What Formula One Can Teach Today’s Business Leaders

What one undercut on a Sunday afternoon reveals about how organisations actually win

With nineteen laps to go, the engineer on the pit wall has roughly forty seconds to decide whether to throw away the race or win it.

The driver is running second, half a second a lap quicker than the car ahead but unable to pass it on a circuit where overtaking is close to impossible. The tyres are going off — not dramatically, but the lap times are creeping in the wrong direction, and the data on the engineer’s screen is beginning to fan out into the shape that means the rubber has perhaps four good laps left in it. There is a window, right now, to pit for fresh tyres, rejoin in clear air, and use the grip advantage to set a series of laps quick enough that when the car ahead eventually stops, it emerges behind. The undercut. It is the most elegant overtake in the sport, executed entirely in the pit lane, and it depends on a decision made in the next forty seconds on imperfect information about tyre wear, the rival’s strategy, the likelihood of a safety car, and a weather front that may or may not be twenty minutes away.

Get it right and you win a race you could not win on track. Get it wrong — pit a lap too early, hit traffic on the out-lap, misjudge the rival’s response — and you have voluntarily surrendered second place to finish fifth, having done nothing wrong except decide badly under time pressure. The engineer keys the radio. “Box this lap. Box, box.”

That moment — and the thousands of hours of work that make it possible to take in forty seconds — is what I want to talk about, because Formula One is widely misunderstood by the people who could learn the most from it. From the outside it is cars going very fast in circles: the speed, the glamour, the drama of a late overtake. What that spectacle conceals is the most sophisticated performance organisation on the planet, an operation in which several hundred people, terabytes of data, a global supply chain and a culture of obsessive improvement are all bent towards a single question — how do we go a tenth of a second faster — and in which the answer is found not in one brilliant stroke but in the relentless accumulation of marginal advantage. I have spent my career in service organisations watching us reach for transformation as though it arrives in a single dramatic moment. Formula One knows better. It is the purest demonstration I know that sustained excellence is built, not summoned.

Begin with that forty-second decision, because it looks like the antithesis of everything I just said about accumulation — it looks like a single brilliant call. It is not. The reason the engineer can make a sound decision in forty seconds is that the decision was, in every meaningful sense, made before the race began. In the days beforehand, the strategy team ran that exact scenario hundreds of times in simulation: this tyre compound, this degradation curve, this rival, this circuit, this gap. They modelled when the undercut works and when it does not, where the break-even point sits, what the safety-car probability does to the maths. By the time the situation arises on Sunday, the engineer is not solving a novel problem under pressure. They are recognising a problem they have already solved, and selecting the response they prepared in the calm of the week before.

This is the thing about decision-making under pressure that most organisations get backwards. We imagine that the skill is staying cool enough to think clearly when the heat is on, and there is something to that. But the deeper truth is that you cannot think your way to a good decision in forty seconds about a genuinely unfamiliar situation. What you can do is prepare so thoroughly beforehand that the forty-second situation is one you have seen a hundred times in rehearsal. The composure that looks so impressive on the pit wall is mostly preparation wearing the costume of calm. Scenario planning — the deeply unglamorous work of asking “if this happens, we do that; if that fails, we do this” before anything has happened at all — is not a corporate nicety to be skipped when things get busy. It is the difference between a confident response and a reactive flail, and it has to be done in advance because the one thing you will not have in the moment is time.

There is a structural detail in how that decision gets made that is worth pausing on, because it is one of the quiet reasons F1 teams decide so well. The person watching the tyre data and the person making the strategic call are usually not the same person. The analyst surfaces the picture; the strategist decides what to do about it. This separation looks like an inefficiency — surely it is faster to have one person do both? — but under pressure it is precisely what prevents paralysis. The analyst is free to read the data without the cognitive load of also owning the consequences; the strategist is free to weigh the call without drowning in the raw numbers. Blur the two and, in the heat of the moment, you get a single overloaded person trying to both perceive and decide, and doing neither well. The principle generalises a long way beyond motorsport: the most decisive teams I have worked with maintain some version of this boundary between the people who establish what is true and the people who choose what to do about it.

Now widen the lens from the single decision to the thing that actually wins championships, which is none of the glamorous parts. Ask most people why one team dominated an era and they will point to the car, or to some singular technical genius. Talk to anyone who has worked inside a winning team and they will tell you something far less satisfying: it was the culture. The car is a product of the culture, not a substitute for it. The teams that win consistently share a particular set of behaviours — accountability without blame, the freedom to challenge a senior engineer’s assumption without it being career-threatening, a restless curiosity that refuses to accept that the current solution is the best one — and these behaviours are what allow the marginal gains to keep coming. Because here is the mechanism that matters: marginal gains only accumulate in a culture where people feel safe enough to report the small failures. A tenth of a second is often lost before it can be found, and someone has to be willing to say “that pit stop was slow and I think I know why” without fear of being blamed for the slowness. In a fear-based team, the small problems get hidden, and a hidden problem cannot be improved. In F1, hiding a problem costs you the race; the cultures that win are the ones where surfacing a problem is rewarded rather than punished, because they understand that you cannot fix what you will not look at.

I find the pit stop itself the most instructive single artefact in the sport, because it makes a point about process that businesses routinely miss. A modern stop takes under two seconds. Twenty-odd people perform tightly coordinated tasks simultaneously — guns, jacks, tyres on, tyres off — with zero tolerance for error, and they achieve it not through individual heroics but through a process so well-designed and so thoroughly rehearsed that it has become almost mechanical. Nobody in a two-second pit stop is improvising. Nobody is confused about their role. Every action has been drilled thousands of times until the choreography is faster and more reliable than any amount of individual brilliance could ever be. And the lesson I draw from it is one that runs against a romantic strain in business thinking: speed and reliability are not opposing forces. We tend to assume that to go faster you must accept more risk, and that to be reliable you must be slow. The pit stop disproves this completely. It is fast because it is reliable, reliable because it is well-designed, and well-designed because the team treats process design as a competitive advantage rather than a bureaucratic chore. Now set your own organisation’s critical processes — an incident response, a client onboarding, a major release — against that standard and ask honestly whether they are choreographed with anything like that clarity, or whether they are loosely defined, dependent on a couple of key individuals, and quietly vulnerable to the day one of those individuals is on leave.

I cannot write about Formula One without writing about data, because the modern car is, in a sense, a sensor that happens to have wheels — transmitting well over a thousand data points a second, every temperature and pressure and flow rate logged and analysed in real time, on the pit wall and back at a factory thousands of miles away. But the lesson here is not the volume. Every large organisation is now drowning in data; the volume is not the differentiator. The differentiator is a culture of using data to decide rather than to justify. This is the distinction I would press hardest on any leader who tells me their organisation is data-driven. There is a profound difference between an organisation that gathers evidence to discover what it should do, and one that gathers evidence to defend what it has already decided to do — and a great many organisations that believe themselves to be the former are quietly the latter. An F1 team uses its data to find the truth, including the unwelcome truth that the strategy is wrong and must change mid-race. The question to sit with is not how much data you have, but whether your people are genuinely permitted to follow it to a conclusion the leadership did not want.

There is a temporal lesson, too, that the late-race drama tends to obscure. A season is not a race; it is twenty-four races across nine months and several continents, an endurance test in which the team that sprints flat-out and burns its people to exhaustion by mid-season loses to the team that managed its energy. The winning operations build in recovery, rotation and depth — they invest heavily in their junior academies not out of sentiment but because succession and reserve strength are strategic assets — and they understand that short-termism wins individual weekends and loses championships. For any leader navigating relentless quarterly cycles and always-on expectations, the discipline is the same: pace the people, plan for the full season, and resist the seductive logic that the way to win the long game is to empty the tank in the first quarter.

And none of it — not the car, not the data, not the strategy — is achieved alone. Behind every winning team sits an ecosystem: the tyre supplier, the fuel and lubricants partner, the technology partners, the logistics operation that moves the entire circus around the world on a punishing calendar, each contributing a piece of a performance puzzle no single organisation could assemble by itself. These partners are not chosen on price. They are chosen on fit and on performance, integrated early into the development process rather than bolted on at the last moment, and held to the same exacting standard the team holds itself — because the team understands, viscerally, that its partners’ failures are its own failures, indistinguishable on a Sunday afternoon from a mistake made in-house. In a business world of global supply chains and interdependent technology stacks, where your customer’s experience depends on a partner’s performance as much as your own, that is not a motorsport curiosity. It is simply how complex value gets delivered, and the organisations that treat partner performance as rigorously as their own are the ones that win consistently.

The undercut worked, by the way. The car emerged from its stop in clear air, the driver strung together four laps quick enough to build the gap, and when the rival finally pitted it rejoined behind. Second became first, won not on the track but on the pit wall, in a forty-second decision that had in truth been made days earlier in a simulator — by a team whose culture let them prepare for it, whose process let them execute it, and whose data let them trust it.

Conclusion

Formula One operates at the intersection of technology, human performance, data, process engineering and strategy, all at extraordinary speed and under genuine pressure, and the lessons it offers are not abstract. Win on the margins, because no single change wins a championship. Make your hard decisions in advance, so the crisis is a rehearsal rather than a surprise. Build the culture first, because it is what lets the marginal gains keep coming. Design your processes as a source of advantage, not an afterthought. Follow your data to conclusions you did not want. Pace your people for the season, not the sprint. And treat your partners’ performance as your own. The question was never whether your organisation could learn from the pit lane. It is whether you are willing to do the quiet, disciplined, relentless work that the best teams do every single day — long before the forty seconds that everyone else sees.