You can outsource the work, not the responsibility
Originally written in Chinese. Translated with AI, reviewed by Gary. Read the Chinese original →
Over the past couple of days I've been reading about the accident at China GT's Shanghai round. On 5 September, there was a collision in the GT3 race and one of the Ferraris caught fire. Loek Hartog, a 23-year-old Dutch driver following behind, saw it, stopped his own car, gave up the race, jumped out with a fire extinguisher and ran over. In the end he pulled the trapped driver, Ollie Millroy, out of the car. Millroy later said publicly that Hartog saved his life.
It's a stirring scene, of course. One racing driver, willing to throw away the result to save another.
But this shouldn't have happened.
Because this situation should never have needed a driver in the middle of a race to be the hero.
When we were kids taking part in school sports days, there'd usually be Red Crescent or St John on the side, at least a first aid team on standby. And this was a GT race, with dozens of cars running at two or three hundred kilometres an hour, Ferraris and Porsches, and professional drivers from many countries.
Strictly speaking, China GT isn't an FIA world championship. It's a national-level GT series in China, but it's already a very large, very professional motorsport event. In a sport like racing, crashes, fires and injured drivers are never entirely unforeseeable. So emergency response, fire rescue and medical teams should never be just a supporting function. They're part of the event itself.
Configuration exists doesn't mean capability exists
What I found even more interesting was a line in China GT's later statement: after a preliminary review, the event's "setup met the requirements for a national-level event", but detailed management needed improvement, and it would review organisation, support, emergency response, rescue and medical arrangements.
This may be where many organisations are most at risk.
Configuration exists doesn't mean capability exists.
You can buy ten fire extinguishers; that doesn't mean the people on site can use them. You can arrange an ambulance; that doesn't mean it will be there in the critical few minutes when an accident happens. You can sign a security contract and outsource the medical team, fire rescue and event crew. It's all there in the paperwork, every box ticked: security, yes; medical, yes; fire extinguishers, yes; emergency team, yes; ambulance, yes.
Normally, everything looks fine.
Only when something actually happens does the system sit its exam.
And this time, the first to pass the exam was a racing driver who had nothing to do with the rescue team.
Outsourced layer by layer
After the accident, a screenshot of a security job ad for the Shanghai circuit circulated online, reportedly five hours of work for 60 yuan, paid daily. The information I've seen so far isn't enough to prove these were the people on site at China GT that day, so I don't think that number can be stated as fact.
But it does hint at another problem.
Many industries are getting more and more cut-throat. Clients want it cheap, organisers have budgets, so a lot of things get outsourced. A contract worth 100 goes to a contractor, who takes a margin and maybe 80 is left. It's subcontracted to another firm, 60 left. Then it goes through a manpower agency, and by the time it reaches the person actually standing on site doing the work, very little may be left.
That's just a hypothetical example, of course, not a claim that this is how China GT works.
But it's very common in many industries.
The person standing there at the end isn't necessarily a bad person, nor necessarily someone who "isn't dedicated enough". He might do an exhibition on Monday, mall security on Wednesday, and on Saturday someone asks if he wants a job at the race circuit, how much for the day, and he thinks OK and goes.
From his point of view, he's just there to do a job.
Whatever training, equipment and job scope you give me, that's what I'll do.
But when a race car actually catches fire in front of him, and you suddenly expect him to instantly become a trained firefighter who understands race car construction, fuel fires, extinguishers, how to approach the car and how to get the driver out, that expectation itself may already be the problem.
The real question isn't why a particular worker on site didn't rush in. It's why, in a high-risk operation like this, nobody made sure that the most critical positions were filled by someone genuinely trained, equipped, with an SOP and enough experience.
That is the management problem.
Something similar has happened before. At MIRROR's 2022 concert at the Hong Kong Coliseum, a large LED screen fell and seriously injured a dancer. The government investigation later found it wasn't as simple as one steel cable suddenly snapping. It involved a gap between the actual and declared weight, the suspension system, workmanship, safety factors, and responsibilities spread across the hirer, contractors, subcontractors and various professionals.
This is also where I think outsourcing is most easily misunderstood.
Outsourcing itself isn't wrong.
We outsource every day in business. Warehousing, logistics, developers, agencies, factories. You can't keep full-time staff for everything. An event series with only a few races a year keeping hundreds of its own security, medical staff and fire crew wouldn't necessarily make commercial sense either.
The real question was never whether to outsource or not.
It's whether, when you outsourced the execution, you outsourced the accountability along with it.
A very easy mindset for bosses is: "That's not my staff, that's the vendor's people." "We didn't do that, the contractor did." "That was subcontracted out again."
But customers don't know your subcontractors.
Drivers entered China GT. Concertgoers bought the organiser's tickets. Consumers buy your brand. When something really happens, nobody is going to dig into the fact that it was your third-tier vendor's employee who got it wrong, so it's not your problem.
In the end, responsibility still comes back to the name at the top.
What you saved may have been redundancy
I think the really frightening thing about cut-throat competition isn't that margins keep getting thinner.
When an industry is driven purely by price for a long time, with everyone cutting prices again and again, one day what gets cut may no longer be profit, but professional capability.
Cut 10% from many budgets and normally you can't see any difference at all. Nothing went wrong last year, so this year you naturally feel you can cut a bit more, and next year a bit more again.
Until that one accident actually happens, and you discover that what you saved wasn't necessarily waste.
It may have been redundancy.
And the most important thing in any safety system is precisely redundancy.
Why do race cars have roll cages, fireproof suits, HANS devices and fire suppression systems? Because racing design logic was never "it probably won't crash". It's "what if it does?"
Running a company is the same.
Good management isn't making everything as cheap as possible. It's knowing very clearly what is just cost, and what is actually capability.
Some costs can be optimised relentlessly.
But some things, once over-optimised, look completely fine day to day, right up until the day something goes wrong.
What this China GT accident shows is no longer just a story of one driver saving another.
Hartog of course deserves every bit of applause.
But a good system should, as far as possible, make it unnecessary for ordinary people to become heroes.
If in the end someone's life depends on another driver who happened to be passing being brave enough, calm enough and capable enough to save him, then what really needs reviewing isn't the person on site holding the extinguisher.
It's the people who designed the whole system.
Work can be outsourced, manpower can be outsourced, even expertise can be outsourced.
But there's one thing a boss can never outsource.
Responsibility.