What a Formula 1 Track Taught Me About Performance

Your next offsite should be on a racetrack.

I spent the day at Allen Berg’s elite Formula Racing School at Laguna Seca, and I’m leaving with a new perspective on execution, pressure, and precision.

Here’s what I learned from behind the wheel:

🏎️ Speed isn’t the goal. Precision is.
The fastest drivers aren’t the ones pushing hardest - they’re the ones hitting their marks with surgical accuracy.
Track record holders clock lap times within a tenth of a second of each other. Every. Single. Time.

🛑 Brakes make you faster.
The quicker you brake, the sooner you can accelerate.
It sounds backward, but ask any pro - braking well is what separates elite drivers from amateurs.

📐 Physics wins.
Everything on the track is math: force, friction, weight transfer, momentum.
(A class I never took… and now regret.)
You don’t guess your way to mastery. You calculate it.

💰 F1 is the most expensive sport in the world.
Team budgets are pushing $500 million a year - all for marginal gains.
In racing, every tenth of a second matters. That mindset? Transferable.

And this is just Day One.

What really hit me wasn’t just the adrenaline - it was how applicable this is to life and leadership.

🏁 Discomfort = growth
Great drivers chase discomfort - right up to the moment of losing control.
That edge? It’s where real learning happens.

🧠 Focus becomes survival
The level of concentration required is intense.
Progress happens in millimeters, not miles. You don’t have time to overthink. You just execute.

🔥 It’s a pressure simulator
You’re forced to make rapid decisions, assess real risk, and act without a safety net.
That kind of stress test? Game-changing.

🤝 Shared risk builds trust
Push your team into something uncomfortable - together.
The bonding isn’t forced. It’s earned.

🔁 It rewires how you think about performance
After this, your team walks away with a new language for execution, failure, feedback, and momentum.
You leave with a higher threshold for intensity - and a deeper understanding of how people show up when it counts.

See you on the track.

Want to design an offsite that actually shifts how your team performs?
I build immersive experiences that rewire how teams think, lead, and connect - racetracks included.

Location

San Francisco