In this chapter, we will look closely at high-performance organisations in the context of Formula 1 teams by responding to three questions: What business are Formula 1 teams in? Who are their customers? And, most crucially, how do they achieve high performance? This last question enables us to explore the key processes which lead to winning on the track – designing and manufacturing a competitive car, maintaining consistency and reliability, and generating revenue streams so they can keep racing.

What business is a Formula 1 team in?

From one perspective they are in the performance engineering business. They produce a small number of highly specialised vehicles over the space of a year, which they continually develop in order to achieve sustained performance levels. From this point of view, we can understand why the region around Oxford in the UK is referred to as Motorsport Valley, a comparison with Silicon Valley on the west coast of the US, where a local cluster of firms dominate the world in a particular technology, in the latter case micro-processors.