on that. I made it work well.’
“It's been great coming to work here and finding out what actually happened to make the boat go fast in the last campaign [after watching it on Youtube] and understanding what they're changing this campaign to make it go even faster. Another thing that is interesting about the AC is that it doesn't happen very often. There are 24 F1 races a year, and that's the pinnacle of motorsport -- but the pinnacle of sailing is a handful of races every three or four years.
© Ugo Fonollá / INEOS Britannia
Ugo Fonollá / INEOS Britannia
“It would be cool to be part of a winning team. There's only a couple of hundred people every three or four years that can say they've won the America's Cup. And to be one of those as part of our team here would be really good. I've learned a lot in the last two years, and for the next campaign, it would be a great chance to learn even more and make the boats even faster.”