Marc Priestley

Marc “Elvis” Priestley worked as a Formula One race mechanic, member of the pit stop crew and in team management at one of the sport’s most successful organisations, McLaren Racing, for almost a decade.

Mindset: A single minded focus took him from apprentice mechanic with a small racing team in North London, working on Caterham Seven kit cars, through Formula Ford, British GT, Formula 3, Formula 3000 and on to his goal of working in Formula One in the year 2000.

An amazing ten years with McLaren Racing, as Number One Mechanic and part of the famous pit stop crew, culminated in helping Lewis Hamilton to become World Champion in 2008.

Marc left the team in 2009 to pursue a media career. Starting by sharing his experiences at the team for various websites and magazines, his writing was picked up by the producers of BBC Radio 5 Live’s F1 show and he was invited to join the team as pit lane reporter for the British GP. That only served to light the fire of passion for broadcasting with Marc and over the following years he’s successfully built a career in television, both inside and outside of motor racing. Marc has now relationships with a number of well known networks and production companies.

As a Formula One mechanic Marc and his team come together in perfect synchronicity to change tyres in little more than two seconds and get it back into the race.

He has worked with an impressive list of World Champions including Mika Hakkinen, Fernando Alonso, Kimi Raikkonen, Jenson Button and Lewis Hamilton.

In one sense an F1 team is a business like any other. But it’s also different in many ways to most others and offers unique lessons in such areas as rapid productivity, marginal gains, image portrayal, data analysis and of course teamwork.

Marc now shares his experiences and knowledge by delivering talks to businesses and conferences.