Bathurst’s Epic Win Shows How to Chase the Strategy at the Edge of Performance
Whether you’re into car racing or not, if you got to watch the recent 2025 Bathurst 1000, the last few hours were some of the best motor racing drama and incredible driving skill you’ll ever see. It was truly edge-of-seat viewing.
23-year-old Matt Payne and veteran co-driver Garth Tander delivered one of the most remarkable wins in the race’s 65-year history. Starting 18th on the grid, they navigated a race that transformed from brilliant sunshine into torrential rain, fog, and chaos. Seven safety cars, multiple crashes, and favourites hitting walls. Yet through it all, Payne and Tander stayed patient, read the changing conditions, and hunted down leaders who either over-drove or lost their nerve. In the drama-filled back half of the race, Payne meticulously chased the track, adjusting his lines lap by lap as grip changed, reading the surface others couldn’t see. When the decisive moment came with five laps remaining, they were perfectly positioned to capitalise as leaders collided ahead. Victory by 0.959 seconds in a six-hour marathon.
This is what separates strategic leadership from rigid planning. The winners aren’t those who cling to the script when conditions shift, nor those who panic and back off. They’re the ones who sense the changing surface, adjust their lines in real time, and keep their organisation poised right on the edge of its capability.
In my own experience as an executive and CEO, I led a wealth management business where we relentlessly strove to secure the number one spot in our sector, starting from way back in the field at number 12. To outsiders we weren’t even a contender. But over a nearly decade-long marathon, we climbed methodically. Firstly, we launched new and distinctive products that secured attractive independent ratings. We went from 12th to 9th. We finetuned our web portal, invested in our sales process, raised our profile at more industry conferences. We clawed ahead from 9th to 5th. Incumbent leaders fell away as the market situation changed. Others had too many management changes to stick at anything. We out-manoeuvred them around every corner by being highly attentive and taking nothing for granted. We won the biggest account in the country. We launched a series of user-driven product enhancements and we doubled the size of our sales team. We jumped from 5th to 3rd and then to 2nd.
Even having secured 2nd place, we didn’t have the most expensive technology or the biggest marketing budget, but we worked relentlessly to delight our customers. While competitors waited for perfect clarity or stuck rigidly to well-funded but outdated plans, we persisted and adapted through every changing condition, staying in flow with the new reality. Then as others were aquaplaning across disruptions from new regulations and tectonic structural shifts (which we had anticipated), we kept our carefully calculated line all the way to 1st place. We chased our strategy every day, every week and every quarter, relentlessly fore-sighting and adapting to the conditions.
Chasing the strategy is adaptive ambition – constantly reading conditions and adjusting to keep your organisation at the edge of capability. Not backing off when uncertainty hits, not pushing beyond control, but sensing the surface, staying calibrated to conditions, and building the sustained performance that wins marathons, not just sprints.
The discipline of this approach means you don’t abandon your plan, you refine it in motion. You create rapid feedback loops that tell you when priorities are slipping, when fatigue is rising, when opportunity is opening up, when competitors are winning or losing ground. You balance sustainable pace against reckless speed. You keep intent fixed but lines flexible. Most critically, you build strategic fluency across your team so everyone can sense change and respond together, showing up with skill and attentiveness every day.
Like Payne and Tander chased the track to victory, is your organisation chasing the strategy with adaptive ambition – squeezing advantage from every corner, every lap, staying right at the edge of performance?
Further reading:
“Matt Payne and Garth Tander win dramatic Bathurst 1000 after starting 18th” | ABC News https://abcnews.go.com/Sports/wireStory/matt-payne-garth-tander-win-dramatic-bathurst-1000-126444029
“Payne/Tander reign supreme in Bathurst 1000 for the ages” | Supercars https://www.supercars.com/news/supercars-news-2025-results-bathurst-1000-race-report-video-crashes-battle-matt-payne-garth-tander
© 2025 Matt Walsh. All rights reserved.