Total Competition: Lessons in Strategy from Formula One

by Ross Brawn

The overall performance of a modern Formula One car is truly astonishing. The acceleration time from zero to 60 mph is a ‘modest’ 2.4 seconds, but this is because the car cannot put enough power down through the tyres. In reality the car’s acceleration accelerates: the next 60 mph to 120 mph requires only an extra two seconds. And the braking is astonishing: from 200 mph to a standstill in 3.5 seconds. The forces experienced by the drivers are also impressive, 5g in braking and 4g in cornering. By comparison, a high-performance road car might achieve 1g braking and cornering. The excessive g-forces explain why the drivers have to be superb athletes, comparable with any Olympian.

The cars can generate downforce equivalent to their mass, ¾ of a tonne at 110 mph, which means theoretically that, at that speed, they could drive along upside down and stick to the ceiling. At top speed, the cars generate 2.5 tonnes of downforce. The drag is so high that just lifting off the throttle at maximum speed will give over 1g of deceleration – the same level as a performance road car braking hard. In other words, an F1 driver who lifts his foot off the throttle will decelerate as quickly as a Porsche 911 driver doing an emergency brake.

I described these events in the light-hearted manga format of a book I called The Art of War – Five Years in Formula One.

strategy has three perspectives – political, economic and technical.

theory has evolved a hierarchy that acknowledges four levels: policy; strategy; the operational level (discussed further below as operational art); and the tactical level.

My philosophy was always to be the ideal employee. So whoever I worked for I tried to fulfil my obligations to the best standard I could.

I’d never changed ratios in a car out in the field – I’d done it in the workshop practising – so I had the instruction manual in front of me while I changed them. My boss at March walked passed and said, ‘That’s not very professional, is it?’ and I said, ‘Well, it’s more professional than putting the ratios in wrong.’

If you change the references for these drivers and said you are all going to get paid $500,000 a year instead of $50 million a year, would they still do it? They would. It’s just the references. When they see someone else getting paid a certain amount, they have got to get a bit more.

I don’t think that bonuses are true incentives. I have always had the view that money can be a stronger disincentive and a problem, rather than an incentive. If people are doing things just for money, then they have got the wrong motivation. The real issue is that people get upset if they think they are being treated unfairly. If someone is doing a good job and he sees the bloke next to him getting more for doing a lesser job, he gets upset. But it is not the absolute numbers, it’s the comparative numbers. It’s the fairness. So, I have always thought that those arrangements were potentially demotivators.

Not long before I arrived, they had sacked a man in the machine shop, and it was like a public hanging. This guy had machined a piston incorrectly, and despite what I have said about quality control, it was the engine that blew up in the warm-up lap at Magny Cours the year before. They’d had an investigation and this guy had got hung, drawn and quartered and sacked: ‘This is what will happen to anyone that doesn’t keep up the standards.’ I thought that was shocking: the system had broken down, he hadn’t broken down. And I wouldn’t allow this to happen, which led to my only conflict with Luca di Montezemolo. When Luca was looking for someone to blame for a problem we had had, I said, ‘Luca, it’s me. I am responsible for it all. If you want to blame somebody, you blame me.’

We put the engine design division next to the chassis design division. We built the design offices next to each other. They couldn’t be the same, because we had some physical constraints. But there was only a 20 yard walk to go from one to the other. We only had one metallurgy group that supported the whole programme. We moved people around, we had people in the chassis group go and work in the engine group and had people go from the engine team to the chassis group for periods of time. Paolo and I would look at the workload and we would help each other out when there were challenges.

Before me, the engine group was in charge, then they brought in John Barnard on the chassis side, who was a strong character. But he was based in the UK, so he and the head of engine didn’t have so many opportunities to go out for dinner or have coffee, so therefore you had this problem. When I came in, I chatted over coffee, I went out for dinner, did all the normal things. It was easier for me, I was alone there; in the evenings I either went home and sat by myself or I would invite Paolo or someone else out for dinner. I used that opportunity to talk about work, but also have a bit of a social, which always helps. I was building relationships, we had this synergy, the completeness of the car.

Throughout my career, I very rarely lost my temper. Jean would say, ‘You lose your temper more with your family than with the people who work for you.’ I would say, ‘That’s a conscious thing, isn’t it?’ Family is emotive, work is professional; I think if you get to the emotive stage at work, you’ve failed. In business life, you shouldn’t lose control. There were moments on the pit wall, I confess, when it got a bit ragged. But that’s the only environment. Passion is not to be ignored. I hope I displayed passion and enthusiasm, and emotion of that sort.

I said to the staff that were there, ‘When do you hold your debrief to decide what worked well, what didn’t, what problems you have and what you need to do?’ They said they didn’t have debriefs. I said, ‘But surely you must get together and discuss things?’ ‘Only if the patient dies.’ Only when someone has died do you discuss, when it’s too late. And at that time it’s emotionally charged, because you are all worried about the consequences. ‘Why don’t you have a normal session when everything’s been okay and you can see all the things you’d like to improve?’ They said they don’t have time. That was shocking for me. I said, ‘That’s the biggest thing you have to do, give yourself time to improve the process. You have got to have a system where improvements can be developed. If problems recur several times, then it’s got to have priority.’

We brought an engineer in that we had identified working for Bridgestone Italy in the research centre, and we gave him a high level of responsibility in the race programme. So, this deep integration was again part of solving the problem.

Winning requires also that a team maximizes its political, economic and technical capabilities. So, these are the three dimensions of strategy.

the Sunzi describes the ideal commander in five words: wisdom, trustworthiness, benevolence, courage, discipline. Once appointed, the commander must follow his own judgement, and not any orders given to him by the ruler, who cannot assess the situation as well as he can:

If fighting is sure to result in victory, then you must fight, even though the ruler forbid it; if fighting will not result in victory, then you must not fight even at the ruler’s bidding. The general who advances without coveting fame and retreats without fearing disgrace, whose only thought is to protect his country and do good service for his sovereign, is the jewel of the kingdom.

In summary, the ruler and commander (once appointed) must both follow the way and exercise good judgement with a calm, dispassionate temperament. The commander must accept the responsibilities of leadership, regardless of the consequences, and the ruler must accept the consequences of delegation, resisting the temptation to interfere.

R Well, most of them, and in some ways I include myself in this, are lazy. Human beings who will often take the easiest route and do what they feel is adequate, and I am just as guilty in that respect. As a person I am often best driven by deadlines and targets. I like to give myself challenges, because I know that will be the thing that will drive me most and if I know there is not that deadline . . . One of the ways I worked in the office was to schedule meetings for the week because I knew that . . . A . . . otherwise you would go fishing? R Perhaps not that extreme! But I knew the week would slip away. I had to structure my week quite strictly to make sure I used the time properly. I knew a technical review was coming up and so I had to do the work to be ready for it.

So if you recognize in yourself that you are lazy, then having that structure, committing to it, and making sure it happens, is vital.

he realized he needed to be seen in the factory and that has stuck with me for my working career. And I used to say to my PA, all my PAs, ‘Make sure I spend time out in the factory. Make sure you remind me and schedule it in.’ And that relationship was a vital part for me of achieving success and getting the right team.

I had the philosophy that it took a year to understand a team, a year to fix it and then the third year you should start succeeding. In my mind these were the timescales I worked to. Your first impressions of people are quite important, but sometimes they are the wrong impressions. Someone can be very awkward, difficult – but as you start to understand them, you discover they can be contributing an awful lot. They just need a few edges massaged off. And some people who are very friendly and nice and cooperative, you realize they aren’t contributing very much. It takes time to understand that. So, first impressions are not always the best. I would always prefer to have time to absorb and understand how an organization was working. And also be able to spend the time to tell people what’s expected of them. Understand what they think they are there for and make sure that aligns with what you think they are there for. Often, that is not the case.

One of the things that became apparent to us at Mercedes during that period building up to when the new engines first raced in 2014, was that every time we asked the FIA for an interpretation or clarification of the engine regulations, it became clear we were the first ones to ask. This told me that we were ahead of the game compared with the other engine manufacturers. We were putting the work in early on the engine project when everyone else seemed to think there was plenty of time. They thought there was ample opportunity to get this job done. But at Mercedes we knew that we were going to run out of time. So the early work was vital.

I always had the belief in separate teams for projects like developing the new car

You mustn’t waste time. So even if you’ve got a structured plan, you mustn’t waste time on it.

race-winning cars are not designed the winter before they win the race. They’re a product of several years of good work to develop the designs and engineering that you need to produce a successful car. If you have been part of a successful team, sometimes you can transplant that knowledge to a new team to some degree, or at least get you a step up the ladder. But it does take some time to get the infrastructure in place. If you go to a team that doesn’t have a good driver simulator, for instance, that’s something you have got to build. If you go there and it hasn’t got a good wind tunnel or CFD [computational fluid dynamics] system, you can’t turn a switch and immediately have a top-rate facility. If you go there and the chief aerodynamicist is not capable, it takes you six or 12 months to find the right guy, put him in the system and so on. There are things that just take time.

If you keep piling in the resource on the problem you have today and never allowing some resource to go into the future, then you will never have that future.

your approach towards the regulator in the sport was to be transparent, to prepare. Some people would not have done that, because they wouldn’t trust the regulator not to spread the technology out there. Or they would think, no, it’s just better to keep it to ourselves and then we will fight the case as and when it happens. But your track record shows that it is not as effective, is it?

The important point for people reading this is that we all get into situations where we have to make arguments on purely logical or technical grounds. Like putting forward an investment in a business or a planning application. Fundamentally it seems like it is a technical issue: does this meet the investment criteria or the planning rules? But this purely technical argument is being addressed to people. When they see the document on the table, do they want to approve it, or do they want to knock it back? And that can be down to personality or chemistry or track record. What you are saying: you invested a lot in making sure that when it came to a decision, people were prepared and were on your side.

He said that ultimately if there was any drama in the team, I would stand up and take responsibility for it. That aspect was very important to me and I just thought that was a natural thing. Even if someone else had caused the drama, caused the problem. And it might be someone or something I didn’t even know about. It was important for me personally, and for the team to know, that I was prepared to take it on my shoulders when there was a drama.

when I worked at Honda, Bernie several times rang the president of Honda to discuss something he wasn’t happy about. And on every occasion the president referred him back to me. ‘It’s Ross Brawn’s team, I’m sorry you are going to have to speak to him. I’m not going to get into it.’ And that was perhaps typically Japanese in a way. Also Honda had had some issues with Bernie in the past. I don’t recall what they were, but they were very uncomfortable in dealing with Bernie directly. They knew he was the exact opposite of their philosophy and culture and they didn’t know how to deal with him. They didn’t want to deal with him. So on the few occasions he tried to bypass me and go to the president of Honda about some issue he was just rebuffed,

Then he rang Dieter Zetsche, rather like he did with you, and said that he was struggling to deal with me, and wanted someone else involved in the negotiations. Now, unfortunately, Dieter Zetsche didn’t tell me that until much later. If Dieter had come to me and said, ‘Bernie has made this phone call. What shall we do?’ we could have played a double act. Dead simple to get round it. Instead, Dieter got Niki Lauda involved because Bernie suggested Niki.

The fact is that being a statesman is a great idea, but it’s very dangerous . . . there’s a horrible expression, which my wife hates when I mention it, but you could say about Formula One that ‘no good turn goes unpunished’. R Right! A You said your own approach is to develop relationships and build trust – but that only works internally. If you set yourself up to be the statesman and you don’t just do what’s ruthlessly in the interests of your team, you pay a price.

one of the things you have always done well, if I may say, is that you don’t glorify your own success. You are not the kind of person who gets out there in the media and talks up their own team, their performance, what they are going to achieve next season. I think it’s lethal, because if you are telling the truth you are just attracting attention. And if you are not telling the truth, you let people down. Whereas you always keep it low key. This is an example of where people should have asked themselves, ‘Why would Ross Brawn be telling us that he has discovered 50 per cent extra downforce, if he hasn’t? What’s in it for him? Is that in his nature?’

quality of people against quantity of people. And that’s vital. You need the resources, you need the headcount, to do the job but you need the quality. Therefore developing a team, growing a team, is always two steps forward and one step back. However well you think you have chosen the team, you find when you get them together some of the chemistry doesn’t work and you have to take a step back. Move something out and then put another piece in. And you have to pay a lot of attention to that. You need to have a really good infrastructure of people to support that. I was never a great fan of the Human Resource (HR) department – and I still have mixed feelings – until I went to Ferrari, and Ferrari was really the first place where there was a substantial HR department that was needed and worked.

You need an HR director and some HR people who can really connect with the troops. Not just be seen as bureaucrats. I met with my HR director at Brawn GP and Mercedes every week and he had to give me a summary of what was going on and where we had issues, where we had to pay attention.

In terms of routines, I had a fortnightly senior management meeting. The subject of that meeting was company matters: HR would give us an overview of how recruitment was going and what personnel issues we had; Bob would give the group a quick overview technically of what was coming up, where we had to focus, what problems we had; Rob would give us an overview of where he was on the manufacturing and operational sides; Nigel would give us a financial overview once a month because he had to collect his figures, so he would tell us how the budget was going; Caroline would raise any legal issues that were coming up. She was a compliance officer as well which, as you know, at large companies like Mercedes is a bit of a thing. And then we would invite other people to come and make a presentation if there was something important going on.

A Would you say this group was about formulating strategy or for information? Did it take decisions? R Primarily information but some decision-making. It was to make sure the executive group had all the information. There would be an action list generated from the meeting. My PA used to sit in on the meeting and make the list. In terms of decisions, I would say that they were concluded by me, but with the input of the whole committee. So, in the end if I felt really strongly about something, rarely would anyone stand in my way, but I cannot remember a situation getting to that.

About thirty or forty people would come to the debrief. That would start by running quickly through a critical fault list. I didn’t expect people to tell me about every nut and bolt needed, but we did have a fault list system. Every fault raised had an identity and a fault sheet was created and it had to be fixed by design or engineering and signed off.

Everyone should have left that meeting with a clear picture of what happened at the weekend and what was broadly expected of them for the next race. What were the priorities. What were the issues. The debrief could take a whole morning if it was a heavy agenda.

after every second race I would have a whole factory debrief, with everyone. In fact in the end, because we made that a little more detailed with information slides, we had to do it in two or three tranches of two hundred people a time to get everyone into the presentation room. The team was growing and so was the amount of information we were giving. In that briefing I would give a summary of the races, how we had done. It would show where we were on points scoring. We had metrics for reliability which we would present at that meeting. Rob Thomas would do a presentation on the factory and how it was going. What the reject rates were etc. Just things to give people a flavour of how the company was doing. There would be a financial report to let them know how we were doing on budget, but it wouldn’t go into massive detail. I would then give a summary to the staff and try to make it clear what our objectives were and what was expected of them. That would be spread over a day because there would be a couple of presentations in the morning and one in the afternoon. Each individual presentation would be one-and-a-half to two hours. And also we did one at night because there were quite a number of shift workers. That would happen at 8pm.

I would try and do each department at least once a month. Have an informal walk around.

I had a schedule of all the meetings going on and I would jump in on some I thought would be interesting for me to have an understanding and also where I might be able to contribute.

A If you sat in on a meeting what was your approach: to sit and listen? R I tried to. Certainly, I would never undermine the guy who was heading the meeting. If it was something I didn’t like I would try and deal with it quietly, away from the meeting. If I thought I could contribute in a balanced way, then I would. So it was just that judgement call on making sure you didn’t have a confrontation with a department head in front of his team.

I got a chauffeur. Which sounds a bit of an extravagant thing. But it was an hour in the car in the morning and the same in the evening when I could properly read or think. Nicole Bearne, my PA, would produce a car file for me. So when I left each evening she would give me the car file with things I had to read in the car – either that evening going home (sometimes I fell asleep to be honest, if I was pretty knackered) or the next morning – that was easier. And if I had a meeting the next morning, she would give me the agenda and the supporting notes for the meeting so when I arrived I had some insight into what we were going to be talking about. So I had a driver, which sounds a bit of an indulgence, but actually was a very efficient use of my time. And you cannot make sensible phone calls while you are driving . . . I can’t concentrate. I can’t think properly if I am driving. Nicole would give me a phone list of people I had to ring who I hadn’t caught up with during the day and she would give me a reading list as well. I had a file every night to take home with me which was quite a nice time as I would be sat quietly in the car and I had a nice S Class in the end . . .

if we had something that was problematic, critical, I would quite literally clear the decks. Nicole would just put the barriers up and I would say, ‘I need a couple of hours to think about this. I need some time with no phone calls, no interruptions, to spend and reflect on all of this.’

I used him as my technical secretary. So I could delegate all of the technical working group preparation and reading of the rules and proposals and all the rest of it. He would spend the time prepping all that for me. So when I sat down and looked at it, he would outline all the things we needed to focus on etc. I didn’t have to spend time myself doing all of that. Steve had a few other tasks in the factory, but eventually he ended up really as my technical secretary. I would give him all sorts of projects. There are always things you’d like to do and you never quite have the time. So I would give them to Steve and say, ‘Go off and look at that for me. Go off and gather this information from the relevant engineers and come back to me with a summary of it all.’

I have always been very conscious of trying to plan for the future and trying to make sure that we devote resource to the future. I keep it pretty simple. I allocate three or four people to a future project, or however many I feel is appropriate, and I tell them they are sacrosanct. Unless we have an earthquake and we are in a massive crisis, then they stay out of the daily mainstream tasks. It pains me if these people aren’t left alone to get on with their future project. We would hold regular reviews with them, because I wanted to know where they had got to.

It’s the same in Formula One: you commit, not knowing what the results are going to be. But you know that if you’ve got the right people with the right resources and you give them the opportunity, then they will come up with the goods. You know as well as I do, you don’t know in twelve months’ time where you are going to be with your aerodynamic performance. But you know if you have given them all the facilities they need and you have got bright people and they have the time, and you back them and motivate them, they will be so many percentage points better in twelve months’ time than they were. It’s creative intellectual work that you can’t really quantify. But in time you will have a car that’s 20 points better than where you are now. It’s a machine. It’s the same with all innovation. You have got to create the right environment, right people, right resources, give them the vision. Manage it as it goes along, do regular reviews. But it’s a process.