From the outside, Formula 1 can look like the ultimate individual sport. One driver, one car, and, ultimately, one person standing on the podium, but listen to McLaren Mastercard Formula 1 Team's Lando Norris and a very different picture emerges.

Speaking at the BMW PGA Championship, Lando talked about the hours spent in the simulator preparing for different circuits and conditions, the engineers providing reassurance when split-second decisions need to be made, and the hundreds of people whose work contributes to what happens on the track.

The stage might be different, but many of the principles behind high performance are remarkably similar in global logistics.

Preparation Lets Us Trust Our Instincts

For Lando, preparation isn't about knowing exactly what will happen during a race.

Instead, simulator training allows him and his team to explore different scenarios before they encounter them for real. The aim, as he explained, is to arrive at the circuit with as many answers as possible already available, and there's an important lesson in that for global trade.

Supply chains operate in a world where circumstances can change quickly, whether demand shifts, weather intervenes, ports become congested, or transport capacity changes. A route that made perfect sense yesterday might not be the best one tomorrow and we can't eliminate uncertainty, nor can we predict every eventuality - all we can do is prepare for them.

Increasingly, data and technology allow us to understand what is happening across supply chains earlier, anticipate potential issues and consider alternative scenarios before decisions become urgent. AI promises to take that further, helping turn enormous volumes of data into intelligence that people can act on. But knowing something is changing is only part of the equation, you also need options.

When circumstances change, the breadth and connectivity of logistics networks matter, and having access to different ports, routes, modes of transport and warehousing options gives businesses room to respond. The best route isn't always the same one, and high performance means being ready to take a different one when the situation demands it.

Giving People the Tools to Perform

At the elite level, much of what happens behind the steering wheel is instinctive. Racing drivers need to trust their abilities and be able to react, they don't want to be consciously processing dozens of pieces of information as they approach every corner.

That trust is built through experience and supported by technology, preparation, data and the teams around them, and the same is true in logistics. For all the attention rightly being paid to AI, automation and increasingly intelligent supply chains, technology isn't valuable simply because it removes human involvement. At its best, it allows people to make better decisions.

A terminal operator with better information can plan more effectively, a freight forwarder with greater visibility can identify another option for a customer, a warehouse team supported by automation can move goods more efficiently, and a supply chain professional equipped with the right data can spend less time finding out what has happened and more time deciding what should happen next. High performance comes when technology and human judgement reinforce one another.

Performance Is Built Together

Talking about winning, Lando described looking down from the podium and seeing his team celebrating below. Despite being the person holding the trophy, he said much of the satisfaction comes from knowing how many people contributed to getting there. When a product appears on a supermarket shelf, a component arrives at a factory or an online order reaches someone's front door, it's easy to see only the end result, what you don't see is the team behind it.

There will be colleagues operating a terminal, planning a vessel call, driving a truck, running a warehouse, organising a rail service, clearing customs, managing freight or monitoring information thousands of kilometres away, and increasingly, those people are connected through networks that span the entire supply chain.

Ports, terminals, warehousing, freight forwarding, road, rail and digital capabilities are valuable individually, but they become much more powerful when they work together. In global trade, the network is the team and just as in elite sport, the quality of the connections between different parts of that team can be every bit as important as the individual parts themselves.

Today's Best Is Tomorrow's Starting Point

When Lando talks about motivation, he talks about setting an even better lap, putting things together more effectively and finding the next improvement, and that's a mentality we share.

We share the mentality that while sometimes progress comes through major breakthroughs - a new terminal, a new rail connection, a new piece of technology, or a fundamentally different way of moving goods - it often comes through thousands of smaller improvements.

Each improvement might appear marginal on its own, but repeated across a global network and millions of individual movements, those gains can become significant, because there is always another improvement to find.

That may be the most important thing elite sport and global trade have in common. High performance isn't a destination you reach, it's something teams build, test and improve continuously.

Whether the challenge is shaving fractions of a second from a lap or moving goods across continents, technology can make us faster, data can make us smarter and preparation can make us ready.

Our Global Trade Observatory CSCO Pulse Report 2026 explores how supply chain leaders are moving from optimisation towards greater optionality, the growing role of CSCOs in business growth, and the capabilities they believe will matter most over the years ahead.

Read the full CSCO Pulse Report 2026.