I watch a lot of Formula 1.

And not for the reasons most people do.

I’m far more interested in what’s happening behind the scenes than I am in who’s standing on the podium. Because if you’ve ever worked in engineering, you quickly realise that performance is rarely about the headline name—it’s about everything underneath it.

One of the most common things I hear from hiring managers at the moment is that there’s a “talent shortage”.

Good engineers are hard to find. The market is tight. Candidates are difficult to secure.

And to a point, that’s true.

But having worked in engineering before moving into recruitment—and now working closely with teams across automotive and high-performance sectors—I don’t think that’s the real issue.

I’ve always found Le Mans more interesting than Formula 1. Not because it’s more exciting on the surface, but because of what it represents from an engineering point of view.

Formula 1 is about speed, iteration and marginal gains. Le Mans is something different entirely. It’s about endurance, reliability, and systems that have to perform consistently over a sustained period, under pressure, with very little room for error. And from where I sit now, working with engineering teams across automotive and high-performance sectors, that difference is more relevant than most people realise.

One of the things that always stands out to me at Le Mans is how much of what actually matters… you don’t really see unless you’re looking for it.

From the outside, it’s easy to focus on the cars, the lap times, and the headline performance. But if you spend any time trackside, you start to notice something else entirely. It’s the way the teams operate behind the scenes. The coordination, the communication, the small decisions being made constantly to keep everything moving.

One thing you learn very quickly in engineering is that projects rarely go exactly to plan. On paper, everything looks clear. Timelines are mapped out, resources are allocated, and the path from start to finish feels well defined. But once things get moving, reality has a habit of getting in the way. Priorities shift, challenges emerge, and what looked straightforward at the outset becomes far more complex.

That’s just the nature of engineering, and it’s something I think often gets overlooked when it comes to hiring.