What Le Mans Teaches You About Building Engineering Teams That Actually Deliver

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.

Because the way you build a team for endurance is not the same as the way you build a team for speed.

In Le Mans, it’s not enough to have the fastest car on the grid. If components fail, if systems don’t integrate properly, or if small issues start to compound over time, performance drops off quickly. The teams that succeed are the ones that get the balance right—across disciplines, across shifts, and across the full lifecycle of the race.

I see a very similar pattern in engineering projects, particularly in automotive, where programmes are complex, timelines are tight, and multiple functions need to work together seamlessly. On paper, a team might look strong, but if it’s been built with a short-term mindset—focusing purely on individual capability rather than how everything fits together—things tend to start unravelling as the project progresses.

From an engineering perspective, it usually comes down to a few simple things. You need people who understand not just their own discipline, but how it interacts with others. You need consistency in the team, not just peaks of performance. And you need to think about how the team will operate over time, not just how it looks at the point of hire.

That’s where I often see a disconnect. Hiring decisions get made around immediate need, without always considering how that hire fits into the longer-term delivery of the programme. The result is a team that might move quickly early on, but struggles to maintain momentum once the pressure builds.

The businesses that tend to get this right take a slightly different approach. They think more holistically about team structure, they consider how roles evolve over the lifecycle of a project, and they’re more deliberate about when they bring people in—whether that’s permanent hires or specialist contractors. It’s not about slowing things down, it’s about building something that can sustain performance.

Final thought

Le Mans isn’t won in the first few hours. It’s won by the teams that can keep performing when things get difficult—when fatigue sets in, when pressure builds, and when small problems start to appear. Engineering projects are no different, and in my experience, the teams that deliver aren’t just the ones with the strongest individuals, but the ones that are built to last.



Photo by Mark Bideleux 

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What Le Mans Teaches You About Building Engineering Teams That Actually Deliver
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