Yesterday a couple of us headed east to Bloomberg TV’s HQ to attend the inaugural SportBusiness Group ‘Sport and The City’ event on Formula 1.
The conference attracted an interesting mix of speakers including Geoff McGrath, McLaren Applied Technologies, Valerie Servageon Grande, Hublot and Ollie Gadney, UBS. Each of the speakers presented different strategies linked to their involvement in F1.
If you follow the McLaren model, there is little point in engaging in any activity unless you can demonstrate that you will be the first or the best. This business principle is evident today where McLaren is now applying its technology and design to deliver breakthrough’s in performance not only in the motorsport industry but also through the supply of performance-based date to elite athletes and teams.
It’s a smart move as it provides McLaren with a different channel for securing new business income and one that started over a decade ago when McLaren first developed their telemetry system to help enhance the communication between the drivers and the team engineers.
It got us thinking about the whole subject of performance in sport. Are we reaching the stage where elite Performance Directors in sport will work even more closely with their team of engineers and will success on the field soon be based on the strength of your back up/data analyst team? It would be interesting to analyse some before and after data but expect that the bulk of the athletes competing in London 2012 will be working very closely with a team of engineers, and some of those engineers will probably be based in McLaren’s HQ in Woking!
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