Formula One Has a Mission Assurance Problem

By Shawn Kroon, Founder and Chief Services Officer at Whyze Byte.

Damage to Oliver Bearman’s following his crash at Grand Prix of Japan at Suzuka Circuit. (Photo by Kym Illman/Getty Images)

Key Takeaways

The Problem: Strategy fails when it is rigid and misaligned with operational realities.
The Concept: Organizations and sports leagues function as complex service ecosystems where all participants must co-create value.
The Solution: Mission Assurance ensures strategy remains aligned with service delivery, preventing misalignment from resulting in public failure.

The System Behind the Crisis

Nobody in the FIA, Formula One Management, or a manufacturer board woke up one morning wondering, “How do we make Formula One more dangerous for drivers, flatter for fans, and weaker for the ecosystem that gives the sport its prestige?”

However, if you’ve been following the headlines this season, you’d assume that was the plan. The simple narrative writes itself. Management is incompetent. Fire the executives. Save the season.

I do not believe that story.

The actual pattern is more common and harder to fix. Highly intelligent people, executing a completely rational and mathematically sound strategy, can still shatter a functional service ecosystem. Not through malice. Not through stupidity. Through architecture.

This type of architectural failure is a foundational study within service science. The discipline teaches us that an organization is an ecosystem of interconnected actors; when governance ignores how these actors co-create value, the entire system degrades.

Formula One appears to have optimized with manufacturers carrying disproportionate design weight. By the drivers’ own account, meaningful warnings were already surfacing in 2023 from the people closest to the consequences.

This is a story of Mission Assurance, not of villains. Whether or not you follow motorsport, the pattern is familiar. Transformation rarely fails because the original strategy was absurd. It fails because the system is more complex than the strategy acknowledged, the wrong measures are allowed to govern, and value is defined by leadership rather than co-created within the ecosystem.

If this were the fault of one rogue executive, the solution would be simple. Fire the executive. Learn. Move on. But when the failure sits inside how an organization perceives value, weighs signal, and governs risk, changing the people only treats the symptom while the underlying problem spreads like a disease.

The Strategy Was Rational

The FIA and Formula One were solving for real constraints. Sustainability. Advanced fuels. Future relevance. Stronger manufacturer commitment. That plan helped secure Audi, Honda, and Cadillac, with GM’s own power unit program approved for 2029.

The 2026 regulations changed the power requirement. Now there is a 50/50 split between combustion and electric, nearly tripling on the electrical side.

Electric power must be recovered under braking. Slowing the car is no longer just about corner entry. It is part of how the car gets its electric back, storing it in the battery for latter discharge.
In earlier eras, most of that happened in the background. Under the 2026 rules, drivers must manage the cycle in real time.
That turns every corner into a trade-off. Go slower and brake longer to charge the battery. Or discharge it to go faster and overtake the car in front of you.

The strategy achieved its stated objectives. The manufacturers have signed up. The investment pipeline is full.

Then the cars hit the track. And the track is where strategy loses the protection of abstraction.

What The Track Revealed

But Formula One isn’t abstract at all. When an F1 driver hits the brakes, their body can take up to 6G of deceleration. Their chest is compressed into the harness at six times their body weight. The forces ram air out of their lungs. Their neck muscles strain against the physics that want to slam their face into the steering wheel. This happens dozens of times every lap, at every corner, for more than two hours continuously.

That is what they are already managing at 300 km/h. Now add the 2026 regulations to the mix. While enduring those forces, drivers must also monitor a real-time energy display on their steering wheel. According to the reigning champion Lando Norris drivers now glance at the steering wheel “every three seconds” to manage battery state, deployment rate, and harvest targets.

What looks like a technical problem is a cognitive one. The current regulations require drivers to take their eyes off the track, which is the most dangerous thing a racing car driver can do at any speed.

George Russell’s 2026 pole lap in Melbourne came in at 1:18.518. Lando Norris set 1:15.096 on the same circuit a year earlier. That is a 3.5 second gap, which is enormous in a sport measured in thousandths of a second.

The effect is a season that feels more dangerous for drivers and less exciting for fans.

The Statements of the Drivers

Four-time world champion Max Verstappen described it plainly, “The right word is management. As a driver, the feeling is not very Formula 1-like.” Norris stated the cars have gone “from the best ever made in Formula 1… to probably the worst.”

During the first race of the season in Melbourne, that split attention cost Norris directly. He drove straight into debris from another car because his eyes were on his energy readout instead of the track. “I’m looking at my steering wheel,” he explained. “It’s why I don’t see the debris.”

With the new rules, two cars on the same stretch of track can be travelling at drastically different speeds. One is backing off to recharge. The other is discharging the battery to gain as much as another 60 km/h.

In the third race of the season in Japan, Oliver Bearman closed in on Franco Colapinto, who was out of boost and relying solely on combustion. Colapinto defended the inside line, but Bearman, approaching at a much higher speed with boost, had no time to react and steered onto the grass to avoid a collision.

Bearman reached 308 km/h as he left the track, lost control, slid back onto the track sideways in front of Colapinto, and crashed into the barrier between the track and the fans. The impact registered 50G.

He walked away only limping. “I think as a group we warned the FIA what can happen.” Bearman said. “This is a really unfortunate result of the massive speed difference we’ve never seen in F1 before these new regulations. It was a massive overspeed, 50kph, which is a part of these new regulations that I guess we have to get used to. But also, I felt like I wasn’t really given much space, given the huge excess speed that I was carrying.”

The pattern is familiar. The people closest to the consequences raised concerns early. The program continued anyway. Drivers flagged this issue in simulators as early as 2023. Were rules on passing space reviewed to mitigate the known overspeed risk? The real question is whether those warnings carried sufficient weight into governance.

Within three races, two incidents have already surfaced the failure trend drivers identified years ago. The physics do not care who had the authority to decide.

Drivers Are Telemetry

Not all concerns from an elite performer should shape policy. But drivers are the highest-sensitivity human interface in this system. They live where design assumptions meet physics.

If a leading driver raises concerns years before launch and the live system later confirms it, this moves beyond feedback. You now own that accountability because the feedback was ignored.

This is what happens in organizations every day. You have probably seen at least one of these patterns.

The loudest stakeholder ends up shaping the requirements, not because they are right, but because they have the budget, the access, or the political weight to drown out everyone else.
Once the strategic objective hardens, dissent starts getting relabelled as resistance, edge-case thinking, or noise.
The program keeps moving because too much money, reputation, and executive capital are already tied to the direction of travel.
By the time the evidence is strong enough to force a change, the cost of being wrong has already been pushed onto the people closest to the work.

F1’s own governing body has now started reducing the energy limits for qualifying, among numerous other changes. After the second race the stance was no changes are needed. It took a near death, and now the live system is forcing governance to react to the very problems the drivers flagged three years ago. That is not evidence of malice. It is evidence that governance failed to give enough weight to the right signal early enough and is now being forced to correct in public.

The key point here isn’t that drivers were unhappy in 2026. What matters is that there was already a clear warning in 2023. The system collected data, ran simulations, and even received feedback from the people who would use the product every day.

But there didn’t seem to be a clear process for turning that warning into real influence. The team missed the chance to ask better questions early on and adjust their strategy before it was too late. F1 is just the visible case. The deeper issue is one you’ll recognize immediately. It is always more expensive to correct a system in public than it would have been to design it right from the start.

The Service Ecosystem They Broke

Formula One made its design priorities clear. F1 aimed to bring in more manufacturers while also respecting those who had already invested a lot in the program. This approach made sense and guided their decisions.

And that is exactly why this story matters.

This is not a simple villain story. No one sat in a room trying to make the sport worse. This is the more dangerous kind of failure, the kind that appears across industries when a rational strategy is allowed to outrank the operational signal that should have refined it.

F1 was doing what it is supposed to do. Protecting investment, backing the long-term strategic thesis, and keeping the institution commercially viable. The problem is not that leadership had a strategy.

The problem is that the system appears to have lacked the discipline to keep strategy, operator reality, and ecosystem value in the same conversation long enough for the strategy to improve before it went live.

Value is not embedded in a regulatory document and then passively consumed by everyone else. It is co-created across the service line, where leadership, operators, partners, and beneficiaries continuously shape what the product becomes in lived experience.

That means strategy cannot be treated as finished once approved. It has to move through the service line, pick up new signal, surface the right questions with the right people, and be refined before drift hardens into public failure.

In Formula One, that service ecosystem looks like this.

For drivers, value lies in a car that rewards skill, courage, timing, and feel. When energy management starts crowding out racing instinct, the sport stops testing what it claims to reward.
For fans, value lies in a contest that feels authentic and worth caring about. When qualifying laps start to resemble warm-up laps, the emotional contract begins to fray.
For manufacturers, value lies in halo, prestige, and commercial legitimacy. That halo only transfers if the contest that created it still commands respect.
For Formula One itself, value lies in remaining the place where engineering excellence and human excellence meet under conditions people still believe in.

These actors have different preferences but share a higher-order interest. The contest must remain legitimate, challenging, and prestigious to make winning valuable. The sport is the service platform, and all actors are co-creators. The moment you optimize the platform for one actor at the expense of the others, the whole ecosystem begins to degrade.

In practice, the design appears to have treated manufacturers as the primary stakeholder and everyone else as an ecosystem expected to absorb the trade-offs. That is a value-chain mindset inside a value network. Fans are not passive consumers of a broadcast product.

They are active participants whose attention, passion, and spending sustain the very halo manufacturers came to capture. When fans stop rearranging their Sundays around the race, manufacturers start losing the audience they joined the sport to reach in the first place.

If the driving experience becomes fake, the fan experience suffers as well. When the fan experience declines, the sport’s halo effect diminishes. As the halo effect weakens, manufacturer profits decrease. Eventually, if the halo is eroded enough, the sport comes to rely more on its history than its genuine legitimacy.

Why Innovation Resists Mandated Relevance

The most important innovations in motorsport history rarely came from trying to look useful to a road-car strategy deck. They came from brutal competitive constraints. Engineers were given a hard box and told to win. Then engineers came back with a box no one had built before.

The technology was later used in road cars, not because it was made for the showroom, but because it worked so well on the track that the showroom demanded it. Innovation is an emergent property of a coherent system under meaningful pressure.

Toyota takes a similar approach but on a different scale, and they are transparent about their methods. Akio Toyoda, Toyota’s chairman and a racing driver known as Morizo, bases his philosophy on an old tradition called Shikinen Sengu. At Japan’s Ise Shrine, the main buildings are torn down and rebuilt every 20 years. The point is not the buildings themselves but making sure the people who know how to build them pass their skills to the next generation. The only way to keep these skills alive is to use them. Toyoda uses the same thinking for cars. If Toyota stops making sports cars, the experts retire and the knowledge disappears.

This is why Toyota uses racing to keep these skills active. In 2026, Toyota became the main partner of the Haas Formula 1 team. Japanese drivers test in Haas cars, and engineers from both companies learn from each other. Thanks to the partnership, a new driving simulator was installed at the team’s UK base. Toyota’s racing program also shapes the design of its performance road cars, using lessons from the World Rally Championship. Lexus, Toyota’s luxury brand, is now developing its next sports car alongside these racing efforts.

In December 2025, Toyota and Lexus launched three cars together. A top-level race car, a customer racing car, and the Lexus LFA flagship. All three share the same platform, engineering team, and expertise. This collaboration goes beyond sponsorship or branding. In service science, it is known as a service ecosystem.

Here, value comes from people sharing knowledge and skills across the partnership, rather than one company working alone. Because the ecosystem is designed to be connected, the benefits carry over, and the road cars benefit from the race team’s experience. This creates a direct link between championship success and the cars available to customers.

Toyota shows this approach works in other ways too. The GR Yaris came from Toyota’s rally program, and Toyota UK described it as an ‘official sell-out success,’ noting that its ‘order books are now full for this year and next.’

Honda has left Formula 1 several times but always returns. No company would spend that much to rejoin unless it saw a clear benefit for its road car sales.

If any of these following examples resonate, they point to the same underlying pattern. When value creation is misaligned, everyone suffers.

Did your shared-services redesign the org chart but turn simple requests into a six-week maze of portals, approvals, handoffs, and escalations?
Did your last technology implementation check all the boxes for the vendor’s roadmap but make life harder for every team that actually has to use the thing?
Did your AI initiative impress the boardroom, then land in a fragmented service ecosystem and automate chaos faster than anyone could manage it?

This Is a Mission Assurance Problem

Strategy relies on frameworks. Technology needs platforms. Project management uses its methodology. Service management has been around in most organizations for a long time and often looks like ticket management. But just handling tickets is not the same as creating real value.

Yet there has never been a clear name for the practice that turns early signals into better questions, keeps strategy practical, and ensures executive intent reaches the people doing the work.

To fill this gap, I call this missing practice Mission Assurance.

Mission Assurance keeps strategy and service teams connected. It helps turn early signals into better questions, smarter decisions, and a stronger strategy before problems become expensive or risky. It does more than just execute the strategy. It makes it better.

Start using Mission Assurance today. Strengthen the feedback loops between service and strategy, and change how your organization learns, adapts, and delivers value before small problems turn into big ones. This fragmentation explains why most organizations do not fail at strategy in the abstract. Instead, they fail because value creation splits across departments, each optimizing for its own metrics while losing sight of the collective goal. HR hits its targets. IT hits its targets. Finance hits its targets. Everyone gets a bonus.

Meanwhile, PwC found that 89% of executives believe customer loyalty has grown in recent years, but only 39% of consumers agree. More than half of consumers, 52%, said they stopped buying from a brand after a bad experience with its products or services, and 29% stopped because of poor customer experience. The customer never sees a department. The customer sees the total result, and that result is often not what any single department thought it was delivering.

This disconnect is visible even in the simplest workflows. For example, filling out the HR form, then the IT form, then the SCM form, just to onboard the same person. This is how organizations design work for themselves, not for those who need the service.

People experience handoffs, friction, and fragmentation, not departments. They want one service line that horizontally spans the business, removing duplicate intake, approvals, and avoidable rework also lowers operating costs.

This error echoed in Formula 1, a value ecosystem where each actor co-creates what others are paying for. The moment one actor’s logic outranks shared creation; the system’s collective value erodes. I have seen the same pattern repeat in every organization I have worked in.

A similar dynamic appears in discussions about AI. AI accelerates whatever system it touches. If everyone is in one conversation about the value they co-create, AI amplifies capability, speed, and judgment. If fragmentation exists, AI accelerates it and spreads consequences faster than governance can contain them. Coherence must come before automation.

Otherwise, you are bolting a rocket engine to a fractured airframe. Duct tape does not reach orbit. It leaves a crater on the launch pad.

Governance that listens twice acts once. The alternative is to move twice and apologize in public.

Design for the whole ecosystem. If the people closest to execution are missing when the strategy is shaped, the strategy will eventually meet them on their terms, not yours.
Measure value where it is realized. A metric that never survives the trip from governance into lived experience is not a measure of value. It is a measure of intent.
Treat operators as telemetry. The people doing the work are the system’s highest-resolution signal. When the same concern appears early and repeatedly, that is not resistance. It is data.
Agreement is not value. A decision that satisfies everyone in the meeting can still degrade the experience of everyone not in it. Value must be co-created across all affected parties.

Defining these principles is easy. Embodying them is hard, but it is still far cheaper than repairing the damage caused by neglect.

Is Your Strategy Creating Value or Quietly Eroding It?

Formula One can pivot. Great organizations often do. They have earned the benefit of patience over its 76-year history. However, the lesson does not depend on how their story ends. We can learn right now.

Before moving forward, consider the following questions honestly.

Can you draw a straight line from your most recent strategic decision to the lived experiences of the individuals who deliver and rely on it? Can your direct reports? Can the operators draw one back?
When your front line raises a concern, how many layers does it pass through before it reaches someone with the authority to act?
Do you know exactly how value is created across your entire service ecosystem, or are you measuring what was delivered and assuming it was experienced?
How confident are you that your dashboards reflect operational reality and not just the metrics the system was designed to report?

If any of those gave you pause, the architecture is worth examining. Not the people. Not the strategy. The connective tissue between them.

You cannot solve a problem you cannot see. You won’t solve a problem you don’t understand. More than likely, the answer is already somewhere in your service line.

Formula One is just showing the pattern in public, at 300 kilometres per hour.

That is a Mission Assurance problem.

Shawn Kroon is the Founder and Chief Services Officer of Whyze Byte. He helps organizations build service lines that do not merely carry strategy but continuously improve it through the signal already present in the system. That is how Whyze Byte connects executive intent to operational reality. He has spent 25 years working from the service desk to the executive table and built Whyze Byte to close the gap between them.