There’s a number that almost every executive should know but almost none do.
In 1950, a Formula One pit stop took 67 seconds. Four crew members serviced the car. They used hammers to remove wheel nuts. Sometimes they had to push the car to get it started again.
Today, the world record is 1.80 seconds.
Red Bull set it at the 2019 Brazilian Grand Prix, on Max Verstappen’s car. The record still stands.
That’s a 96% reduction in 75 years.
Most leaders, told this story, read it as a story about speed. That reading is wrong, and the wrong reading is the entire reason most enterprise AI transformations are failing in 2026.
What actually happens in 1.80 seconds
When Verstappen’s car came to a stop at Interlagos in 2019, more than 20 crew members swarmed it. Every single one of them had exactly one job, and only that one job.
Front jack operator — lifts the front of the car using a specialized jack slid under the nose. Rear jack operator — lifts the rear. Spare front jack operator — stands by in case the primary jack fails. Four wheel-gun operators — one per corner, each operating a high-torque pneumatic wrench. Eight tire specialists — two per wheel. One to pull the old 10.5kg tire off, one to fit the new one onto the hub. Front wing adjusters — two crew members positioned to make front wing angle adjustments if strategy calls for it. Lollipop man (now usually replaced by a light system) — controls the release when all four wheel guns confirm complete. Traffic spotters — watch for incoming cars in the pit lane. Damaged nose sub-crew — a separate team that can change a damaged front wing.
Twenty-plus people. Each one doing one thing.
The Williams team has gone further. In 2016, they partnered with Avanade to begin collecting biometric data from each crew member — heart rate, breathing rate, body temperature, peak acceleration during movement. They use this data to individually optimize each crew member’s specific motion, identifying milliseconds of inefficiency.
This is not athletic heroism. This is industrial engineering applied to a 2-second window.
And here is the key insight that almost everyone misses:
The individual is not the unit of performance. The choreography is.
You cannot make a pit stop 96% faster by training individuals to move 96% faster than 1950 mechanics. The human body doesn’t allow that kind of improvement. What you can do is decompose the work into so many specialized, parallel, simultaneous actions that no single human carries any meaningful cognitive load above their one narrow job.
The 1950 mechanic had to think about removing nuts, changing tires, refueling, and getting the car going again. He carried the entire cognitive load. The 2019 pit crew member has to think about exactly one thing — pulling the front-left tire off the hub when the wheel gun has finished disengaging the nut, and stepping clear within 0.4 seconds so the fitter behind him can install the new one.
That’s it. That’s the entire job.
When you break the work down that completely, you get to 1.80 seconds. When you don’t, you stay at 67.
The historical evolution, and what it teaches
The reduction from 67 seconds to under 2 is not a single innovation. It’s a 75-year story of progressive decomposition.
- 1950: 67 seconds. 4 crew. Two tires changed. Refueling.
- 1965: 45 seconds. Crew expansion begins. Specialized roles emerge.
- Early 1970s: 27 seconds. Parallel work across all four corners.
- Early 1980s: 11 seconds. Knock-off hubs replaced by central wheel nuts. Pneumatic tools introduced.
- Benetton, 1993: 3.2 seconds. The first sub-4-second stop. Considered impossible at the time.
- 2010: Refueling banned. The 4-tire change becomes the only constraint.
- 2019: Red Bull, 1.80 seconds. Current world record.
Every reduction came from the same underlying principle: take a task one person was doing, give it to two. Take a task that required thought, eliminate the need for thought by drilling muscle memory so deep that the action happens without cognition.
The lesson, in operational excellence terms: throughput improvement in any high-stakes coordinated task does not come from making individuals faster. It comes from redesigning the work itself so the choreography eliminates the need for any individual to be exceptional.
The Great Ormond Street story
In the early 2000s, two cardiac surgeons at Great Ormond Street Hospital in London were sitting in front of a Formula One race on television.
Professor Martin Elliott and Dr Allan Goldman were not relaxing. They were working a problem.
Great Ormond Street is the largest center for child heart surgery in Britain and one of the largest centers for heart transplantation in the world. Their cardiac team had been performing world-class surgeries for years. But the handover — the transfer of a critically ill child from the operating theater to the pediatric intensive care unit — was, by their own admission, chaotic.
Imagine the scene. A newborn child has just completed twelve hours of complex open-heart surgery. They must now be moved across a corridor and reconnected to a different set of monitors, drug infusion lines, and ventilation equipment, while clinical responsibility transfers from the surgical team to the ICU team.
Equipment tangled. Information lost between handing surgeons and receiving intensivists. Multiple staff talking over each other. Critical drug doses miscommunicated. The handover was the single most dangerous moment of the patient’s hospital stay — more dangerous than the surgery itself.
Watching the F1 race, Elliott and Goldman had a realization.
If a pit crew could change four tires, refuel a car, and send a 200mph race car back onto the track in seconds with flawless coordination and zero room for error, why couldn’t a medical team do the same with a fragile newborn?
They reached out to McLaren’s Dave von Ryan. Then to Ferrari’s Ross Brawn. The pit crews were intrigued. The doctors were invited to Italy to observe the Ferrari pit operation in person.
What the surgeons saw at Ferrari changed their hospital — and over time, hospitals around the world.
What Ferrari actually taught the hospital
When the Great Ormond Street doctors observed the Ferrari pit crew, they expected to learn about speed. What they actually learned about was failure analysis.
The Ferrari engineers spent hours around a table before each race weekend, asking three questions, over and over, about every aspect of the pit operation:
- What could go wrong?
- What do we do if it does?
- How important is it if it does?
Every team member’s input was given equal weight. The questions were ranked using a methodology called FMEA — Failure Modes and Effects Analysis — a structured technique for identifying every possible point of failure in a system and pre-planning the response.
The Ferrari and Williams pit crews then traveled to London. They watched a real surgical handover live. Notes taken like they were scouting a rival team. One of them later said the experience was more stressful than Monaco.
Their feedback was direct: too many people around the bed, too much talking, too many hands crossing over one another, too much chaos where there should have been quiet order.
What they helped redesign:
- Defined roles. Every member of the handover team had one specific job.
- Single coordinator. One person — typically the anesthesiologist — owned the transition.
- Structured information transfer. A checklist replaced freeform conversation.
- Fixed physical positions. Staff stood in pre-determined spots around the bed.
- Video analysis. Every handover was filmed. Patterns were analyzed.
- Multiple rehearsals. New protocols were drilled before they were used in live patient situations.
The research outcome was published in the journal Pediatric Anesthesia in 2007. Technical errors during handovers were significantly reduced. The method spread globally. Hospitals from around the world contacted GOSH to learn the protocol. Thousands of children’s lives have been saved by the method since.
It made the front page of the Wall Street Journal. The hospital’s physicians were invited to speak to boards of directors at multi-million dollar corporations.
This is the most important operational excellence case study of the last 25 years. Most executives have never heard of it.
Why this matters in the age of AI
The Ferrari–GOSH case study has become one of the most important reference points in my work, because the pattern it surfaces is the single most consistent cause of AI transformation failure that I see in the field.
Most enterprise AI programs are running the pre-Ferrari GOSH handover. Many skilled individuals. Many simultaneous workstreams. Many vendors and consultants. Many pilots. Many opinions about strategy. But no defined choreography.
The AI architect doesn’t know where the change manager’s job ends and his begins. The change manager doesn’t know what the data lead is doing this week. The vendor program manager is running parallel workstreams with no single coordinator. Three executives are sending different priority signals to the same engineering team.
This is the chaos GOSH had before Ferrari. Skilled people. No protocol.
The outcome data is exactly what you’d expect. McKinsey’s 2025 research: only 5% of companies capture substantial AI value at scale. 60% generate no material value despite real spending.
BCG’s 10-20-70 principle: 10% of effort goes to algorithms, 20% to tech and data, 70% to people and process. Most enterprise AI budgets are allocated almost exactly inverse — and most enterprise AI failures map to that inversion.
The translation: most AI programs treat AI as an individual brilliance problem when it’s a choreography problem.
The Ferrari pit crew lesson, applied directly to enterprise AI:
Defined roles. Each person on the AI program has exactly one specific job they own. Not a portfolio. Not “supporting” five workstreams. One job.
Single coordinator. One person leads the transition with clear authority over the choreography. This is the role most enterprise AI programs are missing entirely — they have steering committees, not coordinators. A committee can’t run a 2-second pit stop. Neither can it run an AI transformation.
Structured information transfer. Status moves through checklists, not freeform meetings.
Fixed positions. People know where they sit in the structure of the program. There’s no ambiguity about who decides what, who escalates to whom.
FMEA. Before any major AI pilot launches — “What could go wrong? What do we do if it does? How important is it?” Not as a compliance exercise. As a leadership discipline practiced in the room.
Video analysis and rehearsals. Every significant AI rollout debriefed honestly. Most enterprises celebrate their successes and bury their failures. The Ferrari approach inverts this.
The deeper principle for executive coaching
There’s a personal lesson buried inside the organizational one. The pit crew analogy is teaching us that exceptional performance, at scale, in high-stakes environments, does not come from exceptional individuals. It comes from exceptional choreography that allows ordinary individuals to perform at the limit of their narrow specialty.
This is the opposite of how most senior executives were trained to think about leadership. The executive ladder rewards individual exceptionalism. The leaders who reach the top did so because they were, in some specific way, exceptional individuals. So when they encounter a complex challenge — like AI transformation — they default to looking for other exceptional individuals.
But the lesson from F1 and GOSH is that complex transformations don’t run on exceptional individuals. They run on choreography. The leadership work isn’t to find the AI hero. It’s to design the system in which ordinary, skilled people can produce exceptional outcomes because the work has been decomposed correctly.
Coaching senior leaders through this shift — from individual brilliance to choreography design — is, I think, the single most important executive coaching conversation of the next decade.
The closing thought
The Formula One pit stop got 96% faster in 75 years, not because the mechanics got 96% better as athletes, but because the work itself was redesigned 96% better as a choreography.
A pediatric cardiac surgery handover went from chaos to globally-emulated best practice in less than five years, not because the surgeons got better, but because the choreography was redesigned with help from people who had spent decades thinking about exactly the right things.
Your AI transformation will succeed or fail on the same principle. Not because your people are or aren’t talented enough. Because the choreography is or isn’t designed enough.
In 1.80 seconds, Red Bull’s pit crew teaches you everything you need to know about operational excellence — if you’re willing to read the lesson correctly.
The lesson isn’t speed. The lesson is design.
The world has changed. The leaders who notice will be the ones the next decade is built around.
