Formula 1 motor racing provides many important ingredients to help us explore the nature of organisational performance. The first is a clear, unambiguous performance outcome – consistently winning races and thereby consistently outperforming the competition. The fundamental importance of this measure of performance, and one which is often overlooked by managers striving to improve their organisations, is that it is concerned with relative advantage. The notion of competitive advantage is based on the premise that an organisation’s performance is superior relative to all available competition. Formula 1 clearly exhibits this criterion, as a team may make significant performance enhancements to its own car, only to find that it has become inferior to the competition that has made greater advances, and therefore it is the relative rather than absolute pace of improvement that is needed to improve and sustain a competitive position.