The first two rounds of the 2026 Formula 1 World Championship were events that McLaren Racing would rather forget. With the Australian nation collectively heart broken when they saw Oscar Piastri spinout on the way to the grid of the Australian Grand Prix and both of their drivers scoring zero points in Australia and China.
Behind the scenes though a huge win for the McLaren team was announced in Australia, with a major milestone in their mission to accelerate coral reef recovery. This comes two years after an unlikely collaboration between Formula 1 engineers at McLaren Racing and marine scientists from the Great Barrier Reef Foundation started.
For coral reefs around the world, every year there are just a few nights in spring when they come alive as corals release millions of tiny reproductive bundles into the ocean in a natural event known as spawning. Scientists collect and grow hundreds of thousands of these bundles in controlled conditions, before settling baby corals onto cradles and returning them to damaged parts of the reef to accelerate recovery.
The process has shown promising results, particularly when using corals with a higher tolerance to warming ocean temperatures, to help build the Reef’s resilience to long term climate change. But the real challenge has always been delivering this potential at the speed and scale required to meet growing urgency, as the Reef faces repeated mass bleaching events. A highly manual and labour-intensive process, assembling each specially-designed coral cradle by hand, can take up to 90 seconds. When the narrow spawning window closes, so does the opportunity to deploy the baby corals at scale – until now.
Innovation is nothing new at McLaren, the team were the first to development the carbon fibre monocoque in Formula 1 and this structure has gone on to save countless lives in the sport. So, when a colleague came to Kim Wilson, Sustainability Director at McLaren Racing after watching a documentary on saving coral reefs, saying he believed that McLaren could help with this challenge, the ball was set rolling. Contact was made via the info@ email address of the Great Barrier Reef Foundation and McLaren engineers eventually came to Australia and sat down with staff and began to undertake systems-based approach to identify the problem.
That problem is time. The time it takes to manually assemble the tile and cradle and the time that coral reefs potentially have remaining on this blue planet, with the loss of coral reefs around the world happening faster than scientists can help them to recover and if nothing changes, in just 24 years coral reefs will be only seen in aquariums.
Coral reefs are high-performance ecosystems, covering just 1% of the oceans, but supporting 25% of marine life. So taking that F1 mentality for the constant pursuit of going faster, beyond the track to play a more meaningful role in society is what has occurred here with this partnership. Working with organisations, such as the Great Barrier Reef Foundation to find solutions off the race track using what McLaren do on the race track and driving that next level of performance.
Currently reef restoration is undertaken in land-based nurseries, where scientists let the coral spawn and these new babies settle on cement tiles and after a few days these small cement tiles are broken off and on them there are around six tiny coral babies, which can be easily squished. Working with the marine scientists McLaren have developed a semi-automated process that breaks off the small tiles and three of these segments are placed on a cradle that is made from a ceramic and eventually dissolve over time once placed in the ocean. These cradles are then fed on to what is affectionately referred to as a large shish kebab and this entire process needs to be done under water. The final step involves shipment to coral reefs for ‘planting’ and over time two or three of the toughest baby corals take over and that’s how you breed thermally tolerant corals for the future.
Speaking trackside at the Formula 1 QATAR Airways Australian Grand Prix, leaders from McLaren Racing and the Great Barrier Reef Foundation explained how “Machine One” (or OSCAR – Operational System for Coral Assembly and Restoration) is moving from prototype development, into real world field testing ahead of this year’s coral spawning season and set to increase speed of output by up to 800%.
“In racing, marginal gains add up and drive high performance, and we’re applying that same philosophy to reef restoration. Here, every second saved doesn’t just increase performance, but accelerates the scale, delivery and capacity for innovative engineering solutions and problem solving to help us protect and restore this vital ecosystem,” said Kim Wilson, Sustainability Director at McLaren Racing.
Machine One has been engineered in partnership with McLaren’s Racing’s Accelerator Programme and is set to revolutionise this process for the Great Barrier Reef and beyond. Inspired by elite motorsport engineering, and drawing on McLaren Racing’s high performance engineering mindset, Machine One completes a process that currently takes up to 90 seconds per cradle in as little as ten seconds. Early modelling suggests Machine One has the potential to assemble up to 100,000 coral seeding devices per week, meaning coral planting can go from currently 100,000 a year to 1,000,000, and at a major cost reduction.
“We are in a race against time, working at a scale that can feel impossible. But this partnership is proving world class engineering can help close that gap, and that delivering restoration at the speed and scale the reef demands is still possible,” said Anna Marsden, Managing Director of the Great Barrier Reef Foundation.
Following in-factory testing undertaken in Melbourne, Machine One was shipped to the National Sea Simulator in Townsville for field trials, to test the system under reef conditions, ahead of this year’s spawning season. McLaren Racing’s engineers within the Accelerator Programme, will be working with marine scientists on the ground, to assess, refine and optimise the system through each stage of performance testing, just as the team does with everything they do at track.
If successful, there is potential for Machine One to be deployed across reefs worldwide, shifting coral restoration from small-scale pilot efforts to a globally deployable solution capable of operating at pace. While restoration alone cannot offset the impact of climate change, improving efficiency and scale may strengthen reef resilience during what scientists describe as critical decades.
“Innovation alone is not enough, Machine One must stand up to real-world testing. These field trials will allow us to assess performance, understand limitations and refine the system before broader application. If the data supports it, this approach will represent a major step forward in how we deliver restoration globally and at scale,” said Dr Cedric Robillot, Executive Director of the Reef Restoration and Adaptation Program.
The project forms part of McLaren Racing’s broader sustainability ambition: to leverage world-class engineering and global partnerships to accelerate solutions beyond motorsport. If validated, restoration scale could, for the first time, demonstrate how applying performance thinking from elite motorsport can be successfully applied to the planet’s most urgent and complex environmental challenges, setting a benchmark for others in the industry.
McLaren Racing wants this project to be an inspiration for further unlikely collaborations and to make more F1 engineers think, ‘yes we can do this in other spaces.’ Their metrics also show that their fans feel passionate about this as well. The next big project on the horizon is the development of a first-of-its-kind ‘Circular Car Roadmap’ with partner Deloitte and tracking its circularity metric with support from Google’s data capabilities, to edge closer to its moonshot goal of building a Circular F1 Car.
Photographs by Driven Women Magazine and McLaren Racing, unless otherwise credited.