What learnings from F1® and aerospace can be applied to resources?

The same problem, different tolerances

Racing cars and aircraft are engineered toward 100% reliability. Resources operations, by contrast, can absorb a certain failure rate — a typical industry benchmark sits around 20%. That gap isn't a difference in ambition; it's a difference in the economics of downtime. Deploying F1®- or aerospace-grade reliability targets across a mine site is technically possible, but it would push the total cost of production up far more than the failures it prevents would save.

The catch is that failure rates in resources hurt the balance sheet in ways that are harder to see immediately, whereas an F1® car failing to finish one race in five would be existential for the team and its sponsors, and an airline with a 1% failure rate would lose passengers fast. Resources compensates by treating safety with the same rigour F1® and aerospace apply to reliability — incidents, near misses and potential events are all logged and analysed in detail, because near misses are far more frequent than actual events and carry real diagnostic value.

Why reliability practice looks so different

In resources, reliability is a sub-metric of overall performance with a direct line to the cost of production — yet because the payoff isn't always visible to production teams in the short term, it's easy for reliability work to lose out to near-term output pressure.

Much of the gap between industries comes down to data collection. F1® and aerospace track the location, status and history of every individual part. In resources, parts typically only enter the record when they're transacted, so reliability engineers have to reconstruct each part's history by manually searching and sorting transaction data — a slow, error-prone process that doesn't scale.

Competitive pressure also shapes behaviour differently. F1® teams and airlines run rigorous continuous-improvement cycles that set a firm cadence for maintenance, which tends to mean parts are over-maintained rather than under-maintained. Resources, by contrast, is driven by commodity prices: when the cost of downtime is low, maintenance plans flex accordingly, and vary more as a result.

Benchmarking is harder in resources too. An F1® team or airline has immediate, direct visibility of its competitive position. A resources company has a much harder time getting clean, comparable peer data — even though, ironically, it often has far more raw data to work with. An F1® team runs two cars, with maybe twenty comparable cars across the whole grid; a single large resources company can operate more than 300 units of the same haul truck model across its sites. On sheer data volume, resources sits closer to the airline OEM world, which is well placed to benefit from large-dataset statistical analysis.

Finally, F1® and aerospace maintenance work is tightly standardised — a two-second pit stop is only possible because variability has been engineered out of the process. Resources maintenance work is less rigidly standardised, and the variation that results both degrades reliability and makes benchmarking harder.

What resources can practically take from this

On a mid-sized operation running around 30 trucks plus supporting dozers and excavators, unoptimised reliability can waste a meaningful share of the maintenance budget every year — standardising process alone can materially reduce that variation. Installing F1®-style sensors and barcodes on every part isn't economical or necessary given the difference in downtime cost between industries. But the transactional data already connecting frontline maintainers to reliability engineers can be improved significantly, and the improvement pays off quickly.

An independent, third-party reliability platform like IronMan® can bring the same discipline resources companies are trying to reach — from frontline data quality through to optimised maintenance strategies and master data — without requiring F1®-level instrumentation to get there.

Where these lessons come from

OXMT was founded by engineers with direct backgrounds in F1®, aerospace and resources — the same cross-industry mix that shapes the comparisons in this piece. You can read more about that team and its background on our About Us page.