What you can learn from a racing driver on risk, resilience and high performance

When Naomi Schiff talks about her life in motorsport, two things stand out: her relentless drive and her ability to reinvent herself without losing sight of who she is. From the first time she drove a go-kart at age 11 to the bright lights of Formula One broadcasting, her story is one of resilience and adaptability.

Schiff’s motorsport journey began at a family friend’s birthday party, where a go-kart ride sparked a lifelong passion. She begged her father to take her to the track and within a year she was competing – and winning. She progressed quickly up the local karting competition ladder, representing South Africa at the World Championships for four years before moving into single-seater cars. 

But the high costs threatened to end her career. At 18, her dad remortgaged their family home to give Schiff the chance to race in Europe – only for the championship to declare bankruptcy after just two races. She was forced back to go-karting.

Others might have walked away, but Schiff doubled down. She handed out business cards, cold-called sponsors and eventually earned the opportunity to race in the Clio Cup China Series. She won the championship in 2014 with seven wins from 10 races. From there, she competed in the GT4 European series, the 24-hour series and the W Series before transitioning into the pundit’s chair.

Joining Sky Sports as an F1 analyst in 2022 brought a barrage of online abuse. Max Verstappen and Sir Lewis Hamilton publicly defended her, but the criticism took its toll. “There were definitely days when I would just lie in my bed and think why do people hate me?” she admits.

“You spend a lot of your time in your racing career defining your self-worth on split seconds and it can be quite tough to deal with. But you deal with those things head-on. After every racing day, you sit down with your team and have a debrief. I think it's important to go through that and not ignore things.

“Experience and address it head-on, but then also very quickly learn to turn the page and move on because dwelling on it is never a good thing. You spend more time losing than winning, so you end up spending a lot of time building yourself back up. I think I've been able to master that over time.”

And while broadcasting was a new world, she approached it with the same boldness she had in her driving career, despite the lack of a data-driven feedback loop. Not having trained in broadcasting, she admits it was a risk. But that was part of the appeal.

“I love a risk,” she says. “The way that my career played out meant that whatever opportunity I was given or found myself having in front of me, I wasn't in a position to say no. We didn't always have access, money and all the things we needed. I definitely wasn’t prepared for those opportunities, but it was sink or swim.”

An example of this mindset is clear in how she pitched herself to racing sponsors: “My approach has always been that I was walking into the room with a ‘no’. Worst case scenario, you walk out with a no, you’ve learnt something new and you haven’t lost anything. That's exactly the way that I approach risks in life,” she says.

There are also commonalities between racing and broadcasting, notably communication and feedback. The relationship between driver and engineer is vital to putting a team in the best position to succeed, but figuring that out takes time and effort from both parties.

“One weekend, the engineer I had would sugarcoat it, saying things like, ‘take the pressure off’ and ‘don’t listen to that’. I ended up telling him that the philosophical stuff was great, but if I wanted to talk about that, I’d do it with my sports psychologist. I needed facts and figures and to know what would make a difference in the race,” she says.”

She points to Max Verstappen and his engineer Gianpiero Lambiase as proof that direct communication, even if blunt, can drive performance. “For us on the outside, you think that's a really dysfunctional way to speak to each other, but it works for them, it gets the best out of them and the results speak for themselves.”

Leaders, she says, cannot shy away from hard conversations. Schiff’s experience suggests that, in the right environment and when delivered respectfully, honest discussions and feedback can be the fuel for a high-performance environment. Clarity is a gift. But empathy is also key.

“Being a leader takes so many different skills,” she says. “You've got to have a vision, you've got to be ambitious, you've got to be able to rally the troops, but I think the empaths are the ones that really stick out at the top and are the ones who stand the test of time because the people they work with highly respect them.

“Also, I think the ones who are able to actually take a step into the background because they trust the people that they put around them are the ones who always end up succeeding in the environment.”

After 16 years as a driver, Schiff realised racing was no longer serving her goals. Letting go was hard because her identity was tied to it, but change brought new opportunities.

“There’s a quote that I love: ‘The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails.’ Even though I'd never planned anything other than being a racing driver, changing my sails and doing something I never planned to do was the best possible outcome for me.

“Even though you've probably put a lot of soul, effort, time and money into something, don’t be afraid of change and don't be afraid to adjust.”