Samir Abid

AI & Data

Illume

A consulting firm's proprietary knowledge became a scalable AI product. I took on a CTO-type role, shaping the proposition, deciding what to build and helping make it real.

AI product in production: expert knowledge turned into a scalable digital product.

A consulting firm had deep proprietary knowledge locked in their experts' heads. The question: could that knowledge be turned into an AI product that scales beyond the consulting model?

My role was CTO-type: shaping the proposition, defining what to build and working with the team to make it real. The work covered strategy and the product itself.

This is where I operate best: involved early enough to shape the opportunity, connected enough to the implementation to keep it grounded.

Education + Community

Your Data Driven + Motorsport Skool

I built an online motorsport education business from zero during COVID. It now reaches ~10,000 drivers and engineers globally through essays, courses, a podcast and the Motorsport Skool community.

200+essays published
Top 10%most-shared podcast on Spotify
~10,000drivers & engineers reached
1,000+course enrolments

Built from nothing, one piece at a time. The day-to-day now runs on AI agents I built, my first real AI agent project.

I started Your Data Driven because I kept seeing the same thing in motorsport. People had data but didn't know what to do with it. Expensive systems, confusing dashboards, and no clear path from numbers to going faster.

So I built a platform. Essays, courses, tools, a podcast and the Motorsport Skool community. All aimed at helping club and amateur racers use data to improve their driving.

An audience of ~10,000 drivers and engineers globally. Over 1,000 course enrolments. A podcast in the top 10% most shared on Spotify.

Today a team of AI agents I built runs the day-to-day. They handle the admin, scheduling and distribution, the work that used to eat my time. That leaves me free to do the part that matters: helping people. It was my first real test of AI agent development, nearly two years ago, and it led to the AI work I do now.

yourdatadriven.com

Strategy & Advisory

VIS Data Strategy

A data strategy programme for the Victorian Institute of Sport. It included a data maturity health check delivered in person in Australia, with findings presented to the CEO, Performance Director and board.

A shared picture of data maturity, priorities for development, and the first step towards dedicated data-management capability.

The Victorian Institute of Sport needed a clearer view of how its data was being collected, managed, shared and used across the organisation.

I created a sports data maturity health check covering leadership, organisational data understanding, people and operations, collection, storage, analytics and governance. The programme ran in person in Australia, followed by a report and presentation to the CEO, Performance Director and board.

The work gave senior leadership a shared view of the organisation's position and areas for development. The first major step was the successful appointment of a dedicated data-management role. Nearly a year later, Dave Crosby described a significant change in the VIS approach to data management.

Elite Sport + Data Products

Pace Insights: Sports Data Products

Pace Insights built dashboards, Excel tools and data-processing systems for elite sport. The work turned raw performance and organisational data into reports and decision tools for British Athletics, the English Institute of Sport, British Rowing, UK Sport and other Olympic programmes.

100+projects delivered
35+elite sports organisations
4 days → 4 minsreporting time at British Athletics and British Rowing
41 Gold medalsby clients at the Rio Olympics

Reporting reduced from days to minutes, with clearer visuals for better performance conversations and decisions.

Pace Insights started with a simple question: what does the coach, performance director or sports scientist need to decide next? The work sat between engineering and practice: data products, dashboards, Excel tools and processing workflows built around the answer. At one point, our team numbered eight, including Dan Bigham, who later became an Olympic cycling silver medallist and world-record holder.

I developed and implemented dashboards and analysis tools for British Athletics and British Rowing, including performance reporting, physiology and race analysis. The work also included organisational views for UK Sport. One coaching-development dashboard gave the High-Performance Coaching team visibility across 50+ Olympic sports. These images show the wider range of work: Sprint Analyser, Rowing Race Report, UK Sport's Coaching Census, Athletics Physiology Profile and Swimming Athlete Profile.

That meant removing repetitive work and making the message in the data easier to see. Reporting that had taken days was reduced to minutes, so a coach, analyst or senior leader could spend more time discussing what the numbers meant and what to do next.

The tools were practical. Some were polished dashboards; others were Excel sheets, data-processing utilities or early interfaces. What mattered was objective data in a form that supported a better conversation.

Elite Sport

Sprint Analyser + Starting Blocks

A sprint-analysis system built with British Athletics. It brought mechanical engineering, electronics, software and a coach-facing interface into one system.

Used by British Athletics sprint programme. Full stack: mechanical → electronics → software → coach insight.

The question: can you measure sprint start performance precisely enough to help coaches improve it?

Instrumented starting blocks had been tried before. Nobody had delivered a system that people actually used.

The brief was precise. Measure three axes of force at 1,000 Hz, with high precision. The blocks had to be used normally. Kicked about. Generally mistreated.

The solution integrated £30k worth of Kistler piezoelectric force sensors with an F1-spec cable system and a standard set of starting blocks. The data went into the Sprint Analyser software for coaches and practitioners.

You can see the system being successfully tested by Olympian and former 60m world champion Richard Kilty.

Elite Sport

INEOS 1:59 Challenge

I modelled the Vienna course and developed the pacing strategy for Eliud Kipchoge's sub-2-hour marathon. The course model captured every metre's gradient, surface, wind exposure and corner radius to find the best running line.

First sub-2-hour marathon in history (1:59:40). Course modelling saved over 8 seconds.

The challenge: help Eliud Kipchoge run a marathon in under 2 hours. The course, pacemakers and conditions all had to be right.

My role was course modelling and pacing strategy. Every metre of the Vienna course had to be mapped, measured and analysed for gradient, surface, wind exposure and corner radius. All of it fed into the pacing plan.

The course model gave the performance team confidence in the route and the pacing strategy. Kipchoge ran 1:59:40. The first sub-2-hour marathon in history.

"When you are trying to make history, you need great partners. Samir at Pace Insights repeatedly delivered for our team. He first helped us determine the run location. He then developed the optimal running path around the course, saving over eight seconds in the process."

Rob Ketchell, Performance Scientist, INEOS 1:59 Challenge

View the INEOS 1:59 course page

Engineering

Aston Martin VH Suspension

Early in my engineering career, I worked on the design and development of the VH suspension system for the Aston Martin DB9. Hundreds of components had to work together to deliver the handling, refinement and character expected of the car.

The VH architecture went on to underpin the DB9 and subsequent Aston Martin models.

The Aston Martin DB9 was developed around the new VH architecture, a platform that would go on to underpin several generations of Aston Martins.

Suspension taught me something that has stayed with me ever since: you cannot optimise a complex system by looking at its parts in isolation.

Geometry, springs, dampers, bushes, tyres, structures and loads all interact. Change one thing and the effects appear somewhere else.

The engineering challenge was to understand those relationships well enough to make good decisions before the finished car existed.

That systems thinking has followed me into everything I have done since. Different problems. Different technology. Much the same approach: understand how the system really works, identify what matters, then build around it.

Engineering + Coaching

Race Engineering & Driver Coaching

I re-engineered my own race car, developed a simulation model around it and used damper-rig testing and optimisation to improve its performance on track. Those same methods later became the basis for helping other racing drivers understand their cars, make better setup decisions and drive faster.

20+years across engineering, motorsport and performance
5+race cars re-engineered and won
7drivers coached to 1st poles, wins and championships
4× → 1strunner-up to first championship

Drivers went on to achieve first pole positions, race wins, fastest laps and championships.

You don't learn from experience. You learn from experiments. Motorsport gave me the opportunity to apply engineering directly, with nowhere for the results to hide.

The interesting part was never simply finding a faster setup.

A driver has to understand what the car is doing, distinguish useful evidence from noise and know which change to make next. Engineering, data and coaching became part of the same problem.

The goal was not dependency on an engineer. It was to give drivers enough understanding to make better decisions for themselves, with confidence.

See the Analysis Coach approach

I'm Samir Abid.

Work highlights