Excited by a luxury fast car experience…sort of?

Will this week see two people fired?

It was week eight of the UK’s BBC tv series The Apprentice which is currently my weekly guilty pleasure.

This week the teams were given the task of organising a luxury corporate team building experience based at one of the UK’s leading racing track Silverstone. They had to sell it at the highest ticket price they could to one corporate client each and the team which made the most profit would win. However each corporate team could ask for a refund if they felt the experience wasn’t up to scratch.

In this task it was clear that they could select experiences from a folder provided by the BBC production team. And for me, it was very obvious from the start that if you were going to go to Silverstone there is one thing you would want to do — have a ride in a fast car on the race track. For me this was the most basic and central experience. Could this be the gem which would steal the show for the winning team? No, it wasn’t. Shows what I know…

Regardless, Stephanie Affleck put herself forward as project manager alongside Brittany — and Stephanie, with her first class honours degree — went on to show that highest academic achievement does not always equate to basic common sense.

On the other team, Harpreet Kaur put herself forward and was chosen and — once again — even though she was super bossy (described as being worse than Gordon Ramsey in the kitchen) one had the sense that she was getting the job done. And it soon became pretty clear that she was.

Stephanie and her team came up with a few experiences for their corporate team — a museum visit, a luxury lunch, a fast car experience on the track and a ‘pretend’ moment on the podium. On the face of it this day looked the most promising.

For Harpreet’s team it was all about a tour of Silverstone, a pit stop experience where the team members got to try their hand at a tyre change, a luxury lunch and a VR experience. The latter though was actually not VR at all, it was a series of simulations which looked very similar to games at an arcade. Also no opportunity to get in a car on the circuit — for me this seemed like a huge oversight. What do I know?…

Both teams went in hard to negotiate delegate costs of £600 to £750 for the day per person. Even for…