AI & Data Strategy in F1

Richard Taylor:
Welcome to today's podcast, where our purpose is simple. We want to share lessons learned and insights from leaders outstanding in their respective field. And we're joined by someone who started out with a master's in aerospace and engineering, and then moved on to be a head strategist for some of the top Formula One teams, and now is the strategist for Formula One.

It's an honor to be joined by Ruth Buscombe. Ruth, thank you so much for being with us.

Ruth Buscombe:
Thank you for having me. Thank you for the introduction as well.

Richard Taylor:
No problem. Thanks again. You started out obviously as a strategist for a number of teams, which we'll come on to, I'm sure. But can you give us a quick crash course in what strategy engineering is? Like, how do you outmaneuver the other teams, the dark arts of strategy?

Ruth Buscombe:
Yeah, so strategy is basically facilitating the best possible decision making across the course of a race weekend. And that covers everything from how do we approach practice sessions, and depending on the format of the weekend, we sometimes have three, and every now and again we have one.

So how do we approach the data collection in that session? How do we facilitate making sure that we're using kind of the tires across the race weekend in the most efficient way possible for our car? How do we plan qualifying? How many runs do we think we need? What time should we go out? And then of course the kind of race strategy that most people see, or know about at home, which is the actual race itself.

What time do we start and when do we change tires? A lot of that is planning, maths, and then communication.

Richard Taylor:
And is it a perfect science?

Ruth Buscombe:
Absolutely not. I think it's the same with all elite sport. You look at the greatest strategists of all time, people like Ross Braun.

And I think their win rate is a little over 50%, but if it's good enough for Roger Federer, it's good enough for us. And, it's not ever about being perfect. In elite sport, it's about trying to do marginally better than the other nine teams that you have. And if across the season you can do marginally better and you can pick one lap difference that means that you gain a couple of extra points every single week.

That's what ultimately adds up to being a championship position at the end of the season.

Richard Taylor:
Yeah. And you, and you talked a lot about maths and obviously data and the importance of science and Formula One is so specific and to the millisecond. What element of humanity is in there? So, when you've got all of this data, how do you manage the balance between the machine insight and the human gut?

Ruth Buscombe:
Well, I always say that the idea of a gut instinct in Formula One is actually just a summation of all your experiences. Actually, everything in terms of Formula One is a data driven decision even if people say it's a gut decision. It's actually a summation of numbers I think in terms of how we apply those that's very human. There is still a human in the loop, which is one of the things that makes sport glorious, there are actually quite a lot of humans in the loop.

And in terms of decision making as a strategist, once you've made a data-driven decision, then you're following your processes, you still need to actually make sure you deploy that decision. And that's the human bit, which is about not panicking, clear communication, timely and precise information.

Richard Taylor:
And then you mentioned processes, making sure you rectify those processes for whatever outcome might need to be done differently or better the next time around.

Ruth Buscombe:
Yeah, exactly. Was it the process or was it the application of deploying the decision? Was it that you didn't have as good a model for a tire, for example?

Was it that you had a misunderstanding about the weather? Was it that actually there was a breakdown in communication and you had the right answer and you knew what to do, but you didn't get that information across to your team members and therefore to the driver and therefore to the people in the garage as they bring out the tires in time?

I'm really trying to disassociate the emotion from the decision making. And I think that's really, really important and not being afraid of failures, but running towards them.

Richard Taylor:
Yeah, brilliant. And you mentioned communication a couple of times as well, and the importance of communication, ie. for our listeners, obviously running enterprises, businesses, etc.

What is the importance of communication to you in the outcomes, or getting to the right answers, or being able to express different decisions that are made throughout the organization or F1 in your case?

Ruth Buscombe:
Communication is everything. When everybody asks me what strategy I say, it's 50 percent maths and it's 50 percent communication and we spend hours and hours and hours working as a team.

We run millions of simulations. We have Monte Carlo, we have gen AI applications. We have multiple different departments feeding us multiple different forms of information from tires, from power unit, from performance, from everything you can imagine, and we need to distill this down into something that we can communicate on race day morning as this is the plan for today, not just to engineers with technical backgrounds that have been looking at this all weekend, but to management to make sure they have bought into the drivers that don't have.

I've been waiting for hours and hours and hours to listen to you explaining plots. They need - what do I need to go off and do? And you have to give it to them in a way that helps - the last time we have an opportunity to talk to the drivers in teams, is typically about three hours before the start of the race.

They then go away and they do all the media commitments, and the next time we get a chance to talk to them is very, very briefly for maybe a one-minute window on the grid. So, communication is really key and adapting the way that you communicate, from who you're talking to, and when you're talking to them.

Because, you know, when we sat in an office with our drivers, we can have a bit of back and forth, we can discuss, by the time we get to a race, it needs to be short, sharp, and also probably encoded - which is why you often hear things like plan A, plan B, plan C, because we need to adapt to the situation.

Richard Taylor:
Yeah, so right message at the right time. Exactly. And choosing the way and the style probably in which you deliver that as well. Have you personally been in a situation where you've had to make a multi-million-dollar decision potentially, but still, you know-

Ruth Buscombe:
The key thing to remember as a strategist is that by not making a decision, you make a decision.

So, when it comes to making multi-million-pound decisions, actually, every strategist enjoys that part. That's the reason why we do the job. And, you know, the worst thing you can do as a strategist is not make a decision, i.e., make a passive decision because the decision will be made for you.

The right decision is obviously the best option. The wrong decision is actually the middle option. And that's what I always tell my team is that I'd much rather you make the wrong decision versus no decision at all, because then you have control of it.

Richard Taylor:
What a great takeaway. Making no decision is potentially making the worst decision.

That's a great little segue. Influence. Let's talk about influence. So, I think if I'm not mistaken, when you're working at Ferrari, the team is around 350 people, roughly, for two drivers. Seems like a lot. It's-

Ruth Buscombe:
about a-

Richard Taylor:
-thousand. About a thousand people. Yeah. A thousand people for two drivers is a huge team.

How do you get heard? How do you go about making influence amongst that huge community of people?

Ruth Buscombe:
Actually, having really strict communication processes, that makes an important difference in a team, especially a large team like Ferrari. So having really clear lines of communication, making sure that everyone's aware of who's responsible for each element within a Formula One team, I think is also really, really critical.

Richard Taylor:
Absolutely, I couldn't agree more. And also, collaboration is so important for all businesses and a thousand people is a huge number of people. How important is breaking down silos and getting those teams to be able to work together again to deliver that outcome? Again, thinking about the business world, it's very rare that sometimes you have perfect flows of communication between IT or into the marketing departments, etc. How important is breaking down those silos in your world to get the right outcome?

Ruth Buscombe:
I think it's absolutely key. I mean, one of the advantages we have in Formula One is that everyone wears the same T-shirt, both metaphorically and physically. There's something very powerful about looking at a computer screen and seeing everyone dressed the same as you.

Whether you're a team principal, or you're working catering, or you're working as an engineer, or you're back in the factory, everybody dressed in the same T-shirt. You represent the brand. And then, as we go racing, we are one team. It is who we are. We're one team. And we are all part of it.

Richard Taylor:
So, culture obviously is so important to enabling that direction, that purpose of the team to know where they're all headed and leadership is really important to culture. Without naming names, but thinking across the number of teams that you worked at, what were some of the qualities that stood out to you from leadership?

Ruth Buscombe:
I definitely will name names because my first boss is a chap called Pat Fry, technical director, and he taught me probably one of the most powerful important lessons about leadership. I remember we had a race. It was one of my first races doing strategy back as a kind of junior strategist as a car strategist, and I didn't do a very good job that day.

And I remember watching him take responsibility for my failure. In the debrief saying, I should have done that. I remember listening and being like, you didn't need to do that. And I went to talk to him on the Monday after the race and I said I was the one that made the mistake, you didn't need to do that.

And he kind of looked me in the eye and he said, I've got more beans than you do. I've got beans to spare and you don't. And I think that's what leadership is. It's basically, once you are in an established position, it's protecting the people that work for you. And actually, that one moment inspires so much in terms of loyalty, in terms of hard work, in terms of really doubling down.

And the second that you know that, that someone's got your back, not only does it mean that you work harder, but actually really motivates you to do better because you really don't want someone to have to take responsibility for your failures. You want to try and do the best that you can.

And I think for most leaders in Formula One your job is basically to shelter the people below you to enable them to be the best versions of themselves in strategy. That's so key because a lot of what we need to do is take risks in order to make the team below you work well, you need them to feel empowered and enabled to take risk and not feel silly for suggesting out of the box ideas or for pushing the envelope.

Richard Taylor:
I've got beans to share, or I've got more beans than you do is brilliant - I'm going to remember that one. I'm going to steal that as my own. And that leadership creates that culture. What are some of the barriers you had to fight? Because obviously culture also leads to more innovation, more collaboration, communication, like we've talked about.

And innovation in today's world is key for every business, but in F1, innovation is the thing. What are some of the barriers you've had in a culture to getting that innovative environment?

Ruth Buscombe:
It's being able to be okay with failure. I think that's the thing. And by being okay with failure and being okay with yourself in elite sport.

You have to fail to succeed. If you look at the greatest sportsman of all time, if you look at the greatest teams of all time, the dynasties, they didn't win every match, and they didn't need to succeed overall. And I think being okay with the fact that you don't need to hide mistakes.

You don't need to hide areas, but actually saying because I'm okay with these, I'm going to make fewer in the long run, because I'm going to learn from them rather than run from them, because they will catch you up in the long run.

Richard Taylor:
And things change around us a lot as well, especially in today's world from pandemics to the way the macro-economic environments are working, etc.

As a strategist. What were some of the biggest external factors outside of your control that you had to deal with or overcome?

Ruth Buscombe:
Being a strategist is taking the hand you're dealt and trying to play with it. I've gone from being in a team where we had a championship - when in car, back in 2012, for five laps of that race, Fernando Alonso was going to be the world champion.

And then the car in third at the time, Hulkenberg, crashed into a wall. And so, guy was fine, but alas, our championship was over because of the way the points were then distributed. Sometimes you're racing for P17, sometimes you're racing for P1. I owe it to everybody to give the same level of professionalism, of commitment, regardless of if you've got a car or a grip position, and if you've either a 1 percent chance of points, or if you have pretty much 100 percent chance of points, you have to give it the same level of respect and the same level of time and the same level of commitment.

Richard Taylor:
Can we talk about losing for a little bit? How do you deal with that kind of toxic culture that builds up when you lose? What sort of steps were taken in Formula One to combat that?

Ruth Buscombe:
I think, again, having good leadership. And having it such that it insulates you from creating that toxic environment in the first place. With Formula One elite sport, you get such a multiplier effect when everything's going well - goes the other way around, like when you can end up in a doom spiral very, very quickly, so realizing you're starting to get into one, and snapping out of it, and saying that you're going to put a stop loss on your own errors or your own performance is very, very important.

If you make an error, put it in a box, forget it emotionally, compartmentalize that, move on. We can mourn that error and we can get upset about it after the race, but we need to stay neutral, positive, focused. What's the next thing that can trip us up? Or what's our next opportunity in the race till we get the checker flag?

Richard Taylor:
Does that mean then, if I hear that correctly, that you would always lean on taking a calculated risk versus playing it safe?  

Ruth Buscombe:
So, the job of the strategist is to come up with a wide range of strategies. Setting the objective function is not our role. That is the job of the management of the team. If you have a fast car, it's your job.

And you're "on pole" you don't need to take any risk. You can take the least risk out of everybody because you have everything already. If you're right at the very back, with a slower car and nothing to lose, you can take more risk. But actually, it's not our job as strategists to set the objective function of a company. It's our job to come up with the best way of delivering it.

Richard Taylor:
Yeah, I think, again, if we draw parallels to the business world, trying to find how you can make those tweaks, those changes, the differences in the organization to be able to get to that North Star, but you've got to have that North Star. What is the purpose direction of the business and then how can you find out the experiment or the calculated risk? To see what value you can deliver on behalf of your customers or on behalf of it. What are the parallels that you can draw between Formula One and the business world in that context of risk taking?

Ruth Buscombe:
It's about delivering what your client wants. Sometimes you'll be in a situation where everyone is aligned and everybody says "We need to take a risk today" on that day. Everyone needs to be aligned. We are going for win or bust. So, it's about delivering what you need to do. And sometimes risk and reward are not necessarily the same thing.

Richard Taylor:
And from an outsider looking in at Formula One, it looks like there are quite a few David versus Goliath situations with the size of the teams or maybe some of the support and funding they might have. What did you see across the paddock or across the teams of the difference in sort of challenger mindsets? And when you're trying to catch up to maybe a larger organization or to a larger team, what sort of ambition did you see from those teams and how they approach strategies or races differently?

Ruth Buscombe:
I'm a little bit biased, but I absolutely do love an underdog story. So, I think you see so much of it in Formula One. And I think everybody's genuine, even though we're in teams and we're competing on the track. The second that the flag drops, the second that we're out, actually, we spend six months a year with each other.

So, it is kind of a traveling circus. It's like a family industry, and people are genuinely happy for other people's success, especially, as you say, if you have an underdog story, come through. I think, in recent memory, when Pierre Gasly won Monza, in a tour of Rosso, that the amount of applause that he had from every other team was phenomenal. And one of the things that I find fascinating, is the number of drivers that I would say in the Goliath teams that frame themselves from a sports psychology perspective as the underdog because they feel like they get the best out of it.

A lot of the time they feel like, yeah, if I'm the underdog and I've still got something to fight for, it gives them the confidence to bring out that extra one or 2%. I think it's no surprise that some of the best drives we've seen in Formula One are coming through from the back. I mean, I think Lewis Hamilton's drive in Brazil, right from the very back in 2021, where he needed to get to the front.

Otherwise, the championship was over really. Enabled him to bring out that extra 1 percent. Was he an underdog? Absolutely not. But did it give him the extra 1 percent you probably-

Richard Taylor:
-and with some of those personalities and egos, if I can say, what's the psychological safety that's required in a team environment to get everybody to be equals in the way they can think about the development and success of the team.

Ruth Buscombe:
I think it is teamwork, and I think the fact that in every Formula One team, you are a team. So, I think making sure that, from a leadership perspective, you create a culture where operationally we have strict lines of command. Obviously, you have bosses, you have information that needs to flow in certain ways.

You have to have clear deliverables about who's accountable, and who is making the decisions. But when we're not operational, everybody is the same. And we're one family, and we're all as important as each other. I remember Sebastian Vettel going around picking up rubbish in the grandstand. And what that did to inspire, not just people in his own team, but people in other teams.

And he's like, "people are leaving this, and I don't see why it should be there. And actually, if I go and do this, I know it's going to create enough of a buzz that I don't think there'll be any rubbish tomorrow." And there wasn't any rubbish for the rest of the race weekend.

Richard Taylor:
What a great reminder.

Some of the basics in life, real ownership of a team environment and doing some of those simple things. What is your current mission in your season or this season of your life? What is your mission and ambition?

Ruth Buscombe:
Well, I think really challenging myself and actually learning and trying to use - they say that you can't - teaching an old dog new tricks.

But, I think I'm testament to the fact you can, and actually using all the skills I've learned within a team, repurposing them and trying to really learn new things. Even though I'm getting on a bit now.

Richard Taylor:
And those skills have changed over time because I think you were quoted as saying when you were a young child, that you had ambitions to be a princess and obviously they evolved into being an engineer for F1. Which leaders inspired you to make that change?

Ruth Buscombe:
Well, I was a slightly strange child. And when I realized probably princess wasn't for me, queen was going to be a much better role anyway. And both of the princes in my country were going to be taken, I really focused on maths - love maths, love sports - and yeah, it was looking at the leaders that were currently in Formula One. So it was the technical directors, and seeing what subjects they did at university, how they got to their path of doing it, and then basically copied them.

Richard Taylor:
And maths took you to Cambridge, which was, or is, probably still a very male dominated environment for engineering. How did you, how did that sort of impact your learning career, or your experience of studying at Cambridge?

Ruth Buscombe:
I think it was when I was there, it was 9 percent female in engineering.

I believe those numbers have nearly tripled. I definitely benefited from having a really good group of friends, especially a really good group of female friends. So, within that 9 percent, they're some of my best friends to this day. So, I think having good people around you, and all walks of life, especially when you're in your formative years is super, super important.

Richard Taylor:
Yeah, that anchor's essential. And now you're part of a small group of pioneering women who are leading the way in strategy for the sport itself. Does that put more pressure or is it more motivating?

Ruth Buscombe:
I always say, well, Billie Jean King said it first, and I like to repeat it often, that pressure is a privilege. And I think, if you have pressure, that means something is expected of you, which means you've actually earned the right to feel that pressure.

And I think, if you speak to any strategist on a pit wall, male or female, the car doesn't know what gender you are, the racing doesn't know what gender you are.

Richard Taylor:
No, I love that performance is performance, especially in a sport like Formula One. Now, as a final thought, what's the wisest thing when it comes to teaming that you've been told or sort of learned along the way?

Ruth Buscombe:
I think in terms of leadership and in terms of things, I think there's a great one that's work hard, be kind to people, and great things will happen. I think it's really, really important. And I think that if you do work hard and you are kind to people, great things do happen.

Richard Taylor:
Awesome. Well, thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you. We look forward to hearing your insights trackside as well and thank you very much for being with us today.

Ruth Buscombe:
Thank you very much.

Richard Taylor:
Thanks, Ruth.

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