From designing and building Moto3 competition bikes to becoming a stress engineer in Formula 1, Pol Sancho was enjoying a relatively typical motorsport career trajectory. But he wanted to make it in business as well, which is why he founded the online marketplace GPBox – and coded it himself…
THIS MONTH
GP Racing: You had a very interesting entry point into motor racing – going straight into designing a motorbike…
Pol Sancho: I graduated in Barcelona in mechanical design, engineering and automotive engineering. Different universities compete with projects such as Formula Student and MotoStudent, which we won in 2012.
We were young and naïve and thought we were the best, so we founded BASS Racing to design and build motorbikes from scratch for the up-and-coming riders in the Spanish championship. So that triggered my passion for motorsport and for having my own business – to follow the former I moved to Oxford where I did a Masters’ degree and went into Formula 1 with Manor, then Force India and Renault.
GPR: What was it like getting your start with Manor, one of the teams which was struggling?
PS: I was in the room that sixth of January [2017] when we were told the team was no longer competing. It was unfortunate Manor didn’t survive because it was amazing experience – we were roughly 250 employees, 35-40 engineers, much smaller than other teams but we still had to make a car. And it’s got 26,000 parts. So it’s very, very challenging but you gain a lot of experience getting to know the car as a whole rather than on a big team, where you end up focusing on individual areas. That certainly helped me a lot as I moved along the rungs and at Renault I was the team leader at the front of the car, overseeing everything from the mirrors forwards. I believe I was the youngest senior stress engineer in that team and that was thanks to my Manor experience..
GPR: You did an MBA as well. Was this something you did in parallel or did you decide there was a right time to go into business for yourself?
PS: It’s most engineers’ dream to work in F1 and to spend your life in it. For me it wasn’t enough to do this for the rest of my career. I always had in the back of my mind that
INTERVIEW spark of making my own thing from scratch. So I decided to move back to Barcelona and do an MBA here in the IESE Business School, which is one of the top three in Europe. If people think Formula 1 is hard they should try an MBA – it’s nuts! But it went really well.
The idea for GPBox came before I joined Renault. I’m an F1 fan and I like to collec
