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The surgeon who used F1 pitstop techniques to save lives of babies

Professor Martin Elliott reflects on how watching a Formula 1 race two decades ago led to an unlikely partnership with Ferrari that transformed practices at Great Ormond Street and other hospitals

At the Dutch Grand Prix, among the sports stars and musicians who strolled around the Zandvoort paddock and filled the grid was a different kind of VIP, Professor Martin Elliott, who spent much of his career as a paediatric cardiothoracic surgeon — operating on children’s hearts and lungs — at Great Ormond Street Hospital. “There was a quote from Ross Brawn [the former Ferrari technical director] when we were working with him: ‘If you want to be the best team in Formula 1, everybody has to want to be world champion at what they do.’ In other words, the person cleaning the pit, wiping any grease off the outside of the car which would slow it down, all those people have to do it perfectly, and they’ve got to want that common goal if you’re going to make it a success.” Through the relationship with Formula 1, a number of other discoveries were made: the computational flow dynamics used in wind tunnels mirror the mathematics used in an MRI scanner, and the data on the pitwall graphs that predicts the failure of a car component is similar to that used on a life support machine.

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