McLaren<\/a> and a mentor to many of the RAD researchers. \u201cMotorsports is about getting things right at the right time. It is about relentless pursuit of better in detail and understanding how tribes of people in different functions really come together.<\/p>\n\u201cYou need high levels of innovation but you also need high levels of execution.\u201d<\/p>\n
That\u2019s what RAD has brought to dementia research.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis constant innovation, constant working out, looking at data,\u201d Mark Stewart said. \u201cWe\u2019re saving months, maybe years just because of that relationship alone.\u201d<\/p>\n
Cara Croft, a senior lecturer in neuroscience at Queen Mary University of London and a Race Against Dementia researcher, has worked closely with McLaren\u2019s race team the past three years, even employing its data scientists, who have helped her better categorize and understand some of the findings of her research. That partnership, she said, has proven fruitful.<\/p>\n
\u201cOne thing is working with a team mentality; kind of we\u2019re all united in one common goal being able to push the boundaries of innovation,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
![\"Cara](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/1779109030_708_.jpeg\")
<\/p>\n
Cara Croft is a senior lecturer in neuroscience at Queen Mary University of London and a Race Against Dementia researcher.<\/p>\n
(Race Against Dementia)<\/p>\n
That teamwork and encouragement to try new things can be rare in medical research, said Brian A. Gordon, a cognitive neuroscientist at Washington University in St. Louis, whose work focuses on utilizing advanced neuroimaging techniques to understand the complex biology of healthy aging and neurodegenerative disorders.<\/p>\n
\u201cFormula One teams are relentless in their drive to succeed \u2014 collaborating to achieve a common goal. It\u2019s a mindset and work ethic we believe can be applied to a team of dementia researchers,\u201d Gordon said. \u201cPeople haven\u2019t thought of working in this way because biology and engineering are two disciplines that normally sit on parallel tramlines. I can\u2019t think of any other science scheme where you get access to different people and game-changing resources in the same way that you do with Race Against Dementia.\u201d<\/p>\n
Gordon is not affiliated with RAD nor does he receive funding from the group. But he believes the mentality the group is preaching, one that has roots in the Ferrari pit-crew model of a generation ago, will have equally profound results.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you try to do everything well, you fail, right?\u201d he asked. \u201cYou can\u2019t be the driver of the car and the pit crew and the person engineering the car. A good Formula One team brings all the experts together so that they\u2019re stronger by the sum of their parts. And I think that\u2019s a good ethos to view where medical research has to go.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou can\u2019t just have the neurologist that does everything, or the radiologist or the PhD. Everyone has their specialized role. You do best when you\u2019re all there firing and all cylinders.\u201d<\/p>\n
Neale, a mentor to many RAD researchers, said there\u2019s little he can teach people such as Croft or Gordon about medicine or research. But after a career spent measuring progress in sometimes infinitesimal steps, he has shared experiences that are already proving valuable.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you look at Formula One, we were making an engineering change to the car 24 hours a day, seven days a week about every 20 minutes,\u201d said Neale, who cycled through a number of jobs during his 16 years in F1. \u201cWhen I started back in 2001, 80% of all those changes, we weren\u2019t really sure whether it made the car fast or not because we were looking for such small changes.<\/p>\n
\u201cBy the time I left, with simulators we were running thousands if not millions of virtual experiments in a synthetic world. You build a system that says \u2018I don\u2019t know, but I\u2019ll test the idea.\u2019 And you can do this in research.\u201d<\/p>\n
As a result, Croft and many of her colleagues have come to accept that failure often leads to progress.<\/p>\n
\u201cOne of the key things that I like from Formula One is that they\u2019re kind of happy if they make a car that doesn\u2019t work very well because then they think how to make it better,\u201d she said \u201cThis kind of fail factor, that\u2019s something that we need to bring to the dementia field and medical research.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf we have more clinical trials, a lot of them will fail but then some more will be successful. That\u2019s something that is kind of a mind shift.\u201d<\/p>\n
And in motorsports, few things illustrate that story better than the evolution of the pit crew.<\/p>\n
![\"McLaren](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/1779109031_707_.jpeg\")
<\/p>\n
McLaren driver Oscar Piastri pits for new tires during a practice session ahead of the Miami Grand Prix on May 1.<\/p>\n
(Lynne Sladky \/ Associated Press)<\/p>\n
Pit stops \u2014 and the crews that work them \u2014 have been part of racing for more than a century, but for much of that time they were slow, methodical ordeals that could last several minutes. Leonard Wood, the chief mechanic for Wood Brothers Racing, which has been running on the NASCAR circuit for 76 years, is credited with introducing the precision, choreographed pit stop in the mid 1960s by pioneering the use of power guns to change tires, fuel venting which allowed a 58-gallon gas tank to be filled in 15 seconds and improved jacks, which could raise a car quickly.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt all has to click,\u201d Eddie Wood, Leonard\u2019s nephew and the CEO of the Woods Brothers team, said. \u201cThey all have to know what the other\u2019s doing. They key off each other and they help each other.\u201d<\/p>\n
The innovations quickly spread to every racing series, peaking when a McLaren team performed a four-tire pit stop for driver Lando Norris in 1.8 seconds in 2023.<\/p>\n
The lessons that progress taught are still valuable.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhether it\u2019s the rear jack guy, the fuel guy, the engineer, the driver himself, they all play that piece,\u201d said Neale, who started with RAD in 2020. \u201cAnd the collective understanding about why are we here? What is it that we\u2019re trying to achieve and how do we nudge the odds in our favor? It\u2019s the intensity of the scrutiny that really makes the difference.\u201d<\/p>\n
Croft and Neale know they aren\u2019t necessarily close to the finish line when it comes to curing dementia. But they sense the race may be in its final laps.<\/p>\n
\u201cI wouldn\u2019t be in this field of work if I didn\u2019t think we were pushing towards solutions that can slow down dementia, treat dementia, cure dementia,\u201d Croft said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019d love to be a small part of doing something important,\u201d Neale added.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe all know somebody who\u2019s had dementia or Parkinson\u2019s disease. I think within five years we\u2019ll see some big breakthroughs. It\u2019s a disease and therefore scientifically [it] can be addressed. It might not mean we win tomorrow but it means we can define the gap, close the gap, show progress.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The idea, like many good ones, arose by accident. It was the mid 1990s and London\u2019s Great Osmond…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":678635,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[573],"tags":[64,63,5865,327101,9757,817,31960,813,816,1474,327099,1861,327100,3173,327103,337,9316,85,327102,6618,1547],"class_list":["post-678634","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-formula-1","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-car","tag-cara-croft","tag-dementia","tag-f1","tag-formula","tag-formula-1","tag-formula1","tag-innovation","tag-jonathan-neale","tag-people","tag-pit-stop-tactic","tag-race","tag-rad","tag-research","tag-researcher","tag-sports","tag-team-mentality","tag-time","tag-year"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/678634","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=678634"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/678634\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/678635"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=678634"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=678634"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=678634"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"Ferrari](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/1779109030_189_.jpeg\")
<\/p>\n