In 1953, the Le Mans 24 hour race was a foregone conclusion.
As usual, Ferrari had the fastest, most powerful car.
That year they had a massive 4.5 litre V12 engine, delivering 350 bhp.
Plus, they had the reigning World Champion driving for them, Alberto Ascari.
Obviously, they would blow everything else off the track.
But it didn’t turn out like that.
After 24 hours of flat-out racing, the winner was Jaguar.
It had a much smaller 3.4 litre engine, an old-fashioned straight 6 block, delivering just 200 bhp.
All told, just over half of what Ferrari had.
But Jaguar finished 4 entire laps ahead of everyone else, that’s half-hour before the next car crossed the line.
Jaguar set the record as the first car to average over 100 mph for the 24 hour race.
How could that be?
What was Jaguar’s secret that allowed it to blow everyone else away?
Now here’s the really creative part: it wasn’t the engine that made the Jaguar faster.
It was the brakes.
But you don’t win a race by going slower, how can brakes make you win?
The answer is, Jaguar were the first to have DISC brakes.
Everyone else had the same brakes cars had always used: DRUM brakes.
The drum was attached to the wheel and the brake-pads were inside the drum, pushing outwards to slow it down.
But friction generates a lot of heat and, with the brake-pads on the inside, there is no way to disperse that heat.
And heat makes the brakes fade, so they’re less effective.
Which means you have to slow down earlier for corners and go round them slower.
But with disc brakes, the drum is replaced with a disc, and the brake-pads are on the outside of the disc.
So the pads press inwards onto the disc, to slow it down.
The friction still generates heat but, because the brake-pads are outside the disc, they get cooled by the air.
That means they don’t fade, so they’re more effective.
That means the driver can brake later.
That means the car goes into every corner faster.
That means it goes round every turn faster.
That means it comes out of every corner faster.
Which also means it burns less rubber off the tyres.
Plus it uses less fuel accelerating back up to speed.
And all of that means it has fewer pit stops to refuel and change tyres.
Put that lot together and the car is faster over the entire race.
So while all the other racing strategists were looking in the same place: trying to increase the speed, Jaguar strategists were looking at the one place no-one else was looking – the brakes.
THAT is creative strategic thinking.
The traditional strategy for going faster was always power, so Ferrari, like everyone else, concentrated on the engine.
While everyone was looking that way, Jaguar strategists looked the other way.
And by doing that, Jaguar had the braking-strategy to themselves and were able to beat everyone else.
THAT is creative strategic thinking – not just trying to do what other strategists are doing, but instead doing what they wouldn’t even think of doing.
As Schopenhauer said:
“The man of talent is like a marksman who can hit a target no-one else can hit.
The man of genius is like a marksman who can hit a target no one else can see.”
And then came the jaguar rebranding:)
Hi Dave, the same, or similar, is true for the F-16 which was designed to be aerodynamically unstable to give it an edge in manoeuvrability (known by fighter design foreheads as relaxed static stability).
This was a plane that common sense would say ‘couldn’t fly’ but the secret to its success was that it could be “put into parts of the sky other planes can’t get to”.
Inspired by this, a colleague and I launched an independent planning consultancy called F-16, predictably, and perhaps poetically, it crashed.