Paddy Lowe

Paddy Lowe's career is a narrative of high-speed innovation, first in the pursuit of milliseconds on the track, now in the race for sustainable energy. Trained as a computer scientist, he entered Formula One with Williams in 1987, where his systems engineering mind found the perfect arena. His rise through the technical ranks was meteoric, holding pivotal technical director roles at McLaren and Mercedes during eras of profound dominance. At Mercedes, as Executive Director, he was a key architect of the hybrid turbocharged engines that rewrote the record books. The numbers are staggering: over three decades, his work contributed to 158 Grand Prix wins and a dozen driver and constructor titles. In 2019, he walked away from the F1 paddock, not to retire, but to tackle a bigger problem. He co-founded Zero, a company dedicated to developing fossil-free synthetic fuels. For Lowe, it's the ultimate engineering challenge: applying the relentless precision of F1 to create a carbon-neutral fuel that could keep internal combustion engines alive in a climate-conscious world.