Total Competition: Lessons in Strategy from Formula One

by Ross Brawn

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.’