Business of Speed Podcast - The One with Marc Priestley, F1 Elvis

Episode Date: November 1, 2025

Former McLaren mechanic Marc Priestley—better known as "F1 Elvis"—joins us to talk about his brand new book Pit Lane Lessons: What F1 Can Teach You About Work and Life.In this episode, Marc reveals the surprising origin story behind his legendary nickname, takes us inside McLaren's obsessive culture of excellence during the championship-winning years, and explains how those pit-lane principles translate into business success today. We discuss the delicate balance between obsessive attention to detail and maintaining team morale, the parallels between McLaren's 2007 and 2024 seasons, and what it was really like working alongside Lewis Hamilton during his first championship run.Marc also shares his moment of clarity that launched his second career, why he thinks Lando Norris might win the 2024 championship (and why he'd rather be in Max Verstappen's seat), and what makes Austin, Texas, one of the best fan experiences in Formula 1.Whether you're an F1 fanatic or a business leader looking for competitive advantages, this conversation is packed with insights from someone who's lived in both worlds at the highest level.

Welcome back to the Business of Speed podcast. I'm Vincenzo Landino. Today's guest is someone who doesn't even need an introduction, but I'm going to give him one for those of you that may not know who he is. He worked for the McLaren team from 2000 to 2009 under legendary Ron Dennis. He worked with drivers like Fernando Alonso, Kimi Räikkönen, Mika Hakkinen, Lewis Hamilton, Lewis Hamilton, who won his first championship in 2008. this guest was on the team working with lewis directly he is now a two-time author his second

book came out the day we recorded this episode he works with brands all over the world companies that want to make their teams better using formula one strategies the guest i'm talking about is none other than mark priestly aka f1 elvis i hope you enjoyed this conversation Hi, welcome, Mark. Hi, nice to be here. Welcome to the show, Mark. Really glad to have you here. Exciting day for you today. It is. It is the day that my brand new book, Pit Lane Lessons, finally comes out. So I'm very excited, really intrigued to find out what people think, but just generally excited because it's

been a long process. You sit with a book for a long, long time while you're writing it, and you're just desperate for everyone else to see it. So finally, today's that day. yeah so and this is your second too so i mean you've you've done this before and you you chose to go back to doing it again yeah yeah do you know what i've done these we all do this so many times with lots of things in our life i've done the same with houses we've done up houses over and over again i get to the end of every one i said i'm never doing that again and then you go and do another one so yes it was the same with the book i said i'm never writing another book because it was it's a tough process it's hard um but here i am i did it it's taken three years so it really

was hard but you know sometimes the hardest things we do in life are often the best when they when they finally materialize already with some uh a good word of wisdom there right there's a saying that everyone has one book in them like but you had two and you so far so let's see maybe there's a there's a trifecta somehow in there although there'll be a third when you get to when you get to the next phase of this i think pit lane lessons you'll learn even more about lessons about the lessons right um who knows you know never say never let's ask you something since since i followed you i've been following you for a very long time and your your handle has always been f1 elvis so i'm very curious i asked vincenzo that about that he had no idea

where it came about so i want to i want to know that did you give yourself that nickname did something i understand the priestly presley thing yeah but what else is what else is behind that No, that's kind of it. And it wasn't me, but it was a long time ago. So when I was at school, and I'm talking like 10 years old, there were a few people, my actual name's Mark, and there were quite a few Marks in the class. And so some bright spark at school realised that Priestley sounded a little bit like Presley and came up with Elvis. and you know it stuck and it stuck to such a level that i think most people i went through 10 years working in the formula one pit lane i don't think many people know that my actual name is mark they all just call me elvis even my own wife only ever calls me elvis so it's not my mom i thought you were elvis for a long time it's only my mom that still calls me mark there you go i i contemplated saying is do i put f1 elvis in the invitation when i invited you to

the to the podcast but i don't want to like i don't want to because i know you've been using the mark priestly account on instagram well i started a second account uh f1 f1 elvis has always been my instagram handle but yeah with this this this book and and a lot of the stuff that i do around the book i work with a lot of businesses with this same kind of topics and it was a little bit separated from a lot of the other stuff that the real formula one racing stuff and the car show that i host and those kind of things they're slightly different audiences so i thought i'd start a separate Instagram account just to keep it really specific. So if you're into this kind of stuff, it's my mark underscore priestly account, which is the one for you. I mean,

I love the business side of things, but I know Lolly's got more sporting questions before we go into that. I just have a few, for instance, like you've spoken a lot about how during your McLaren days, there was like an extreme obsession with detail, right? Obsessive attention. And now you talk a lot with business people and you're a public speaker. Do you think that obsessive attention to detail equals competitive advantage always? Or do some people in businesses perhaps thrive in that environment and others don't in that level of obsessive that McLaren had? Yeah, and it really was obsessive. And, you know, the first book goes into quite some depth about how obsessive it was. I don't think any rule in life or business is a sort of one rule for

everybody, because everybody is a little bit different. Being obsessive about details in a competitive world, and that's business or sports or anything else, as long as you're focused on the right details, and that's the key here, that I think does or can at least translate into a competitive advantage. What I think a lot of people get wrong is either they focus on these finer, glitzy glamorous details the bits that everyone wants to plaster across instagram um but but forget about the basics and actually that's a there's a lot of lessons in the book and mclaren have been guilty of this in the past and i talk about that quite sort of honestly if you don't get the basic details right there is no point in focusing obsessively on these finer details

but if you do get the basics you lay your foundations and then you start honing down and understanding which details will matter in the world you're operating in and then becoming obsessive, yeah, absolutely. If you can be more obsessive about those details than your competitors, I think it can translate into an advantage. But do you think that's why perhaps you also lived the extreme at McLaren? There was this obsessive attention to detail. They were dictating what you ate for breakfast.

But at the same time, there was a lot of pranking and a lot of fun being had. Do you think that because it was so strict, you guys really needed to let loose? Was there a correlation there? A hundred percent. Yeah. I think, you know, all life is about some kind of balance. And we had, we did have obsessive attention to detail. It stemmed, to give some context, it stemmed from Ron Dennis, who was the CEO of McLaren when I first joined the team, who, I mean, I'd never known anybody in my life to be as obsessive about details as he is still today um but the problem is you know that was him and there's a thousand people working at mclaren they're not all ron dennis and so we all have various levels of attention to detail or

obsessiveness or whatever our characters are all different so we can't all be expected and i think this was if we're honest i think this was something of a mistake to some extent or something that could have been done better in the ron dennis days we're not all we can't all operate under that exact same, you know, set of parameters. I tried and I came out of McLaren after 10 years with a far more obsessive sort of characteristic around detail than I went in. And I genuinely believe that's helped me in all the things I've done since. But I never got to the Ron Dennis level. You know, Ron Dennis has the gravel in his driveway washed at regular intervals, so it's clean. I'm never going to get there because that doesn't matter to me. But I am obsessive about

the things that i think matter to me which will be different to the things that someone else thinks matter so that's what i mean the right details for you obsess about those if you believe they're going to make a difference and then they will what i was going to ask you about who do you think the most obsessive person is currently in formula one but i mean if i mean ron ron is the most obsessive it sounds like yeah is there anybody comparable like just below ron or a second place and what does that look like for the people around them yeah that's an interesting one i think only only if you really work very closely with someone do you understand to that level but what i do know is that um david coulthard you may remember a driver he was with us at the team back in the day

he still presents and operates in and around formula one in to quite a large degree and maybe this came from ron because he worked under ron for a long time but he is also incredibly obsessive about detail and i had him on my my own podcast a little while ago and he just reiterated just how his genuine belief is that if anything matters to you then everything should matter and that's the way he goes through life so he obsesses about the way he packs his suitcase to go to a race you know obsesses about the way his office is is clean and tidy even if he's not there you know those details to him reflect in everything else that he does and i kind of get that to some extent and i and i believe that is true for a lot of uh for a lot of people but it's just about how far

you want to take those things depending on whether you think they'll make a difference in your world so i don't know the modern sort of crop of drivers i don't know i think lewis is quite obsessive about detail but again only the details that matter um i don't think anyone with with ron dennis for me it seemed like every detail mattered like there was nothing that he wasn't obsessive about for me the much more healthy way to look at this and i think what most people in in my sphere of life do is they obsess about the things that you know are important to them and maybe just relax a little bit on having you the gravel on your driveway washed every now and again when when you were at mclaren it's it's been documented you've spoken about this

extensively how close you became to kimmy like actual proper friends yeah you went to his house you met his friends etc at that time was that common were other mechanics very close to their drivers and is that common still today uh you definitely form a real bond particularly in the car cruise around a driver and that happens to various extents up and down the pit lane but i do think the relationship we had at mclaren at that time with kimmy and with a group of guys we had was particularly special i don't see many people many mechanics or engineers going on holiday with their their drivers at the end of the season so I think that was special we had a genuine bond we all kind of came together around the same time when he joined McLaren so that car

crew formed at the same time I was joining McLaren at a very similar era so we kind of grew together as a group and and that bonded us incredibly tightly together we were similar ages we had very similar interests both you know at the track but also away from that as well and his friends and my friends you know became great a great group of friends together so it was a very special time and I genuinely think because of that that was a large part of why we were successful as a group you know having that bond and having that this inherent desire that we would have done anything for each other has to translate into in this competitive world of Formula One has to translate it's an amazing teamwork great fight and determination and that's exactly what got us

through a lot of really tough periods at times i want to talk i want to ask a lesson about failure or if you can give us a lesson about failure you know you go from failure 2007 to then winning the very next year what what can you glean from that what type of advice would you give and i'm sure you do this regularly from the stage into organizations and they're probably asking you about you know uh winning through failure what what do you what's the biggest lesson you can give if you had to give one piece of advice about adversity and uh sticking you know continuing on so that you can find that success what would that be yeah it's really interesting and there's a whole chapter on the book in the book on this on dealing with failure and actually

i use exactly that example as a large part of it so 2007 for us was a should have been the best year right we had two great drivers in Lewis Hamilton and Fernando Alonso we had a great car great team we were winning races left right and center it should have been a dream but it was a nightmare and it was a nightmare because so many things went wrong and at the end of that season I'd moved into a more senior role in the team part of my part of the role that came up for me was to try and understand where it all went wrong so there were some very obvious things like the two drivers fell out with each other it's very public this is no secret they ended up hating each other that destroyed the internal dynamic because the groups of people around those drivers ended up

falling out as well so that destroyed the teamwork element inside but and then there was a spy gate drama going on in the background this big industrial espionage 2007 by the way would make a great movie um but um but you know my job idea maybe maybe maybe david coltard can produce it yeah yeah exactly yeah um my job that year wasn't just to identify those surface level things because they were quite obvious it was to go really deep and this is what Formula One teams do very well and this is where this this sort of lesson comes in is that the deeper you're able to go into a failure and that's hard right because in 2007 it was an awful year and most people in our team including me just wanted to forget it we were all of this opinion that well we know what's

gone wrong let's put that behind us and we'll just move forward that's the obvious way to go about it But Formula One teams, and particularly our team at that time, didn't think that way. We collectively decided we were going to delve really deeply and sort of forensically analyze our mistakes and the things that we had got wrong. Which is really uncomfortable because the people that made some of those mistakes had to be front and center in that investigation and have it laid bare in front of their peers, you know, and openly discuss it and try and find what was at the heart of it. the key to dealing with failure in the best way in my opinion is to go as deep as you can so yes the two drivers fell out okay so ask yourself why go another level deeper why did they fall out well maybe there was some sort of discrepancy about Fernando Alonso was the world champion Lewis was a rookie maybe they had different expectations you know and and they didn't match up when Lewis

suddenly became a very worthy championship contender maybe Fernando got upset and vice all true then ask yourself why again and keep going deeper and deeper into more and more levels of why these things happen and what we uncovered was all the way back like a year before Fernando even joined our team he was a world champion at Renault at the time when Ron Dennis approached him and asked him to drive there was never a conversation that happened about who you know was we was there going to be a number one or number two driver yeah we had Fernando the king of Formula One at the time, the world champion. And we had this young rookie in Lewis. Everyone assumed Lewis was going to just learn the ropes from this guy who was a double world champion by

the time he got to us. But it was never talked about. There was no communication around that. There was nothing to say, you know, as we go through the season, preferential treatment or development will swing in the favor of Fernando. It was just assumed that way. Fernando assumed it. I suspect even Lewis assumed it in the beginning because he didn't have the expectations of challenging for a title the team certainly didn't have any expectations of that so the assumption was there but no communication to back that up so when reality didn't match expectation after just a few races and Lewis was very much on par with Fernando we at the team never had a policy of having a number one and number two driver we were never going to change that but it was always just

assumed that that would be the obvious scenario so if you really uncover that failure probably a lack of clear and concise communication, a year before any of this even happened, was probably one of the things that was at fault there. So you take from that, well, okay, so moving forward, clear and concise communication has to be a key part of avoiding these things in the future. And then from that very known baseline that you've uncovered, you build your way back up to a set of parameters that meant in 2008, we did win the world title. And I say in the book here, I'm 100% sure we would not have won that world title in 2008 without the failure of 2007 and because of what we did in the winter between those two seasons uncovering what went wrong

I have a quick follow-up because I don't think I've heard you speak of this and forgive me you have how much did it sting to have Kimi win the 2007 championship with Ferrari after you'd been working with him so closely he was such a good mate he leaves you and boom he gets his championship Yeah, it stung just internally at our team. It stung because we'd failed massively. We had everything there to win the title. All the pieces of the puzzle were there and yet we'd failed. So that stung.

But if we weren't going to win it, I obviously, I absolutely was really happy for Kimi. And I remember on that Sunday night in Brazil, it was a disastrous day, of course, for us at McLaren. But I remember going to the post-season party and right at the end of the party, I hadn't seen Kimi at all all evening and I saw him just across the other side of this event, this venue, and he just happened to be on his own. And I literally just ran across and he sort of got up from his chair and we just had this enormous embrace because, you know, I know how hard he'd been desperately trying to win that as well. I'd have loved it if we could have done it with him. That would have been the dream. But if that wasn't to be the case, I was so happy for him genuinely that very quickly the sort of negative emotion of our disastrous season, which we'd seen coming for a while, so it wasn't like it all happened on the last day, very quickly switched into real joy to see my mate suddenly achieve a childhood dream.

yeah and we'll put a nice bow on this before we get uh we kind of segue into the next uh questions but you say this in the book and i skimmed through some sections and this one stuck out to me you said never let a failure go to waste of course you won't extract the true value from all your experiments if you don't take the time to analyze what happened and what you can do different in the future and you said the trick is to try and take a moment of calm to zoom out failures tend to come with emotion attached if we didn't care about the result it wouldn't affect us but if we do care then it matters and we're going and we're often all in and emotions and all and so i just thought that was a it was an interesting just because what you were talking

about you you can fail but you have to learn from it in order to get better right and to then win and i think that was and the hardest part of that is that emotion you know when it happens to us on a personal level the failure does come with emotion and when when emotion comes into these equations we get angry we get sad you know and those emotions cloud everything and and all you want to do is either lash out if you're angry if you're sad you want to sort of hide away but those things all detract from actually analyzing the failure and and taking the moment to learn formula one teams are very good at you know parking the emotion it still happens we're not emotionless beings at a formula one team but we have a moment where we we kind of define an end

point, Ron Dennis was always very good at telling us this. He'd say if we had a disastrous race on a Sunday, for example, we'd do our post-race debrief, of course, on a Sunday evening, we'd pack up. And on a Monday morning, he said, for him personally, he always used to say by the time his slippers landed in his, or his feet landed in his slippers by the side of the bed on a Monday morning, what happened yesterday was done emotionally. And then it was all about moving forward in this sort of pragmatic way to learn what we could do better next time. And, and I still remember that all of the time today I still am affected by emotion when things go wrong for me but pretty quickly I can define an end point it might be the next morning after a good night's

sleep it might be something like brushing my teeth or whatever I define a moment where after that moment I park the emotion and we look at what we can learn and having that as a sort of skill in your locker I think it's hugely valuable I love that because having the failure living rent-free in your head is not going to allow you to get quickly to your next success yeah yeah actually pick a point you can sulk until there after that point you're done we're more yeah we tend to we tend to dwell and then it's and then you oftentimes paralyze yourself right you you don't you don't move forward and so exactly that's absolute excellent point uh we talked about kimmy so one last it's not really about kimmy but kimmy was a party animal knows we all know that legendary

off the track um today's environment so let's switch gears to today a little bit and i know you're looking at it maybe from from a different lens now but do you think it's just it's gotten a little too professional buttoned up tight i mean we don't at least i don't see it from the outside that these guys are party animals or they're i mean yeah they let loose but oftentimes you know you yeah they're they're on the yacht with their girlfriend or they're you know they're they're cruising monaco in their their cars but you don't really see them partying and in a world where we're so tied our phones are everywhere right it's probably easier to get noticed and spotted in film doing all these things you really at least i don't i don't seem to see it as much

do you think that that's just do you think it's gone away do you think something's changed have we lost something have we lost that edge to f1 what is it it's definitely changed and uh you know i often i often sort of think back and reflect and say i may have got the sweet spot in formula one right because a it was a period of time when the sport was awash with money so the tobacco sponsored era where budgets were sort of 400 million dollars a year and more and there was more money than you could dream up ways of spending and a lot of that went on parties which was great but the other side of that was there was no such thing as social media and mobile phones when i first started and you can it doesn't take a genius to work out how that changes everything

in terms of what you can do publicly and get away with or you know not be under the same scrutiny and spotlight but also the sport has moved into a more um you know serious if you like uh business like corporate world where we've got blue chip brands sponsoring teams you're not just representing your formula one team but all of the huge brands that are associated with the team you're representing them when you've got that shirt on and you're at an event. So that's definitely changed. But having said all of that, I can tell you for sure that a lot of these guys still manage to have a good party every now and again. So it hasn't got so bad that these guys are not just sort of rushing back to a library to catch up on the latest textbooks of an evening. They do manage

to have some fun as well. They're not robots, thankfully. You talk about how F1's changed social media it's it's a content machine right now we have this it's just everything's content i mean we're making a podcast you have a podcast you have books about it there's there's so much more content around f1 forget about all the content that teams produce brands produce the series itself produces um do you think that what netflix the whole drive to survive liberty media purchasing do you think that that's helped or hindered the authenticity of the sport um well the authenticity it depends from which perspective you look at because the the netflix show i think is an amazing thing it's obviously been a roaring success in the level that it's

brought in a huge number of new fans more eyeballs onto the sport that grows an audience which means you grow sponsorship opportunities and branding and the whole thing is growing at an astronomical rate the authenticity aspect of that if you watch the netflix show i mean i can tell you i'm sure you can figure it out it's not all authentic you know they're constructing a narrative because it's entertainment and that's fine because it is an entertainment show and it's working the authenticity side of things i don't think you're going to get from netflix but you can get it from other places so there are lots of personalities and people from within the sport that now have the freedom to broadcast their careers

and parts of their weekend on their own social channels. There are a lot of the major broadcasters that do a very, very good job of covering the authentic side of the sport. So Netflix, I don't think, has necessarily tweaked the authenticity piece in favor of being authentic, but it's done another job, an important job,

and it's doing it very, very well. So I think you can have both. Yeah, Lolly and I grew up in an era where you couldn't find another Formula One fan, you know, in your locale. We were the only ones, the weird kids at school. We were like, hi, if you are any lunatics, what are you watching on television? So now it's, you see it everywhere. It's almost, you can't walk into, you know, I'll walk down the street

and I'll see someone with a Red Bull shirt on or a McLaren shirt. Well, it's great, right? Do you actually follow? And especially in the U.S., right? So in the US, which has always been a really difficult market for Formula One to crack, Netflix has done a huge part, has played a huge role in that, as well as bringing the great races that we have there, the three events, which are all fantastic events on the calendar. Liberty Media, who've taken over the commercial rights, have done a wonderful job of pushing into that zone. And I can see it from my own career in terms of all the corporate work that I do and working with companies. A huge percentage of what I do now is in the States.

I spend a lot of time in the US and it used to be that one out of 10 events I did was in the US. And when I got there, no one really knew what I was talking about. You know, you're looking at a face of a sort of room full of blank faces to some extent. It's the opposite now. I have, I've got people who, you know, not only know me, but certainly know a lot about the sport who are really intrigued and interested to have me come and speak to them. And from a personal career perspective that's been great because i now have a lot more work coming from that side of the world and i think it's wonderful that the sport is now pushing into different markets and there are still untapped markets around this planet which we're about to start breaking into so this sport is

nowhere near done in terms of its growth yeah uh three last questions in the in the um for you just three you because i do want to talk about the consultancy piece but not really talk about it but you went from a mechanic you're now this media personality but you also consult and you speak what was that transition like for you going from from in the garage to now out there thinking about it while you were at the garage so much about that certainly didn't think about it going in this direction necessarily but just towards the end of uh of my 10 years at mclaren and i said earlier on we won the world title with with lewis in in my final or a year before i left um that was an amazing opportunity for me and i and i did appreciate it it made a difference for my future

which i always thought there was going to be a future outside of formula one wasn't sure what it would look like but i wasn't going to stay in formula one forever i'm just the sort of person that always needs reinventing and a new challenge that's just part of my character so there was always going to be life after F1 winning a world title with Lewis changed the value that I could offer to people or even just the perception of that value right because now in what I do being a Formula One world title winning mechanic is just genuinely better than just being a Formula One mechanic it might not sound that much different but the truth is it does it gives me an awful lot more authenticity in this kind of work that I do because I've lived it I've done it I've been

there and i've ticked the box of of being part of a team that's beaten the rest in the world the best in the world and that elevates you to a certain level of status just as it does for a driver who does the same kind of thing it's the same in my world it's exactly the same so that was a catapult for me where we won that title and i thought right this is it this is the moment i've got my spring board i'm going to go and do something and it actually started with the media side of things it started reporting first of all writing on Formula One then the BBC here in the UK gave me the opportunity to come and be a pit lane reporter for the radio and you know ironically all these years later I now am back with the BBC commentating on the sport for them on the radio for the same

network so that's really nice but that media a little dip into the media with the BBC which was just a trial weekend I remember it being first of all gave me a little window into this idea the media side of the Formula One paddock by the way is completely different to the pit lane where I'd spent all of my previous 10 years so I'd been to these races forever but I just hopped over the paddock to the other side and it's like a whole new world so that really was a new adventure for me and I remember coming home after that Sunday night it was the British Grand Prix being a pit Lane Reporter for the BBC. And on the way home, I called my wife and I said, I've just found my new career. And it was that kind of clear, you know, I was that clear that this was going to

be amazing. I had value to offer because people were, you know, my insight was from the inside of a team as opposed to from the outside. And I think the career I've had started with broadcasting and I'm still doing it, but it's evolved into this value that I have from this internal perspective, which i appreciate is a privileged position it's changed my life for the better and i'm now on a mission to try and help it to change other people who don't necessarily have the same opportunity that i had yeah we're grateful for that moment of clarity that you had for sure i'm gonna wrap it up with two questions that are just like first thing that comes to your head okay of all the tracks you've ever visited personally which one do you think offers the

best fan experience oh uh do you know what i'd say austin is right up there um it's one of my favorite race race events of the year and i know it is for for anyone who goes to visit and it's partly because the americans have really embraced this event america does an incredible job of putting on a show anyway and if you combine that with formula one at a great racetrack that almost always delivers a really interesting or exciting Grand Prix. And a city, which is just weird and wonderful at all times. You combine those elements and I think it's wonderful. What Formula One has done today under Liberty is they've done a lot more of this. They bring races to destinations that make a great weekend, even outside of the racetrack. So if you're a fan, you now want to

take your family your kids you want to take friends not just to watch the race but to go and have an amazing weekend and austin for me is one of the great places that does that if only there was an event that handed out that award lolly if only there were uh and who is going to win the world drivers championship go oh nice easy one yeah um well okay two two quick answers to this one i think lando is probably going to win it that's how the form looks right now he's also now got the position in the in the championship race right he's leading albeit by a small margin but he's on form which is key um the play and i asked this on my social media on my instagram the other day whose seat would you rather be in right now i think i'd like to be in max's seat and the

reason i say that is because you know max has now got a car that can compete at a lot of weekends it didn't work out that way necessarily in in mexico city didn't didn't suit the track his car didn't suit the track but it will at some of these upcoming races so he's got a good car that's competitive but he doesn't have the pressure that the two mclaren guys are under they're going to be fighting each other those two neither of them ever won a world championship yet they've dreamt of it since they were kids it's the one thing that's been a lifelong goal and the only person for them that's really standing in the way of it is the guy on the other side of the garage i talked about the failures we had in 2007 at mclaren there are so many similarities

in 2025 at McLaren right two drivers full circle two drivers both going for the title yes Max could well be a threat and I think he will be a threat at some stages but really the opposition for each of those two McLaren drivers is their teammate and when you take a teammate and turn them into an enemy well that's what happened in 2007 right so that's a real challenge for McLaren to understand how to manage that relationship and so far yeah you know they seem relatively friendly but when this gets down to the real business end and we are talking about fine margins determining whether you're a world champion or not and bear in mind in 2026 everything changes in formula one this opportunity could be it this could be your shot so everything's on the line and

it will be the single most important thing to each of those two drivers max is kind of sitting there with a great big grin on his face going i can get in amongst this and have some fun here because he doesn't have to pressure all the expectations so what i can say it's going to be a fascinating end to the season i'm definitely here for it and i and i cannot wait to see which way it plays out mark thank you for your time today uh awesome stuff uh your book pit lane left lessons what f1 can teach you about work and life is out today everywhere and in the u.s soon but we do have it Kindle and audiobook for the United States. Tell us, tell the audience where they can connect with you, find you, how they can work with you. Yeah. So Instagram or LinkedIn are the two places

generally that I operate online. So you can find me, I've mentioned at F1 Elvis or at Mark with a C underscore Priestley. Those are the Instagram and it's Mark Priestley on LinkedIn. But yeah, you can find me all over. You'll find me on YouTube as well. A quick Google, find out what I do but yeah thank you guys i appreciate you having me on because this book as i said it's been a labor of love this is my life's work today it's trying to help people to get the opportunities that i know i've been very fortunate to have through working with amazing people at an amazing team at mclaren in an amazing environment of formula one it's changed my life i've spent the last 10 years helping to change the fortunes of some of the world's biggest companies successfully

in many, many cases. And so I know it's proven that this model, that this book is full of, all of the lessons it's full of, can help you if you want to achieve something, if you want to change something in your life, this is the book that can help you do it. So I'd love it if you go and buy it, download it, listen to it. I've also got the audio book that I recorded myself. Very grateful to anyone who goes and gets that. And I'd love to know what you think. So drop me a message thank you so much this is this is definitely a book that we will be handing to all of our clients at business of speed for sure i mean it is the perfect perfect opportunity for people to understand right from within the garage and actually we'll probably just have to bring you

on board right yeah yeah great it's so good it's so good to see you so good to chat thank you so much mark we'll see you guys thanks take care bye