06/08/2026
MotoGP lands at Silverstone today. Barry Sheene took the last premier class world title won by a British rider, back in 1977. No other Brit has managed it since. Two years earlier, a horrific crash at Daytona left him with a broken leg and pins in his thigh. He got back on the bike and won the title anyway. Sheene read a race lap by lap, adjusting before problems became crashes. Mike Hailwood, a generation before him, built his reputation the same way. Neither man won on raw nerve alone. They won because they prepared for the moment things went wrong, then reacted faster than anyone else on the grid.
Today's MotoGP riders have telemetry that Sheene and Hailwood never had. Tyre wear, brake temperature, lean angle and lap times are tracked in real time and fed back to the pits lap by lap. But the principle has not changed since their era. None of it is improvised. It is prepared in advance and triggered the moment conditions demand it. By the time the lights go out on Sunday, every rider's team engineers will have already run through hundreds of scenarios they hope never happen.
Cybersecurity runs on the same principle. The businesses that come through an incident well are not the ones with the deepest pockets. They are the ones who worked out their weak points beforehand. They have staff trained to spot a security issue. They have backups that are tested, not just scheduled. Crucially, they have a clear plan for who does what in the first hour after something goes wrong.
Most SME owners treat security as a chore they tolerate once, then forget until the worst happens. The great riders never treated preparation that way and businesses should not treat cyber that way either. Threats change continually. The plan has to change with them.
If the race this weekend gets you thinking about your own setup, I would love an introduction to anyone weighing this up.
