Motivation Quote by John Surtees

There is a whole era of motorsport management hiding inside that mild, almost bureaucratic sentence. John Surtees frames “driver policy” not as a grand sporting philosophy but as a contingency plan, shaped less by ambition than by scarcity. The key word is “partly”: it’s a preemptive defense that admits compromise while insisting there was still some agency left in the room. That’s the voice of a competitor-turned-leader who knows how quickly fans and press turn personnel choices into moral verdicts.

The subtext is the quiet power of contracts. Racing sells itself as pure meritocracy - fastest wins, best gets the seat - but Surtees points to the off-track economy that actually governs the grid. “Who was available” is a polite way of saying the talent pool was already spoken for, locked up by sponsors, manufacturers, and rival teams with deeper pockets or longer calendars. This is especially pointed coming from Surtees, a singular figure who crossed from bikes to F1 and understood, viscerally, that performance isn’t the only currency. Access is.

Contextually, it reads like a rebuttal to hindsight criticism: why didn’t you sign X, why did you run Y, why wasn’t the lineup stronger? Surtees answers without drama, almost shrugging. That restraint is strategic. In racing, complaining sounds like weakness; stating constraints sounds like realism. The line normalizes a truth fans often resist: teams don’t always choose the best driver, they choose the best driver they can actually get.