Tony Purnell

Tony Purnell
Born	23 May 1958 Carshalton, Surrey, United Kingdom
Citizenship	United Kingdom
Alma mater	Manchester University, MIT Sloan School of Management
Occupation	businessman

Tony Purnell (born 23 May 1958 in Carshalton, Surrey) is an English businessman, and former principal of the Jaguar and Red Bull Formula One teams.

Before entering motorsports, Purnell had a lengthy academic career in England and the United States. A pupil of The John Fisher School, he gained a scholarship to study Mechanical Engineering at Manchester University in the 1970s: then won the Kennedy Scholarship at the MIT Sloan School of Management where he completed his master's degree. His dissertation was on the subject of Formula One aerodynamics.

After MIT, Purnell returned to the United Kingdom as a researcher at Cambridge University. Here he began work on wind tunnel analysis software for the Lola organisation and consulted for the short-lived FORCE F1 team.

Purnell went on to found Pi Research (and its later spin-off Pi Technology) around his software and by the late 1990s had built the company into a highly successful global electronics business. In 1999 this company was purchased by the Ford Motor Company making Purnell a multi-millionaire. Still under Purnell's management, Pi Research was made part of Ford's Premiere Performance Division alongside Cosworth and the Jaguar Formula One team.

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