What Formula 1 Can Teach Us About Running An Accounting Practice

In 2006, I was in Monaco and as I gazed, mesmerized by a city carved into a mountain. I recalled the famous race held there each year in the late spring.  I wasn’t much of a motor sport fan, but in my mind, I could see the cars racing through the downtown streets and the tunnel of that small principality.

Over the years, that memory has stuck with me, but about 18 months ago, I became low-key obsessed with Formula 1 (F1)! At that time, I was at a conference in Las Vegas just ahead of the Grand Prix, and they had a car in the lobby of the hotel in which I was staying. Since then, I have watched every race and am enthralled with Netflix's multi-season docuseries, Drive to Survive.

In that time, I recognized almost immediately a parallel to business, especially as it related to running a CPA firm. About what it means to prepare obsessively, to work as a team, to let innovation define your competitive edge, and to face technology changes that threaten to redefine your role overnight.

These teams are running the most sophisticated, constantly evolving business process operation in the world! F1 turns out to be a masterclass in process improvement, delivered at full throttle.

Performance is just redoing what you've already done

The legendary Brazilian champion Emerson Fittipaldi once described high performance this way: “It‘s not about doing something new”. Performance, he said, is simply redoing what you've already done — better. That's process improvement in its purest form. It's not reinvention. The magic is refinement.

Carlos, the King of Spain, Sainz has his driving lines so deeply memorized that he can navigate simulator race circuits with his eyes closed. That's not raw talent. That's thousands of hours of deliberate preparation encoded into muscle memory. The preparation is the performance!

The lesson for accounting firms is direct: if you aren't systematically reviewing and refining your workflows, you're falling behind. Process improvement isn't a project; it's a discipline. I have had hundreds of meetings with clients, sent out agendas, done file reviews, but what would it look like at the client service delivery if I did the full meeting multiple times, preparing for risk, planning for scenarios, and anticipating what the client might need.

Most F-1 drivers have been practicing racing as early as 5 years old. Drivers spend grueling all-day sessions at their team's factory or on home rigs. They test vehicle setups, learn track braking points, and practice overtaking scenarios. 

In addition to that, they train physically like elite marathon runners. In the age of AI and customer delivery, we have a greater opportunity to prepare for having large amounts of work being automated. Clients expect more, and extreme preparation will pave the way to exceed their higher expectations.

The Pit Crew Principle: process improvement is a team sport

Today, an F1 pit stop takes a little over 2 seconds. Twenty years ago, that was 7 to 10 seconds. Twenty-plus people, each with a precise role, executing a choreographed sequence with zero tolerance for error. The driver gets the headlines, but the team wins the championship.

According to a 2007 published report, The John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, England, brought in a Formula 1 pit crew to observe their handover of pediatric patients from the operating room to the intensive care. The result was a reduction in the error rate, less missed information, faster handover time, and fewer “high-error” handovers.  The result was not measured in efficiency gains; it was lives saved. That's the power of process improvement borrowed from an unexpected source.

Your accounting firm is like a race team. The lead partner is the driver. The staff, the systems, and the software are your pit crew. When the process breaks down, everyone loses, regardless of who is behind the wheel. And here’s the uncomfortable truth: you are only as good as your last race. One messy close, one missed deadline, one client who felt ignored, and that’s what they remember from the engagement.

The little things are the competitive advantage

F1 engineers obsess over fractions. A tenth of a second in qualifying, the slightest tire wear, or the drag coefficient on a front wing. Just over one millimeter of wear (the width of a grain of rice) on a plank on the bottom of a car results in disqualification. Nothing is a rounding error; these are competitive advantages compounded across a full season and translate into victory.

Process improvement in accounting works the same way. The firm that cuts client onboarding from three weeks to five days saves more than time; it signals competence. The team that catches a reconciling item at month-end instead of year-end builds lasting trust. Small refinements repeated consistently separate elite firms from average ones. Innovation in your systems and workflows is the moat around your business.

Never give up on change. It is the sport.

With F1’s constant change in regulations, flipping the competitive landscape overnight is the environment. Teams that fight the change spend their energy on the wrong problem. Teams that embrace it, write the new rulebook. Many fans and drivers complain that rule changes ruin the sport. They're wrong. The ability to adapt faster than your competitors is a competitive advantage. And that adaptability starts with a commitment to continuous process improvement.

AI is the new aerodynamics: a process improvement opportunity

When ground-effect aerodynamics transformed F1 in the late 1970s, some teams adapted and dominated. Others resisted and became footnotes. AI is doing the same thing in accounting right now. The question we should be asking ourselves is how do I use AI to execute process improvement at a speed and scale that was previously impossible?

F1 drivers navigate challenges at over 200 mph! They train themselves not to blink because that would result in traveling 65 feet with eyes closed. AI is information overload. This recent post on the You Need A CFO blog gives a framework for processing and prioritizing what you should be working on.  AI can flag anomalies, draft a financial narrative, and model multiple cashflow scenarios in the time it once took a staff accountant to export a spreadsheet.

The accountants who will thrive are not the ones who enter the most debits and credits. They are the ones who build the systems, review the outputs, and advise the humans the way a great F1 engineer uses telemetry data to guide a driver who could never process all that information alone.

At its core, F1 is a business, and your firm is a race team

Strip away the glamour, and Formula 1 is a cash-flow management exercise with geopolitical complexity, sponsorship structures, constructor points, travel logistics, budget caps, and driver contracts. The teams that win aren't just fast on track; they are operationally excellent. Process improvement isn't a back-office function in F1. It is the strategy.

The same is true for your accounting firm. The firms that scale aren't the ones with the smartest partners. They're the ones that build repeatable, auditable, improvable processes and then relentlessly refine them.

The best F1 teams never believe they've found the limit. Neither should you.

The checkered flag

Process improvement isn't glamorous or highlight reel worthy. It is the difference between a team that wins championships and one that finishes mid-grid. The firms that approach it as a permanent discipline, not a one-time initiative, are the ones who win. These firms won't just survive the AI era. They will define it.