Two professional faces

Tina looks like a woman that has been blessed with a great and diverse life. Although her family weren’t fans of the choice to become a ”world-class rally co-driver”, they were always understanding and supportive. After 20 years living and working inside the sport, Tina decided to do something else – to challenge herself and switch to a new career. She invested time, training and education in becoming a solid businesswoman. Today she works as a motivational speaker, coach for management, sport leadership. We decided to ask Tina Thörner, owner of Tina Thörner Consulting GmbH, to tell us more about the interesting sides of her professional life.

New generations

We need to include the younger generations into the future world of high-end motorsport, and I might just have a plan for that. With “Your Academy” and several other projects that me, my team and partners are working on at the moment, we’re hoping to find new ways to make motor racing interesting for the new fans. Unfortunately, I can’t reveal more about it at the moment.

I have written two books and the first one was to support and motivate young students to learn to read, using motorsport and exciting stories from around the world. It has been a success, especially for young boys, so now we’re looking into doing a digital version of it. The second book was my story of the 20 years I’ve spent in motorsport. It’s a fluent mixture of good, challenging, exciting and really bad experiences of my professional life in racing. No limiters, it’s all straight-from-the-heart material. It has been fun writing and publishing it, I have received a lot of positive feedback and the book, thankfully, has promoted the sport outside the normal motorsport environment.

Now, more than ever before, we need to be able to ”zoom out”

Productivity

A person should be able to be in charge of his own brain, and it’s not an easy task – mental training and understanding our connection within ourselves is what makes our thoughts. Now, more than ever before, we need to be able to ”zoom out” – ask the question ”is this suitable in our world of today and will this help and support the next generation to have life quality in their lives”? Many decisions that leaders all over the world make are focused around ”me and myself during my time on earth” – this is in no way productive for the future folk. So the recipe from my side is: invest in knowledge and learning related to mental training. Also, give courses away as gifts for Christmas or birthdays to the young ones – they’ll pay you back, I promise. All very successful athletes are using this strategy.

Motor racing is moving towards other sources of fuel, so we have to come a long way if we want these sports to survive. To attract more viewers, Formula 1 needs to move into the social and digital channels that the youngsters use – that’s obvious. But most of all, the car manufacturers need to start thinking about ”new roads” to get the younger generations interested in buying cars in general. We are entering a new social-digital-urban way of living and this means that pretty soon you won’t be able to live based on “old results”. I hope we, the motorsport community, can do something about this. My partners and I are surely working hard on that.