March 2020 was a month like no other for Ben Hodgkinson.
As Head of Mechanical Engineering at Mercedes AMG HPP based in Brixworth, he was looking forward to the start of the Formula 1 season. Then Covid-19 struck and he had to quickly reach top speed at something completely different when the racing season was postponed.
With hospitals filling up quickly and fear of the NHS running out of ventilators, he worked day and night to develop a new continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) device.
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Ben Hodginkson BEM with the CPAP machine he helped develop, which saved thousands of lives during the pandemic
Ben has now been awarded a British Empire Medal (BEM) for services to the NHS on the New Year Honors List, but the humble 46-year-old insists he was just “doing his duty”.
He told the newspaper: “I’m proud that I did it, but I also don’t feel as worthy as some. I worked incredibly hard for about three weeks.
“There are doctors and nurses who have been working in these conditions day and night for months and months.
Mercedes plant in Brixworth swapped F1 technology for the construction of the breathing aid
“I helped the best I could and I knew how to do it. It was just my duty.”
Ben has a longstanding relationship with University College London (UCL), where he occasionally teaches engineering. In the early stages of the pandemic, University College Hospital (UCH) in London contacted university professor Tim Baker, who gave Ben an early break in his racing career, and asked if he could help with the government’s ventilation challenge.
UCH believed that ventilator development was not the way to go. They felt that a CPAP – a device that delivers a stream of oxygenated air at constant pressure and attached to a mask or hood – was the best way to see how hard Covid had hit Italy.
On a ventilator, patients must be cared for by an intensive care nurse who can only care for one or two patients at a time. However, on a CPAP, patients can be cared for by a regular nurse who cares for 10 patients.
Ben and his team worked on the device day and night – they wore t-shirts they bought at a local store as they had no spare clothes
But there was one big problem: there weren’t many CPAPs available in the UK. A 25 year old model was excavated from the UCH Museum and they needed someone to reverse engineer it … figure out how it was made and reproduce it. And fast.
Prof Baker knew the man well and contacted Ben, who got permission from his Mercedes bosses to do the job and selected his best engineers to help him.
Ben, who lives in Geddington, said, “In my head it (the device) looked like something from Wallace and Gromit.
“It turned out to be quite a small plastic block with three valves, and I took it to the labs at UCL and found out how it worked pretty quickly.”
After a busy few days of working until 6 a.m. and only sleeping two hours before heading back into action, they have completed the design of their new Mark II UCL Ventura device. They not only reproduced it, but improved it by changing the computational dynamics to reduce oxygen consumption – crucial at a time when there were also concerns about oxygen supply to the NHS.
The project was completed within 10 days of starting. A prototype was made, tested on a clinician, approved in no time by the drug and health product regulatory agency, and production began.
Ben said, “I’ve worked in Formula 1 for 20 years. You get pushed hard and it’s pretty stressful, but you have this mental retreat that it’s all about racing, it’s not about life or death.
“But that was life or death. The few hours of sleep I stole made me feel guilty. I felt terrible every morning when I left. “
The government quickly ordered up to 10,000 devices. With the completely repurposed Mercedes factory in Brixworth, they made $ 1,000 a day to fill the order with workers they even packed in the restaurant area of the factory.
And the design was selflessly published for free so that it could be produced all over the world. Within a week, designs were shared with more than 1,300 teams in 25 countries and have since helped healthcare professionals in more than 90 countries. India used thousands of CPAPs when it was hit by a devastating wave of Covid earlier this year.
To Ben’s surprise, the designs were even downloaded from NASA.
He said, “As engineers, we always joke that this is not rocket science. Then suddenly NASA downloads your designs and you think maybe it is?”
Ben, who has since left Mercedes after signing a deal to become technical director at F1 rival Red Bull Powertrains, said the hair on the back of the neck rose on hearing of the effects of his work.
He himself became infected with Covid at the end of March 2020, which in his opinion must have happened while working on the project, and was “off the count” for two weeks.
He said, “Fortunately, I didn’t need any of my own devices, but while I was in bed I kept getting videos of their use. It was very emotional.”
He learned he was on the honor roll when he received a letter from the cabinet office, even though it was originally absent.
After failing to check the mailbox, he was found by his wife, but Ben was sworn to secrecy and didn’t even tell his mother.
He said, “It was completely unexpected. It’s a bloody thing.”
