"As a race engineer I was looking for incremental changes to a team, making cars faster by fractions," he says. "Most of the work you do is looking to gain an advantage through aerodynamics. So you have a dedicated group who work in a wind tunnel, literally all day every day, trying to make the car go faster. As a race engineer you have to look at the changes and the data and understand how it is all working. You are testing all parts of the car. Such as the end plate, which is the first part of the car that hits the air and determines the flow of air over the rest of the car.

"You are looking at configuring it in different shapes, sometimes more than one. You are trying to work out which is the best combination, even sometimes if it is better to have something solid or with a hole in the middle. This is the way you can make the car go that fraction faster. On a Formula 1 car, that part of it is probably being altered every two weeks."

But along with that attention to the minutiae, Taylor has long been a student of human motivation. Having studied engineering before moving into motor sport, he worked from 1990-1995 as team manager for the Paul Stewart Racing team which had consistent success in Formula 3000.

During that time, when he was based in Milton Keynes, he took one or two young drivers under his wing, offering them temporary accommodation in his house while they established themselves. Among his temporary lodgers was David Coulthard, who would go on to win 13 grands prix in an F1 career spanning 15 years.

Taylor remembers Coulthard as "probably one of the nicest young men you could ever meet", adding: "he was a die-hard Scot, quiet, polite, very driven, what I would describe as ‘very nice selfish’."

Taylor (pictured) also recalls the young Scot as being very successful with the ladies - a succession of whom the host met at the breakfast table.

The working relationship between the two men was similar to that of elder and younger brothers, Taylor believes.

Later in his career, when he was providing race engineering support for Audi, he had to play various roles before he found a way to help top German driver Frank Biela, four times a winner at Le Mans, rediscover his form. "I’d tried a bit of everything with Frank - I’d been his best friend, his elder brother, I’d been a tyrant. None of it seemed to make any difference. Then one day when we were having a fairly frank discussion, it became clear that part of the problem was his home life.

"He had recently got married and had a child, and you could see by his actions and the way he was reacting to the questions that it was troubling him.

"In the end we agreed that the best thing would be if he took himself off and rode across the United States for two weeks. If he cleared his head away from his wife and child. By the time he got to the site of our next race in California, he was fast again..."

Taylor’s time in motor racing also provided him with his own role model - Paul Stewart’s illustrious father, Sir Jackie Stewart, who won the F1 world title three times between 1965 and 1973 and subsequently established his own F1 racing team with his son from 1997-1999 before selling it to Ford.

"He is a man who has always paid huge attention to the smallest details, and has always been willing to go the extra mile to get things right," Taylor said."I remember once him telling me, when a professional photographer was going to come into our workshop to get some shots of the cars, ‘If you don’t agree that he is showing them in the best light, you tell them.’ Even though this was a professional photographer he had faith in you to get the details right.

"He developed his F1 team partly through Ford’s money, and then when it was successful he sold it to Ford. That is canny business acumen. And he has done all of this despite having dyslexia.

"He was a hero of mine when I was driving in Formula Ford as a 17 and 18-year-old. Among all the sharks in the dangerous pool of F1, he’s one man I do admire."

So Taylor emerged from motor sport knowing what made both cars, and people, tick. A useful combination for the task he is now undertaking in the crucial lead-up to the London 2012 Olympics.

Taylor believes he gained additional experience through moving up from race engineer, a role he played within the Arrows F1 team in 2001-2002,  to Sporting Director, a role he fulfilled for the F1 Sporting Aguri team from 2005-2008.



"The parallel is there with a national governing body’s performance director, who works across a much broader field," he said.

As an example of that broader thinking, he instances a meeting he had earlier this week with British Triathlon’s Performance Director, Heather Williams, in which they discussed the sport’s strategy and  "set the ball rolling" for it to be consolidated in a central hub, at the Loughborough High Performance Centre, in the way that Modern Pentathlon is now based in Bath, or British Cycling in Manchester.

Heather Fell, Britain’s Olympic modern pentathlon silver medallist from the 2008 Beijing Games, recently expressed her frustration over the problems she had encountered fitting in at the sport’s base within the University of Bath rather than operating from her native Devon under the guidance of her long-time coach, the former swimmer Robin Brew.

Taylor acknowledges that such drives towards centralisation, although they have proved manifestly effective in recent years, can often result in friction. He is only too aware of the task facing Williams, for instance, as she attempts to persuade Britain’s world champion Alistair Brownlee away from training runs on his beloved Yorkshire Moors...

"We all appreciate there is no ‘one size fits all’," Taylor says. "It’s always a difficult balance to strike. What we all want as sports fans is for athletes to perform at their best. In some cases it may be that we will get sports which have already got the balance right to speak to other sports and help them deal with the situation."

Such cross-fertilisation of ideas lies at the heart of the operation for which Taylor will be taking responsibility, the Elite Coaching Apprenticeship programme.

Working in close partnership with performance directors and head coaches, the programme is tailored towards helping coaches emerging into world class by offering them ‘on the job’ training including mentoring, tutoring from established ‘master’ coaches,  plus a series of workshops on coaching, sports science, sports medicine and other ‘soft skills’ such as effective communication.

So, for instance, in athletics, James Hillier is being mentored by Tom Crick, and working with master coach Malcolm Arnold, whose successful charges include the 1972 Olympic 400m hurdles gold  medallist John Akii-Bua, double world 110m hurdles champion Colin Jackson, and world and European indoor 60m champion Jason Gardener.

Mark Earnshaw, fast earning a reputation within rowing, can turn to the national coach Jurgen Grobler (pictured) for his master guidance.

"Sports are so often so close to the coal face that they don’t look peripherally," Taylor says. "We need to develop that facility."

Taylor will be engaging in peripheral vision within his own field in the course of the next few weeks as he plans to visit the Institut national du sport in Paris and its equivalent in Cologne to study their methods.

Another big area he wants to work on is in getting UK sports to work in harmony with their sports scientists, something which is not managed universally right now.

"In some cases, they don’t seem to be talking the same language," he says, "and this is something I would like to see made better."

And while it is still early days for Taylor, he is already getting good vibrations from a number of sports: for instance, slalom canoeing, gymnastics, hockey, badminton and triathlon. Time will tell if his optimism is justified. But the odds are that it will be.

Mike Rowbottom, one of Britain's most talented sportswriters, has covered the last five Summer and four Winter Olympics for The Independent. Previously he has worked for the Daily Mail, The Times, The Observer, the Sunday Correspondent and The Guardian. He is now chief feature writer for insidethegames