David Pook Vehicle dynamics engineer and founder of Life110

FOR 20 YEARS A VEHICLE DYNAMICS engineer for Jaguar and then Jaguar Land Rover, and more recently the founder of Life110, the Alpine A110 tuning company whose work has so impressed us, David Pook attributes at least part of his fascination with suspension and chassis behaviour to a radio-controlled car.

‘I was into suspension from an early age,’ he reveals. ‘It stemmed from my dad – an electronics engineer – bringing back a Tamiya Sand Scorcher from Japan when they first came out and building that up and seeing brilliant working suspension. It just grabbed me.’

Enthralled by the Sand Scorcher, Pook went on to race radio-controlled cars at UK regional and national level until he left school. ‘I learnt so much about suspension set-up in that time because it’s the same physics, just a tenth of the scale. The decisions you make on how you want the car to behave differently to what it’s currently doing and how you might go about that, are exactly the same.

‘I regard that as a great learning experience from the ages of 12 to 18. Fundamentally it shaped my mind into