Mark Searle, Director of Product Management

ark Searle joined Cosworth in February 2022 as Director of Product Management. With years of experience in Automotive Research and Development and Product Management, his presence at Cosworth has already been impactful, as we strengthen our product portfolio.

Could you tell us more about your current role?

As Director of Product Management, I work with a talented team of product Managers to steer our product.  Our goal is to work with sales, engineering and the wider business to develop and manage a roadmap for our portfolio of products across the motorsport, performance, automotive and data sectors.

What does Cosworth’s current portfolio look like?

Our motorsport products are high-performance and highly-configurable race components that help our customers maximise the performance of both vehicles and drivers. These include engine management, power management, steering wheels and data capture and analysis products.

What is AliveDrive?

Our AliveDrive product line enables the recording, replay, analysis and sharing of road and race outings.  In the case of race, drivers can review, analyse and substantially improve their performance. For road, they can relive their driving experience with video, data and capture moments of their driving with the advantage of full data presentation using video overlays.

Data is key at Cosworth; can you explain why data is so imperative to on track performance?

Data is at the heart of all Cosworth products and is proving to be a game-changer for motorsport and automotive technologies. It drives vehicle performance directly through component strategies and indirectly through post-race analysis.  Connecting users’ data to their own and to third party services is increasingly important in a world of machine learning and AI for prediction.

Can you explain the AliveDrive ecosystem?

There are a number of variants of AliveDrive, with our ‘premium’ product being AliveDrive Performance. AliveDrive Performance includes a high-fidelity, high-speed video and data acquisition ECU and camera, an in-vehicle, Android Automotive infotainment system application, mobile and PC applications for review, sharing and cloud storage.

A variant is available where the OEM is able to provide high quality camera and data directly to the infotainment application. This avoids the need for a dedicated data acquisition ECU.  Other variants are tailored to configurations of the vehicle in automotive and motorsport applications.

We also provide cloud services that help customers, with the assistance of third party service providers, to get the most out of their data.

What do you envisage for Cosworth’s product line-up in the future?

I can’t say too much about our future line-up but we can look forward to evolution of our products that will involve new and sustainable forms of propulsion.  We are already introducing hybrid into motorsport, with BTCC last year being a first of its kind.  We are substantially investing in this and other ambitious new technologies, components and services.

On the automotive side, we are looking at a future where vehicle architectures and key technologies are changing rapidly.  Data acquisition including multiple camera feeds is becoming a central part of the vehicle strategy.  We expect AliveDrive to continue to play a huge role and expand in this sector.

Is there further development going into cloud systems?

The concept of Race to Road is important to the Cosworth product where performance matters. We are using our experience in each of these sectors to improve the other, with data as the crucial connection, which means cloud is vital to this strategy.

Will there be more integration with the wider Cosworth group?

Cosworth Electronics, of course, already works closely with the wider Cosworth Group. However, we envisage even closer collaborations in future as we combine our propulsion and electronics activities to create high performance specialist car systems for the future