Keep Fighting, Michael

Posted on 3 June 2014 by metacool

As our tires caught air at the track crossover, I glanced over at Michael Schumacher’s hands and marveled at the way he danced our KTM X-Bow around the corners. We were really moving. The barriers streamed by just inches away, and the turbocharger whooshed furiously behind our ears. I struggled mightily to keep my helmet from smacking the carbon-fiber backrest like a bobble-head doll. In the middle of it all, one thought kept galloping around my head: HOW AWESOME IS THIS??!!

So just how did I end up racing alongside seven-time Formula One World Champion Michael Schumacher in the finals of the Race of Champions?

Rewinding 72 hours found me in another fast seat, this time crammed in economy-class en route to the Bird’s Nest stadium in Beijing, where the 2009 Race of Champions (ROC) was being held. My friend Jim Hancock, who leads Team USA each year at ROC, had generously invited me along. Unique in the world of motorsports, ROC pairs drivers in head-to-head eliminations, usually with a passenger riding along. Accordingly, I packed my race helmet—black with chromed-out “metacool” and “IDEO” livery—in the off chance that I might co-pilot a star driver (David Coulthard? Andy Priaulx? Tom Kristensen?). The stuff boyhood dreams are made of, and I was going to be prepared.

With a dash of serendipity, a lot of luck, and a little persistence on my part, two days later I found myself strapped in alongside Michael in the final heat of the Race of Champions. During our race I was witness to one of the best drivers in history practicing his craft. As an experience, the best I can describe it is akin to being inside Wynton Marsalis’s trumpet during a Lincoln Center gig, or sitting atop Roger Federer’s racquet at Wimbeldon. A study of genius in action from the front row.

I can still recall every second of it. I literally felt the result of Michael’s endless hours of learning and practice. He possessed an almost supernatural ability to apply a minimum of control inputs to help the car run free and fast. I also saw the power of his total focus and relentless attention to detail: for those few minutes, everything concerned with winning mattered a whole lot, and everything else, not so much. In this video (our race starts around the 2:56:00 mark) you can see him ask the mechanic to check out our opponent’s ride, presumably to make sure that things were fair. On the way out to the racetrack he did a series of huge burnouts to make the rear tires stick better, and during the competition saved tenths of seconds by pounding the apexes with the X-Bow’s front wheels.

We lost. The wildly talented Mattias Ekström came in first. My abiding memory is from our cooldown lap, when Schumacher turned to me with a twinkle in his eye and shared a laugh at the site of Ekström doing a particularly gnarly smoky victory burnout.

Ironically, in our defeat came the most profound lesson I took from my race with Michael. As history shows, he’s a guy who liked to win. But across the 22 or so drivers in a F1 race, only one can stand atop the podium, so even the very best lose a lot of the time. Michael “only” won 29.6% of the F1 races he entered; in baseball terms he batted about three hundred. Not bad, but he certainly had plenty of time to think about how to be on top the next time. So like any great racer, he understands deeply how to be strong in the face of failure.

At the moment we came in second, all the hysterical screams reverberating across the Bird’s Nest abruptly went quiet (most of the Chinese spectators had come to see Michael win). Bummer. But he immediately leapt out of the car and went over to bear hug Ekström. In private, Michael must have been disappointed to lose, but he kept his head up and smiled, positively exothermic in his release of infectious energy. It was truly inspiring; his actions changed the tone in the entire stadium.

A life well-lived can look a lot like that scene from the Bird’s Nest. Whether we’re a child or in our later years, on any given day we all encounter setbacks. We all have personal trials and tribulations we have to work through. Everyone. What’s essential is to be able to resurface, take a breath, and summon the energy to keep on fighting the good fight. And if you can manage a smile along the way, even in the face of adversity, that positive energy might make it all a bit easier. Who knows, it could even help someone else make headway in their own fight.

Keep fighting, Michael.

#KeepFightingMichael

Jeff Zwart at Stanford Revs

Posted on 14 October 2013 by metacool

I’m extremely thrilled/proud/stoked to be hosting renowned film director, racer, and photographer Jeff Zwart on November 7 for an Open Garage Talk at Stanford. The event is sponsored by the Revs Program at Stanford and the Center for Automotive Research at Stanford. Jeff will be giving a talk titled “Telling Stories with Cars”.

Jeff is so good at telling stories that any additional conversation with me may be superfluous, but I promise to work with him to use all the road and keep it (very) sideways, so let’s see where we go. If you’ve ever perused my other blog Unabashed Gearhead Gnarlyness, you know how much I enjoy his work behind the lens and behind the wheel of a car, examples of which are both posted below. I have nine hundred and eleven questions I want to ask him about his creative process and how he makes all these amazing things happen—and I’m sure you have a bunch, too. It will be an awesome evening.

Hope to see you there! Registration is required, so sign up now!

In Memory of Matt Kahn

Posted on 25 July 2013 by metacool

Professor Matt Kahn passed away a few weeks ago. He was my teacher, and had a big impact on my life.

I met him during the 1990-1991 school year, which was a pivotal one for me. It’s the year where I found my North Star and got serious about pursuing my formal training as a designer. I was fortunate to spend that summer studying at Stanford’s program at Oxford. Most of my evenings were spent in jazz clubs in London, and on weekends I discovered the twin joys of live Formula 1 television broadcasts hosted by Murray Walker and the joy of living in a place where so much of the built environment had been designed and engineered with a high degree of consideration. What an amazing chance to live a few months of my life as a flaneur. Both were good food for thought.

Up to this point in college I had been unable to resolve a fundamental tension between my love of the humanities and all the writing and reading and the critical thinking which goes along with that domain, and my abiding love of all things mechanical (especially the loud and fast ones). In a nutshell, I couldn’t figure out whether I wanted to be more like Stephen Barley or Gordon Murray. And then one Sunday morning over an informal breakfast, a very wise fellow student suggested that I just do both and get on with it.

And so I did. I came back to campus that Fall and formally began the mechanical engineering design curriculum, and in the spirit of doing both found a way to also study for a humanities degree via Stanford’s amazing STS program. During that year I took an array of design classes whose lessons I still use each and every day, delivered by a truly inspiring group of teachers, including David Beach, Brendan Boyle, David Kelley, and Matt Kahn.

Matt Kahn taught his foundational Art 60 class with a classic Beaux-Arts approach, meaning that we walked in each day and placed our completed, unsigned assignments on the board (or on a table) before class, and then sat and listened the give and take of Professor Kahn’s critique as he made his way through all the content around the room. The title of Art 60 is “Design I: Fundamental Visual Language”, and in it you had to complete a certain number of projects of your choosing from a list given out at the start of the quarter. Professor Kahn, as David Kelley notes, had a truly singular talent for critique, and so these sessions were often some balance of intellectual enlightenment and personal (but temporary) devastation.

I really struggled for the first month or so of class. I wasn’t getting it, not at all. Ever persistent, I kept plugging away. One day I brought in my approach to an assignment which I believe asked you to take a small number of geometric objects and arrange them in a way that conveyed a feeling or emotion. Using construction paper, I pasted up a composition, brought it to class, hung it on the wall, and then took a seat on one of the stools scattered around the studio. My intention was to show what being freaked out by something feels like, and it looked like this:

Professor Kahn walked in, and looked around the room, and zeroed in on my piece of work.

Gulp.

“Who did this?” he asked, with an arch of his eyebrows. I raised my hand up to about chest level and gave a half-hearted wave.

Calmly stepping toward me, he gave me that squint of his, cocked his head a bit to one side, smiled a wry smile, and then slowly and in a strong voice said,”Who. Are. You. Afraid. Of?”

Here was his incredible ability to critique the work of others and express it all concisely and with great elegance. In a millisecond he nailed exactly what I was feeling and thinking when I created that piece of artwork. Basically, I was scared of being in Art 60. I was frightened by the prospect of screwing up in front of Matt Kahn. In that moment, with Professor Kahn staring at me, my internal voice was urging me to respond with the truth: “Answer him with a big ‘YOU! It’s YOU I’m scared of, Professor Kahn!'” But before I could stop myself, I blurted out a fuzzy statement along the lines of “Oh no no no no… what I was trying to communicate here was the sense of something being herded or corraled, you know…”

He smiled again. Paused. And then quietly said that it was more powerful the way he had described it, and how it worked well when seen from that perspective. He knew. And then he squinted again at me, gave me another dose of that inscrutable smile of his, and moved on to discussing the next student project. I got it—I had done good, but I could do better if I could learn to embrace it all with abandon.

Great teachers have a way of seeing your potential and finding a way to get you there. They give you challenges and allow you to fail along the way—and let you know it—but never so much that you give up on your dreams. Matt Kahn was one of the great teachers in my life. He built confidence in my own creative process as a designer, and for that I will be forever grateful.

Thank you, Professor Kahn.

Nine years of metacool-ing

Posted on 11 April 2013 by metacool

This week marks nine years of my exploring the art and science of bringing cool stuff to life.

I started metacool because I was bored one Saturday afternoon. My wife was out of town for the weekend, I was bored, and as usual I was thinking about cars, meaning, business, aesthetics, technology, life and everything. As a name in action, metacool already existed as a Yahoo Group I used to blast out interesting (at least I thought) articles to a group of unsuspecting and uncomplaining friends. Since I had time on my hands, and because I thought it would be cool to write about my favorite beautiful-ugly car, I decided to ape my internet heroes Seth Godin and Joi Ito by cranking out my own blog.

Thank goodness. I really didn’t care then if anyone read my stuff, and I don’t care too much today, either — at least not in terms of having a big audience or lots of eyeballs or unique visitors or any of those stats that’ll drive you crazy if you let them. Writing down my evolving thoughts here has helped me learn new things and to refine what I know. And if one person reads them and enjoys them or fires off a dubious email to me, that’s gravy. It’s connected me to people who I otherwise would never have met in Real Life, and many of those folks have become good friends. For that — and the ability to pollute the interwebs with my various obsessions du jour — I am supremely thankful. Yet another example of how much you can learn by doing.

Not everything has been rosy here. To paraphrase a shopping cart expert friend of mine, “theTwitter is tyrrany,” at least when it comes to blogs like this one. It’s so tempting to read something interesting, think a few incoherent thoughts for a few milliseconds, and then tweet it out to the world. “Hey, check this out, you’ll love it!” But why? But how? And so what? Such tyrrany is why I only wrote a handful of things over the past few years (thank goodness for the Nissan DeltaWing!) and almost let this blog trickle away to nothing.

But in times such as these, when everyone else is busy tweeting out cryptic sub-140 musings and posting photos of cute little witty kittens, I believe it’s a good strategic move to position oneself on a different sort of mountain top. At least that’s what I learned from Porter! So, as you may have noticed, I’ve renewed my vows to metacool and blogging, and am trying to tweet less and write more.

To punctuate all of that, I’m about to ship a new version of metacool. Coming soon you’ll be able to log on to a new and improved site. Nothing revolutionary, but with refined aesthetics and navigation, amongst other things. Still the same, but better, leveraging a much more modern technology platform. Hopefully I’ll be able to innovate the way Porsche does with its 911: in automotive terms the new metacool will be modern like the 991, but still highly evocative of the 901.

Thanks for reading, and as always, please let me know what you think. Your questions, comments, and thoughts are always most welcome.

Thank you.

metacool LinkedIn influencing

Posted on 8 April 2013 by metacool

I am pleased to announce that I’m now writing the occasional essay for LinkedIn as part of its Influencers group. Here’s my debut effort.

What will I be writing about, you ask? Since my personality and brain haven’t been changed out for something better, I’ll be writing there about the things I’m passionate about, which all in some way roll up to pursuing the art and science of bringing cool stuff to life. Basically metacool stuff. Sometimes I’ll write something specific for LinkedIn, other times I’ll post my thoughts both here and there. Please give me a follow there if you’re interested to see what comes up.

I would also appreciate any feedback and guidance you might have on future topics to cover there and here.

Thank you!

Designing for Difference with Chris Bangle

Posted on 19 November 2012 by Diego Rodriguez

I'm very happy to be interviewing Chris Bangle onstage next week as part of an Open Garage series event at the Stanford Revs Program. Our discussion will focus on the topic of "Designing for Difference in a World of Sameness". I have nothing but respect for what Chris did at Fiat, BMW, Mini and beyond. He knows what it means to believe passionately in a set of ideas, and to bring forth change to create something new in the world as an embodiment of those ideas.

The car I drive is a sculpture created by Chris and team, so you can imagine how stoked (and honored) I am to be having this discussion with him.

I'd love to hear what kinds of questions you'd like me to ask Chris — please leave a comment below with your ideas, and I'll use them as input and inspiration for our talk. Thank you!

Embracing Risk in the Pursuit of Victory

Posted on 27 July 2012 by Diego Rodriguez

Earlier this week I moderated a discussion with Stefan Bradl and Lucio Cecchinello titled Embracing Risk in the Pursuit of Victory. Bradl and Lucio were appearing as part of the Open Garage series hosted by Reilly Brennan, Executive Director of the innovative Revs Program at Stanford. Bradl is a rookie phenomenon in the MotoGP motorcycle racing series. Cecchinello, also a successful motorcycle racing champion, is an entrepreneur who is CEO of LCR Honda MotoGP, the racing team that enters a motorcycle for Bradl in MotoGP.

Live discussions are always an exercise in improvisation and serendipity. As a moderator, you can frame up a discussion, but you've got to go where the ideas take you, and weave a narrative from there. Panel discussions are jazz where as a moderator your job is to lay out the chord changes and roll with whatever comes along. Most "sage on stage" presentations are something more akin to a piano recital, less sponteaneous but beautiful in a linear way.

The point of view I brought to the discussion was that — for racers and innovators both — risk is not something to be avoided at all costs, but is instead a source of great opportunity. Whether you're probing the limit of adhesion on a MotoGP bike through the corkscrew at Laguna Seca, or figuring out how to design a technology to a place where it is both delightful and business viable, you're pushing for something remarkable. You can't be remarkable without taking a risk, whether that risk is financial, technological, emotional, or personal (or all of the above). Healthy opportunity, in many ways, is proportional to smart risk-taking.

I had a great time speaking with Stefan and Lucio. My impression was that the audience enjoyed the discussion with the racers on stage. You can see an unedited video of the evening here:

I'd like express my deep thanks to Reilly for asking me to moderate this discussion, which was a big honor for me. And many thanks to all the team at LCR, who are an extremely friendly, fun, good-hearted bunch of hard-core racers.

Big Bang Theory

Posted on 24 April 2012 by Diego Rodriguez

The essay I wrote for RACER magazine is now available online.

You can find it here on pp. 34-35. The topic is Game Changers. At the risk of tooting my own horn, I think it's one of the better things I've written on the subject of innovating. Here's an excerpt:

How to spot one? Beware of self-proclaimed game changers; most are just marketing hype. Real game changers trigger resistance from competitors and rule makers. Or, like Jim Hall's fan car, they violate unspoken taboos…

I hope you like it! Thanks.

RACER 3.0

Posted on 16 April 2012 by Diego Rodriguez

In 1992 I received a direct mailing talking about a new magazine called RACER. The mission of RACER, to provide a window into the world of racing, was tremendously exciting to me. As a mechanical engineering student who wanted to become an engineer with Penske Racing or McLaren, it was very difficult to find reputable sources of information about what was going in the world of racing and racecars. I didn’t own a TV, the internet at that time was about very bare text message boards, and the few European racing magazines were too expensive for me to contemplate subscribing to. I would read as much as I could for free when I had the time to hang out at a local café and bookstand (which was not very often), so as a result I barely knew anything. Case in point, when I applied for a job at Rahal Racing, tracking down their address in Ohio required an entire afternoon of card catalog searching at Stanford’s Green Library. I kid you not. Things have changed in the past 20 years.

I became a charter subscriber. RACER went on to blow my mind as it expanded my horizons. To feed my design engineering curiosity, it featured achingly gorgeous monthly photographic profiles of important race cars. It helped me understand the complex strategies – sporting, business and organizational – which drive successful racing teams. From a people perspective, RACER gave me insights into the thought and behavioral patterns of legendary design innovators such as Dan Gurney, Adrian Newey, Gordon Murray, and many more.

Above all, RACER’s crisp editorial point of view helped me crystallize a deep belief in the power of acting over just talking, the value of making decisions, and the stark reality that in order to win a race, you have to first show up and start. It made a big impact on this impressionable college kid. For those of you who don’t know much about racing (or perhaps don’t care – which is fine, just keep reading metacool!), being a racer is a lot like being an entrepreneur (and most racers are entrepreneurs): it means making the most of what you’ve got, and putting everything you’ve got into what you’re doing. It’s about being remarkable. It’s a world where, in the words of racer Roger Penske, effort does indeed equal results.

RACER celebrated its 20^th anniversary this past weekend with a big party (it was a good one, I must say!) at the Long Beach Grand Prix. And as part of this big milestone, it is being relaunched as RACER 3.0, with a new aesthetic approach and a big new attitude – with a bunch of future innovations in the works. The extremely gnarly relaunch cover of the May 2012 issue is pictured above, and it features my favorite new race car, the Delta Wing. Does that look killer, or what? The theme of the issue is “Game Changers”, and I’m deeply honored to have written its introductory essay. Thank you, RACER.

If you happen to already subscribe to RACER, I hope you like what I wrote. If you don't subscribe, please do! Here's a link to an online version of the article.

For now, let’s all get back to making a dent in the universe! WFO, people, WFO. Be a racer!