Welcome to the new Action Resources Ltd. website with www.motor-sport.uk.com as an integrated component. 

We have now been a proactive provider of solutions to employers and competitors alike, within the motor-sport community, for over 12 years.

Back in 1999, I quickly came to realise that conventional ‘sponsorship’ was effectively dead and that sustained STRATEGIC PARTNERSHIPS constituted the only route by which competitors could meet their business and career objectives going forward.   And so it has proved to be.

The strategic partnership approach recognises that a business or organisation can only support motor-racing if tangible and positive commercial outcomes ensue.  Teams, drivers and riders who compete in the sport, therefore, have to work on such relationships, understand all they can about their target partner companies and materially assist in making the expected outcomes actually happen.

Alas, I have lost count of the enquiries I’ve received from aspiring racers (or, more often, from their parents) who think that a ‘sponsor’ is just waiting round the corner to pour cash into a fledgling racing career. There must have been 500 or so, mostly with little or no racing experience already under their belt and thus absolutely no story to tell.  

During these past dozen years, we have helped lots of teams (competing at many levels and in several countries) and around 60 drivers, mostly from the UK but also from Australia, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Hong Kong, New Zealand, the Republic of Ireland and the USA.  These girls and guys have competed in series from modern to historic with great success, from Formula Ford to F3000 and GP2, from Ginettas to Britcar, Carrera Cup, British GT, GrandAm, ALMS, the Le Mans Series and the Le Mans 24-Hours itself and from Super Mighty Minis to BTCC and DTM.

And now comes news of probably the most ground-breaking strategic partnership yet to involve a motor-sport company.   With the world economy subject to all sorts of ifs and buts, there is no better time for an innovative, iconoclastic partnership such as that recently announced by Ron Dennis’s McLaren Group and the British-based pharmaceutical and consumer products giant, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK).  This is a live example of motor-sport in the community, of motor-sport in the context of the real economy and of motor-sport coming out from under its protective and secretive shell. 

The collaboration will initially run until 2016 and may indeed involve some GSK brands adorning McLaren race-cars.  In essence, though, GSK has chosen McLaren as its partner in order to tap into practices that will give GSK a sustained competitive business advantage – through access to McLaren’s accumulated expertise in using planning processes, data modelling tools and forecasting methodologies, and in deploying human resources.  This comes hot on the heels of McLaren’s work in advising the Air-Traffic Controllers at London’s Heathrow Airport.  These are giant examples of applying the lessons learnt in racing cars at the highest level to other disciplines and activities.

GSK will build a mission control facility at its London HQ which will be based on McLaren’s Formula One race control module and the two companies are also to construct a Centre of Learning alongside McLaren’s futuristic base on the outskirts of Woking in Surrey. Andrew Witty, who is the CEO of GSK, commented:  “McLaren has an unparalleled reputation for innovation, built on rigorous analysis and fast decision-making.  This partnership is another example of GSK looking outside its sector for inspiration and fresh perspectives on how we can achieve our strategic goals in an ever more challenging and fast-changing business environment”.

In today’s operating climate, anyone who seeks external cash to go motor-racing has to work out how their backers’ and partners’ commercial objectives may be achieved.   No projected outcomes translate into no cash received.  And broken promises this year mean no money next year.

The application of lessons and techniques emanating from performance engineering to the wider world might at last persuade the public and consumer at large that motor-sport might not be a totally self-centred and vacuous activity after all.