Grove is a quiet village in south Oxfordshire with a handful of shops, innumerable cul-de-sacs and a major railway line running past it. Most things about the place are rather unassuming, except for the land at its northern extremity where a cutting-edge engineering facility is located.
WAE Technologies was founded in 2010 as Williams Advanced Engineering, an offshoot of the Williams Formula 1 team. The two companies are still next-door neighbours, but they have been fully independent since early last year when Australian metals company, Fortescue, acquired WAE at the end of the Williams ownership licence. The WAE part of the name was retained, although the acronym no longer means anything, even though it’s still pronounced letter-by-letter.
Post-acquisition, WAE continues to work on complex engineering projects, not just in motorsport, but in other fields such as automotive, defence, off highway and rail.
On the racing side, the company has won significant battery supply tenders in recent years, but those achievements have also presented some significant challenges, mainly related to fallout from the coronavirus pandemic. WAE took on three major assignments developing bespoke battery units for the third generation Formula E car, the LMDh sportscar platform and the Extreme E off-road racer. According to WAE’s head of motorsport, Doug Campling, the pandemic ‘hangs over’ all three of those undertakings, which were severely disrupted by
