A CO Donegal woman is heading up a Formula One racing company’s drive to create life-saving ventilators to combat the coronavirus pandemic.
Ruth Nic Aoidh from Gweedore in west Donegal is an executive director with F1 giant, McLaren in England. The company is one of a number to join the “Ventilator Challenge Consortium”. It involves a number of industries who are changing their normal production output to create ventilators. The body was created after Boris John’s order to vacuum designer, Dyson to build the essential machines.
Ms Nic Aoidh said racing companies like McLaren, Mercedes and Williams were perfectly placed to tackle the demand for ventilators as they all had a history of innovation.
A law graduate of University College, Dublin, she said McLaren was hoping to assist with the manufacture and sourcing of parts for ventilators. The company would also help faster testing procedures to ensure the ventilators reached the high standards required and would create trollies to move the devices around hospitals.
Ms Nic Aoidh, who has worked with McLaren since 2009, said F1 firms had put their normal rivalry to one side to help save lives.
“It’s been a real pleasure to collaborate with our competitors, our traditional competitors to actually try and win this race. Everyone has seen what we have done on the racetracks in the past in competing against each other and I think we will really show the power of our industry with our collaboration and alignment in meeting this task,” she told the BBC.
Commercial and legal director with McLaren, Ms Nic Aoidh said: “As everyone knows Formula One is about going fast both on the track but actually the way to go faster on the track is through rapid development and the rapid manufacture of parts. From McLaren’s perspective, we are contributing our experience in design and in engineering and in rapid prototyping to the consortium.”
