The McLaren Artura GT4 pictured above is not some special edition road car – it’s a proper racing car, of the sort campaigned by professional drivers in series such as the British GT Championship. It’s got more than 480PS, a top speed of 205mph, does 0-60mph in less than three seconds – and when you climb aboard, you enter a properly stripped-out racing cockpit with full harness, roll cage, a race-spec wheel with paddle shift gears, and no thought given to soundproofing, meaning the engine sounds very close and very loud.
In short, this is not the sort of car we at Automotive Management normally get behind the wheel of, but we’ve driven it on a track as close to flat out as our abilities would take us – and your dealership staff could too, for a steep price of course, but one that might just be worth it, not just for the personal thrill of the experience, but what it might mean for your business.
That is, if it provides a good answer to the question of how dealers can incentivise and reward their teams, and possibly even get them to collaborate better in the process.
The McLaren is one of several stunning driving machines on the fleet of PalmerSport, which runs driving experiences from its collection of circuits at Bedford Autodrome – a facility created from an airfield with lots of wide open spaces should drivers run out of talent at a critical moment (we’ll come back to that later). When asked about the potential reasons dealer groups might consider sending staff there, Giles Butterfield, operations manager at PalmerSport’s parent company MSV, says that while for some businesses it is just a case of rewarding their best staff with a day out, there is also a team-building benefit on offer.
He says: “We see a blend of usage. It can be used as a straightforward reward, as an incentive for people to raise their game.
“Also, it’s immensely useful as a team-building and relationship-cementing activity. People are together doing something that’s mildly competitive, which gives people something to talk about, and engage with one another about, that they wouldn’t have otherwise.
“It definitely helps build relationships, because people are having fun together; that’s a very powerful thing.”
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Need to avoid ‘forced fun’
The potential for team relationships to be built through reward activities is among the aspects of incentivising staff noted when we later consulted Sam Luscombe, managing director at Luscombe Motors – although he warns that they must be chosen carefully.
Luscombe says: “I’m always mindful of it feeling like forced fun. I’d much rather gather the views of the team and choose something there is already a bit of appetite for, whether that’s karting, golf, padel or something similar.
“Activities with a team or competitive element can work particularly well because they create a bit of camaraderie and healthy competition without having to manufacture it.
“If people genuinely want to take part, the team-building tends to happen naturally. For me, that works much better than a traditional away-day with forced group exercises that people feel obliged to enjoy.”
Chris Roberts, group managing director at multi-franchised dealer group Drayton Motors, says that he prefers bespoke incentives as team targets risk leaving some disengaged.
However, he adds: “We do run site-to-site leagues with the prospect of promotion/relegation across key periods. This does engender a team building feeling and the lower performers generally pay for the winners’ incentives. We tend to keep these in controlled amounts such as a £500 team incentive which would pay for a lunch or team meal.”
Luscombe says that while big gatherings can work well to celebrate a major milestone, smaller and more regular rewards often deliver superior results.
He says: “For us, little and often tends to work better, and it doesn’t need to be a grand gesture. After a particularly busy weekend or a big quarter-end push, it might simply be breakfast or lunch provided for the team. On a hot day, it could be an ice cream van turning up. Small things at the right time can have a surprisingly big impact.
“When someone has genuinely gone the extra mile, we’ll sometimes recognise that with a more significant reward. I think those are often better being experiential rather than purely financial, because they’re more memorable, but there has to be a high bar for that level of recognition so it still feels special.”
Butterfield argues that this experiential element is central to PalmerSport’s offering.
He says: “It is a participative, experiential activity – that’s what many, many people want to do these days. They don’t just want to go and watch something. They want to go and take part. And this is a real doing event, a real getting involved event.”
Incentives ‘should match objectives’
Luscombe argues that incentivising staff is about aligning an individual’s success with that of the company as a whole. For example, sales executives at Luscombe Motors are encouraged to value and bring in their own part exchanges, and paid a percentage based on the profit or loss those cars ultimately make, giving them ownership of the decision and directly aligning their role with the wider goals of the business.
For Luscombe, incentivisation is about building on employees’ own personal motivation.
He says: “Most people come to work wanting to do a good job, but it’s easy for people to feel as though everyone else is pulling in a different direction to serve their own priorities.
“Getting incentivisation right is really about harnessing that natural desire to do well and making sure the reward is connected to the outcome the business actually needs. Effort absolutely matters and should be recognised, but ultimately the result is what counts.
“The best incentives make that link really clear. People should be able to see how their own actions contribute to the wider result and then feel that they share in the reward when the business succeeds. That creates much more alignment across different roles and departments.”
For Roberts, incentives need to be balanced to achieve a range of objectives.
He says: “Benefits need to be balanced between business performance, customer experience and team development.
“We ensure all our basic pay is linked to training and development so each individual is encouraged to develop their skills to improve their ‘basic’ banding. This drives our manufacturer knowledge and technical ‘right first time’ metrics around things such as diagnostic work.”
What can go wrong?
As for pitfalls associated with incentivisation, Luscombe says that dealers need to ensure that divisions between different departments are not encouraged.
He says: “The reward has to be aligned with the success of the business, not specific metrics that make up the success. Success for one person or department shouldn’t come at the expense of somebody else. We want to win together and, equally, lose together.
“That’s why our profit share bonus is deliberately structured in two ways. Firstly, it isn’t guaranteed and we don’t want it to become something people simply expect. If the performance of the business drops, the profit share drops with it.
“Secondly, it’s distributed equally. There are no backroom discussions about whose contribution is worth more than somebody else’s. Everyone gets the same amount, because everyone has played a part in the overall result.
“If it doesn’t reinforce the culture you’re trying to build, it has the potential to destroy it.”
As for Roberts, he argues that when incentives are not properly thought out, they can have precisely the opposite effect to that which businesses would intend.
He says: “If incentives are poorly designed, this can risk driving bad behaviours. For example, if you are running a percentage add-on campaign, a month-end deal may risk this failing below the target, meaning that the team may avoid the deal if the additional products can’t be sold to maintain the percentage achievement.
“All incentives need to be balanced so both the company and individual benefit from the targets.”
So, what is the PalmerSport experience like?
As noted above, the McLaren Artura GT4 is merely the headline attraction of a wide range of vehicles available to drive at PalmerSport. The others include what PalmerSport calls the F3000 – not an actual car from the 1990s racing series, but still an extremely pukka-looking, feeling and sounding mid-engined single seater capable of 0-62mph in just over three seconds. The same powertrain also appears in the JP-LM, which PalmerSport says is designed to give an idea of sports prototype racing. Automotive Management sampled all three of these cars during a visit to Bedford – and that’s only a selection of what’s experienced by those having a full day there, alongside the likes of the Ginetta G56 GTA racer, Hyundai Ioniq 5 N electric hot hatch, go-karts, Land Rover Defender (on an off-road course), and a Caterham Seven in an autotest competition environment. Add in top-notch instruction and catering, and it’s quite the package – if, unsurprisingly, not cheap, with a full day priced at more than £1,000.
On our visit, there was no question of an easy build up – instead we were straight behind the wheel of the McLaren, and swiftly found that more than eight years in motoring journalism, including some road car track driving, was no preparation for a proper racing car experience. The intensity, the heat (no air-con here) and the sensation of speed were all on the edge of being overwhelming – and yet, with the constant expert guidance and encouragement of the instructor sat next to us, we were able to experience the thrill of flooring the throttle out of bends, the sensation of not getting our braking quite right and having to catch a back-end slide, and the reward of putting it all together to set a fast lap time.
Butterfield tells us that both the physical element and the sense of being challenged, even pushed to go faster, are features that set the experience apart.
He says: “Physically, it’s actually quite tiring. They are racing cars, so the brake pedal tends to need a bit more of a push than a road car, and the steering’s a bit heavier than a road car, but that’s all part of the immediacy and the feel of a racing vehicle.
“The G-forces are so much higher than a road car, and the performance level is such a huge leap from what people are used to. It is a proper assault on the senses.
“And it’s interesting to have somebody sitting next to you who is urging you to go faster – not trying to stop you going too fast, but urging you to go faster and telling you how to do it properly, correctly and safely, and that definitely is a big part of adding to the overall thrill and enjoyment.”
Of course, some readers may be thinking that all this talk of G-forces, fast cornering and catching slides suggests a lack of safety – a fear Butterfield is quick to dispel.
He says: “Safety is absolutely the number one priority for us. In terms of the vehicle preparation, the clothing we ask people to wear; but also, where PalmerSport is unique is that the Bedford Autodrome facility was designed for PalmerSport.
“The amount of space we have here is quite unusual compared to an ordinary racing circuit, so the opportunity for people to push cars to the limit is that much greater, because it can be done in a much, much safer environment than usual.”
The safety of the circuit is something we can attest to, since having switched to the F3000 car (which feels a lot closer to the ground, with much more of a lying-down driving position, than onboard camera shots from F1 races would suggest), after a bout of overconfidence we found ourselves heading backwards off the circuit at around 70mph – but with loads of time to bring the car to a stop before we would have come anywhere near hitting anything.
It’s not just the safety that we can vouch for either. Our experience was alongside a group of regular guests, and between driving sessions we found an immediate camaraderie, talking excitedly amid the thrill and intensity of the experience, and of course comparing lap times. And that’s among complete strangers – we can only imagine that among regular co-workers the benefits could be richer still; assuming our contributors’ tips on rewarding staff properly are followed.
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