What Formula 1 can teach defence about wartime pace

Over the past few years, the realities of modern conflict have shifted in a way that few of us could have imagined a decade ago. The pace of change on today’s battlefield is relentless.

The conflict in Ukraine has shown how quickly new technologies can be adapted, how rapidly tactics evolve, and how decisive data and speed of decision making have become.

For those of us who have spent our careers in high performance environments, this acceleration feels familiar. For those in defence, who are sometimes more used to longer procurement cycles, the pace of change remains a challenge.

I’ve spent nearly thirty years in Formula 1™ and related businesses, working for teams including McLaren and Mercedes in a world where speed, precision and constant improvement are the difference between success and failure. Every race is planned and executed using millions of data points, endless simulations and small, continual refinements. In that environment, an organisation either learns faster than its competitors or it falls behind. There is no comfortable middle ground.

During the Covid pandemic, I was asked to draw on this experience to lead the Ventilator Challenge UK, a UK Government-led project to scale ventilator production to meet the huge demands of the Covid-19 pandemic. It was the first time I had seen government and industry come together on what could only be described as a wartime footing in peacetime. Decisions were taken quickly and informed by expertise. Supply chains were redesigned in days and, by using high performance engineering techniques, we delivered a step change in production at a speed that would previously have been thought impossible. What had effectively been 23 years of production was achieved in just 12 weeks, with 65 percent of the ventilator re-engineered for volume manufacture. Peak daily production prior to Covid was 15 machines per week. The UK Ventilator Challenge peaked at 402 units in one day.

To achieve this, approximately 3,000 volunteer operatives, including AA roadside support technicians, airline pilots and Formula 1™ engineers, were trained remotely using digital tools created within three weeks. Although the final ventilator carried all the investment costs of the 40 pilot projects that led to the one successful programme I led, the unit cost was still lower than that of the original device.

The UK was among the few nations able to upscale ventilator manufacturing at speed. That outcome reflected a combination of policy choices, industrial capacity, and the availability of high performance engineering expertise, including from motorsport.

For me, the experience highlighted how Formula 1™ principles, culture and technologies can translate beyond the racetrack when applied with clear authority and shared purpose. It also prompted a more structured effort to apply those lessons outside motorsport, including through work at PurpleSector, where we have sought to codify elements of high performance engineering for use in environments under pressure to deliver critical capability faster and more efficiently.

Defence is one of the areas where this approach is most relevant, and also where adoption is hardest. Recent strategic reviews and ministerial statements emphasise the need for forces and industry to operate at wartime pace in peacetime. While this ambition is well founded, many defence organisations remain shaped by governance, assurance, and decision processes designed for a different risk environment. Closing the gap between stated intent and operational reality will require deliberate changes in how decisions are informed, authorised and executed.

I believe Industrial Racecraft™ offers a practical route forward. By creating a digital twin with an appropriate level of fidelity to represent a complex system, such as an operational facility or a supply chain, and merging this with validation data alongside data science, machine learning and artificial intelligence tools, it becomes possible to model numerous scenarios offline and without risk. This allows better decisions to be made faster in the real world. The same approach underpins Formula 1™ race strategy, where highly developed tools support real time critical decision making by allowing hundreds of scenarios to be explored and rapidly narrowed in preparation for an optimised intervention at exactly the right moment.

Beyond smart tools, there is also a powerful cultural dimension to this approach. In the best race teams, decisions are made at the point of greatest knowledge. This typically means the expert with the clearest data and understanding at that moment is trusted to act, regardless of seniority. When applied appropriately, this principle can significantly increase the speed and quality of decision making in complex organisations. It encourages responsibility, accountability and collaboration, all of which are essential in modern defence environments.

PurpleSector’s Industrial Racecraft™ approach is agnostic to the application. The same principles that help optimise a race weekend can be applied to an RAF base, a munitions facility, a logistics network or a maintenance programme for complex platforms. During the Ventilator Challenge, we demonstrated that agile manufacturing, resilient supply chains and rapid engineering response can be achieved at national scale under extraordinary pressure. Those same capabilities can now be channelled into strengthening sovereign defence capability, de-risking complex programmes or operations, and accelerating the delivery of critical equipment.

The Government’s commitment to increasing defence and security spending in the years ahead brings with it an important responsibility. That investment must translate into tangible capability growth, improved readiness and long-term resilience. To achieve that, innovation must be embedded in the way defence operates every day. Initiatives such as UK Defence Innovation and its Rapid Innovation Team reflect a growing understanding that solutions may come from unconventional places and that dual-use technologies can be harnessed more effectively.

High performance engineering is one of the United Kingdom’s most distinctive and successful sectors. It has delivered impressive results in motorsport, aerospace and advanced manufacturing for decades.

I am not suggesting that defence should behave like a racing team in every respect. However, I am convinced that the principles that underpin success in Formula 1™, clarity of purpose, disciplined execution, intelligent use of data and technology, and a culture of constant improvement, have direct relevance to the challenges defence faces today.

The need to act is driven by rising global instability and increasing threat levels, creating a shrinking window in which to implement meaningful change. By bringing proven methods from one of the most demanding engineering environments in the world into defence, there is a genuine opportunity to move faster, think more clearly and prepare more effectively for what lies ahead.