Europe’s energy markets are moving at a pace closer to F1 racing, which the traditional utilities are not used to. Intraday markets have moved into 15-minute units, PPAs are becoming more complex, and digital capabilities decide who can scale opportunities and who can’t.
Inside most organisations, however, a structural gap risks slowing performance and hamper growth: Business and IT not having the same understanding of the strategic direction, not sharing ownership on strategic projects, and not operating as a unified team.
And in such a volatile, fast-changing and heavily regulated environment, that gap behaves exactly like drag on a Formula 1 car: invisible at first, but crucial to winning at the end of the race.
Why trading is more like racing than we realize
The F1 analogy has been used often at CommodityFirst to explain what energy companies need to succeed in a fast-growing digital context:
You don’t win a race with just a great driver. You win with a great driver, a great engine, and a great pit-stop crew, all in sync.
Here’s how the analogy maps the energy business:
- The driver is the business i.e., the functions that drives revenue, growth, and innovation e.g., trading, origination, sales.
- The engine is your system landscape i.e., the machinery that decides whether you can accelerate and scale up e.g., your data infrastructure, your EDM, ETRM, short-term trading platform etc.
- The pit-stop crew are the support functions, crucial to make sure everything is properly oiled and ready to go e.g., risk, back office, legal etc.
If one of the three parts are out of sync, the driver is fast, but the engine is unstable, or the pit-stop crew can’t service the car at quick enough, the result is the same: you lose the race.
It may not be right away, but inevitably.
This is the situation many energy trading companies find themselves in today: ambitious drivers, outdated engines, and pit-stop crews forced to improvise.
Where alignment breaks down
1. The driver wants to accelerate faster than the engine can handle
Trading and origination push for new products, new markets, new structures.
But systems designed for different requirements and another era, can’t support the torque.
The result: speed on paper, friction in practice.
2. The engine is patched instead of re-designed
Legacy architecture, manual data flows, point-to-point integrations: all of them act like aerodynamic drag.
You don’t notice the slowdown until you push for a new structured trade or PPA and realise your car isn’t designed for it.
3. The pit-stop crew are not fully involved in the driving tactics
Support functions are often involved too late, with little context, and asked to “fix” what should have been designed differently from the start.
And like in Formula 1, a slow or uncoordinated pit-stop team can ruin an entire race.
4. IT isn’t seen as part of the overall business organisation
Many companies still have a mindset of “Business vs. IT”, as if IT were an external service provider, not part of the business organisation, and not needing to know the full picture.
Trading is so IT-intensive that you should never split them. IT must be seen as a part of the Business organisation. The more IT knows, the better they can support.
In today’s markets, not having Business and IT fully aligned is as efficient as having the pit-stop crew in Abu-Dhabi while the race is taking place in Singapore.
The hidden cost: competitive drag
When these misalignments stack up, companies see the same symptoms:
- Great ideas never leave the drawing board
- Slow execution because systems can’t scale
- Constant firefighting replacing strategic delivery
- High dependency on manual workarounds
Most of this isn’t about people. It’s about an operating model that was never designed for today’s requirements and tempo.
How can you ensure to win the race in the long run?
1. Business & IT co-ownership of outcomes
In a winning F1 team, the driver and the race engineers watch and react on the same critical key-performance-indices (KPIs), so should your business and IT.
How organisations can make this real:
- Give IT a seat at the strategy table.
- Replace project targets with joint Objectives & Key Results (OKRs).
- Run shared post-mortems. If a release fails or an End-of-Day run breaks, everyone Did-Not-Finish (DNF), not only IT or some other support function.
This eliminates the classic “handover” culture. It becomes a single cockpit, one race plan.
2. Treat the system landscape as a strategic asset
A race car doesn’t win because the driver “tries harder.” It wins because the platform, engine, and chassis are designed and built for the speed it takes to win.
How organisations make this real:
- Run frequent platform health reviews, assessing integration bottlenecks, data reliability, latency, extensibility etc.
- Prioritise technology investments along with other business investments to reach financial targets.
- Treat the system landscape like a strategic asset, not a nice-to-have maintenance item.
This turns IT from being seen as simple “plumbing” to a competitive advantage.
3. Cross-functional teams built around strategic bets
Championships are won when the pit-stop crew, engineers, strategists, and driver think as one, not when they hand out discrete tasks along a production line.
How organisations make this real:
- Form multidisciplinary teams around business priorities: e.g., flexibility trading, structured products, asset optimization, PPAs automation etc.
- Give teams the mandate to design, build, test, and refine together, with no sequential waiting lines between teams.
- Let these teams own end-to-end problem solving from data quality to customer experience, so no one can say “that’s another team’s fault.”
This is how bottlenecks and silos can be avoided, and how innovation becomes continuous rather than episodic.
4. Pit-stop crew empowerment
In a F1 team, the pit-stop crews don’t wait to be asked to fix something. Instead, they anticipate, prepare, and enable speed. And support functions should do the same.
How organisations make this real:
- Equip support functions with tools so they can avoid or identify issues early and make improvements faster.
- Move from “review and reject” to “design for feasibility” and involve support teams in solution design before development work begins.
- Build clear guardrails (e.g., product templates, automation rules), so teams spend less time on rework and exception handling.
Empowered pit-stop crews enable and reduce the cost of complexity.
Drop the silos: the future will reward integration and alignment
The energy companies that pull ahead will be the ones that behave like integrated race teams with strong drivers, powerful engines, world-class pit-stop crews, and all parts operating as one.
Many lack a sense of unity, not because people don’t want it, but because the operating model wasn’t designed for it.
This can be changed, and it’s as simple as aligning your Business, IT, and support functions. Like in this trading landscape transformation case, where Business and IT co-ownership translated into measurable progress.
That’s the competitive edge that will separate market contenders from champions.
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