University of Texas Course Mixes Auto Racing, Executive Leadership

• A new program for business executives at the University of Texas at Austin McCombs School of Business will mix high-speed racing and leadership.
• Program participants will race each other in Formula 1 simulators, work together in live pit-stop challenges, and drive exotic supercars with an instructor.
• The program will debut in February.
• The four-day program is capped at 20 participants and comes with a $25,000 price tag.

Leadership accelerator programs aim to better equip business executives for a fast-paced work environment — but a new program at the University of Texas at Austin will take that “fast-paced” concept to a new, very literal level.

The “Winning! What Auto Racing Teaches Us About Success in Business” program at the university's McCombs School of Business will feature high-speed racing, simulations, and pit-stop challenges at the Circuit of the Americas (COTA) racetrack in Austin, according to a press release from the school.

The four-day program, which is capped at 20 participants and comes with a $25,000 price tag, is geared toward offering executives both a chance to sharpen their business acumen and a unique, intensive racing experience.

We're living in a period of time that's extremely volatile and uncertain as well as complex and ambiguous, Don Ruse, an assistant professor of instruction at the school and director of the racing program, said in the release. What that requires us to do is move with a level of speed and adaptability and resilience that, in my 40 years, I've never seen required.

Program participants will race each other in Formula 1 (F1) simulators, work together in live pit-stop challenges, and drive exotic supercars with an instructor, according to the program website.

We can learn some really great things by looking at people who are performing at the highest levels, perhaps especially if it's outside our own industry or area of expertise, Gaylen Paulson, associate dean of McCombs and executive director of Texas Executive Education, said in the release.

School officials tout the highly hands-on and involved McCombs program, which will launch in February, as the first of its kind in the country.

McCombs isn't the only school to embrace high-speed racing as a teaching opportunity: F1 executive and billionaire investor Toto Wolff is set to teach a course on leading a high-performance F1 team at Harvard Business School in 2024, BestColleges previously reported.

Wolff will join Anita Elberse, the Lincoln Filene professor of business administration who incorporated her case study on Wolff's team into her curriculum, in teaching the course.