In a Formula 1 or Formula E race, a strategy decision made in the wrong 45-second window can cost a championship worth hundreds of millions of pounds. The decision-maker doesn’t get to ask for more data, convene a working group, or defer to next quarter. They decide — with the information available, under pressure, with immediate and measurable consequences.
This keynote extracts the decision-making architecture behind thirty years of elite motorsport and translates it directly to the boardroom, the operating room, and the trading floor. It is not a talk about racing. It is a talk about what racing reveals about human performance under conditions every senior leader recognises.
What this talk covers
Drawing on Mark Preston’s career as an engineer at McLaren F1, co-founder of Super Aguri F1, and Team Principal of the DS Techeetah squad that won five Formula E World Championship titles — a combination of Teams’ and Drivers’ Championships — this keynote explores the cognitive and structural frameworks that enable elite decision-making when speed and accuracy are in direct tension.
The talk examines how high-performance organisations build decision rights — who decides, with what data, and in what time window — and why most organisations get this architecture wrong by defaulting to consensus in conditions that demand clarity. It explores how motorsport uses pre-committed decision trees to remove cognitive load in the moment, and how that principle applies directly to crisis leadership, clinical decision-making, financial risk management, and technology deployment.
A core section covers what Mark calls the three-tier decision model: the 0.3-second instinct decision, the 45-minute race strategy decision, and the overnight engineering decision. Most organisations operate these on the same process, at the same speed — with predictably poor results. Separating them architecturally is one of the single highest-leverage changes a leadership team can make.
Who this is for
This keynote resonates most strongly with senior leadership teams and C-suite audiences facing high-consequence, time-pressured environments — particularly in healthcare, financial services, technology, energy, and defence. It also performs exceptionally well with engineering and operations leaders who want rigorous frameworks rather than motivational metaphors.
Mark has delivered versions of this talk to NHS leadership programmes, energy sector executive teams, FTSE board offsites, and MBA cohorts at Oxford and other leading business schools. It scales from 50 to 5,000 delegates and can be extended into a half-day decision-making workshop.
What audiences take away
A decision-rights mapping exercise they can run with their own team in under an hour. A practical framework for distinguishing which decisions in their organisation need speed, which need accuracy, and the small number that require both — with structural design advice for each. And the diagnostic questions Mark uses with new motorsport engineering teams to identify exactly where a group’s decision-making is breaking down.
Book this talk: Contact Mark directly via the enquiry form or through Champions Speakers Bureau. Available internationally for keynotes, panel contributions, and half-day executive workshops.