In 2005, Mark Preston had four months to build a Formula 1 team from nothing. No factory, no staff, no car, no supply chain. Just a regulatory slot and a deadline that didn’t move.
Super Aguri F1 made the grid. It raced. And the team that built it — assembled under impossible conditions — became one of the most cohesive, high-performing groups in the paddock before the budget finally ran out.
This keynote on building high-performance teams is drawn directly from that experience, and from the fifteen years of championship-level team leadership that followed — including five Formula E World Championship titles with DS Techeetah, a combination of Teams’ and Drivers’ Championships, with a team that out-executed rivals with three to five times its resources.
What this talk covers
Championship teams are not built from exceptional individuals. They are built from exceptional systems. This keynote identifies the architectural choices that determine whether a group of talented people becomes a high-performance team or a high-performing collection of individuals with coordination overhead.
The talk examines how elite motorsport teams design for psychological safety without sacrificing standards, how they build feedback cultures where problems surface quickly enough to be solved, and how they manage the transition when a team that was winning starts to lose its edge without anyone being able to name exactly what changed. It draws on the specific dynamics of the Super Aguri build — where there was no time for culture-by-committee — and on the longer-term challenge of sustaining championship performance across multiple seasons with the same team.
A section on team selection addresses the single question most organisations get wrong: they hire for skill and fire for culture, then are surprised when culture is consistently their limiting factor. Mark’s model inverts this — and explains why it produced championship results even when DS Techeetah’s technical budget was a fraction of its competitors’.
Who this is for
This keynote is designed for leaders who build and run teams — not abstract organisations. It is most effective with senior managers, department heads, and executives who carry direct accountability for team performance and are looking for something more rigorous than the standard high-performance culture playbook.
It performs particularly well at leadership development programmes, management team offsites, and HR and people-leadership conferences where the audience has already heard the standard frameworks and wants something grounded in sustained, verifiable, extreme-condition results.
What audiences take away
The five structural choices that consistently separate championship teams from high-performing groups — each with a practical diagnostic to assess where their own team sits. A model for identifying the team’s current performance ceiling and the specific intervention that would raise it. And the framework Mark used to assess whether DS Techeetah was building for the next race or eroding the foundations that made it competitive in the first place.
Book this talk: Contact Mark via the enquiry form or through Champions Speakers Bureau. Available for keynotes, leadership team workshops, and executive off-sites. Particularly effective as a half-day programme with team diagnostics.