When it has to work first time, in public, against the clock.
I help teams, leaders and athletes perform when the stakes are high and there’s no playbook. My experience comes from Formula 1 pit lanes, first-of-their-kind endurance missions in Abu Dhabi and fifteen years as an international athlete.
Image: Haas F1 Team
2
Formula 1 teams
3
first-of-their-kind missions
2
Guinness World Records set across the missions
26–28%
fewer injuries
2
Commonwealth Games finals
How I can help
Projects
A performance project with no precedent, a fixed date and an audience.
Advisory and delivery, from first idea to the finish line.
Individuals
What got you here won’t get you through what’s next.
One-to-one coaching for athletes and leaders at a turning point.
Teams
Lessons from Formula 1 and elite sport, built around your team.
Keynotes, workshops and bespoke programmes.
HOW I WORK
Lessons from diverse performance environments, applied to yours.
Under pressure, decisions get made fast with the information to hand. That’s natural, and it’s often how one side gets fixed while the others get scrambled. Stepping back helps, and anyone can do it. What I add is breadth. I haven’t come from one sport or one organisation. I’ve often seen a similar problem in another context. That brings patterns and analogies from other worlds, so the other sides of a problem show up sooner, and the fix holds.
WHERE THE BREADTH COMES FROM
Many performance environments
Formula 1 pit lanes, elite athletics, national endurance missions, senior executives and corporate teams. What works in one often unlocks another.
The whole programme
On the Abu Dhabi missions I ran the performance programme and the project around it: people, logistics, partners and budget.
Performance and the business
Leading coaching at Snö Performance meant seeing the financials alongside the performance.
An outside view
As a consultant, I see how lots of teams work, not just one.
Fix one face on its own and you scramble the others.
STEP 1
I understand
You explain the problem as you see it. I listen, ask questions and learn how your world works. Sometimes just asking the right question is enough.
STEP 2
We understand
Together, we step back and look at the whole picture: people, plans, logistics, culture, pressure. This is where breadth helps. Experience from other environments often points to where the deeper issue sits.
STEP 3
We solve it
We fix the underlying issue, not just the problem in front of us. That means a fix that holds, built around the people who have to deliver it, and one that doesn’t create more work further down the line.
Featured work
F1 Pit Stop Performance
Williams Racing and Haas F1 Team
Consistent stops. Fewer injuries.
Photo: Williams Martini Racing
Active Abu Dhabi
Swim62 · Row400 · Walk1000
Three missions. Each one bigger than the last.
Organisations I’ve worked with and for
Paul Walker MEng PhD
I’ve spent my career on performance under pressure, from three different seats. As an athlete, I pole vaulted for Wales and Great Britain and finished fifth at two Commonwealth Games. As an engineer, I earned a First Class MEng and a PhD at Loughborough. Then I brought the two together: pit stop performance at Williams and Haas in Formula 1, three first-of-their-kind endurance missions in Abu Dhabi, and leading the coaching team at Snö Performance (formerly Hintsa Performance Middle East).
What links all of it is one belief: performance is a team sport.
What it’s like to work with me
Calm
When the pressure rises, I get steadier, so the people around me can too. Calm on the surface, a lot of work underneath.
Challenging
I’ll push on the plan and the assumptions, never on the person. Good questions early save hard lessons later.
Connection
I get to know you and your team before I give advice. Trust comes first, then the work.
Rigour
An engineer’s mind. Logic and evidence sit underneath every decision, even when the answer is simple.
