What Private Equity Can Learn from F1: Speed, Iteration, and the Pit Crew Model
Private equity firms love to talk about operational rigor, long-term strategy, and steady hands on the wheel. But if you look at Formula 1, where decisions are made in seconds and competitive edges are measured in tenths of a second, you start to see a playbook that PE could borrow from.
First, speed. In F1, the ability to interpret data and act on it in real time is the difference between first place and failure. In private equity, firms often wait weeks or months to take action, waiting for quarterly reports, board meetings, or budget cycles. But the faster we can identify signals from noise and act, the more value we unlock. Speed doesn’t mean haste, it means building systems that enable confident, fast execution.
Second, iteration. F1 teams never stop tuning. Every lap is a test, and every race weekend is a sprint to find the marginal gain. In PE, we too often operate in waterfall planning cycles. Set the annual plan, then measure variances. But growth happens in the adjustments. We should be running weekly marketing experiments, optimizing sales processes monthly, and evolving our org charts in quarters, not years.
Third, the pit crew model. F1 teams win because of the collective. The engineers, strategists, and technicians that swarm a car in seconds. Portfolio companies often lack the talent density to move quickly on their own. That’s where PE operating teams, advisors, and shared resources come in. We should think of ourselves as a pit crew: highly specialized, brought in at key moments, and obsessed with performance.
Fourth, telemetry. F1 teams have real-time dashboards monitoring hundreds of inputs: tire wear, engine temp, fuel mix. PE firms need the same level of instrumentation in their companies. Not just financial metrics, but marketing effectiveness, sales conversion rates, customer satisfaction, and operational throughput. All live, all visible, and all actionable.
Fifth, alignment. In F1, everyone (driver, engineers, pit crew) is chasing the same goal: win the race. Every decision, every adjustment, every data point serves that purpose. In PE, misalignment is often the silent killer. Management teams chase growth, ops teams chase efficiency, boards chase IRR but if those goals aren’t synced, energy gets wasted. The best outcomes come when everyone is pointed in the same direction, moving with urgency, and measured by a shared definition of winning.
Private equity doesn’t need to mimic Formula 1. But we should learn from its relentless focus on speed, data, precision, and teamwork. The firms that do will build not just better returns, but higher-performing systems that win in any environment.