Daren Campbell, tax technology and transformation leader at EY Americas, has been into cars his whole life. But it wasn’t until a couple years ago that he kicked his passion into high gear when he started driving on a race track.
Campbell recently talked shop with CFO Brew about driving on the surprisingly (to us, anyway) data-driven nature of racing and its similarities to his role in finance.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How did you become interested in racing?
I’ve always been very interested in cars in general. The way that driving on track started for me was, before the pandemic, I was looking for a car that was a true “driver’s car,” and had gotten pointed in the direction of the Lotus.
With the Lotus, I realized it was a lot more car than I was driver. Through some friends and associates in some of the car meetups that I’ve gone to, [I] found out that some of the local tracks had track events. They call them high performance driving education events where you can take your car, and they’ll match you up with an instructor…There’s different steps on the ladder to true racing. So, the first time I did a track day was about a year and a half ago…I haven’t done full door-to-door racing yet. That’s on the goal list of what I’d like to get to, but right now a lot of it is just learning how to drive on track.
What’s something that amazes you about track or that you’ve gained an appreciation for now that you’ve been in it a little while?
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The skill required is something that’s really impressive…The instructors, though they’re giving you coaching from the right seat, usually they’ll be on track at different sessions. Oftentimes they’ll allow you to be in the right seat for them on one of their track sessions. Whenever I think, like, “I’m getting fast on track,” if I’m able to do a ride-along with one of these instructors, it always just blows me away how much better they are than I am.
Do you see any similarities between the work you do in finance and your hobby?
The opportunity we have right now is data is much more readily available. We have tools now that allow us to analyze that data in much more efficient ways than we ever have done before. So, we can now make much better decisions; we can make data-based decisions. And then we can measure the impact of those decisions. If we’re looking at a company—at their finance and tax function—and we’re looking at how they’re organized and how they’re performing, we’re able to actually get some of the data together to be able to make recommendations.
The same thing relates on track. There’s some [times] as I drive around that I’m thinking, “I have a feeling there’s a particular corner of the track that, if I improve on that corner, I can cut a second or two off my lap time.” And then when I get back and I look at the data, and I start lining things up between different laps, then I see that there’s a different corner altogether.