What do high-performing teams need in the real world?

I recently watched one of those skits on the Amazon show The Grand Tour (S3 E11) which surprised me with its rather sensible conclusion. The loveable presenters each had a luxury performance car and were competing against a professional racing driver in a rusty aged saloon across 50 miles of "real life" roads: intraurban traffic, motorway, rural roads and finishing in a medieval town centre with cobbled streets. The conclusion was that all cars in the real world go at the same speed because how fast they go is dictated by external factors, not the car itself.

This is a great analogy for how the pace of a potentially-high performance team is often limited by environmental factors within an organisation and they end up performing broadly the same as any other team.

The cars in the urban and rural environments couldn't pick much speed because of factors such as pedestrian crossings and farm animals on the road respectively; overtaking other cars was virtually impossible in both cases. In organizations where all teams must compete for the same resources (my new team member needs a laptop...) and services (...and they need IT's help in getting started) the potentially high-performance team will wait just a long as everyone else.

Even on the motorway, the cars all went at the same speed because there were speed cameras every 100 metres. This put me in mind of agile teams slowed due to the enforcement of traditional governance policies.

Interestingly, when the race concluded in the medieval town, the experienced racing driver in the ordinary car had a distinct advantage: they could pick up pace, not getting jackknifed on the awkward changes in level, not caring about the occasional ding when clipping corners. This reminded me how an organization's "people assets" are most valuable because they know how to get things done in the existing environment, usually by having a network of useful people. How often do we see newly-formed teams of expensive contractors with so much potential fail to make progress because they don't have anyone to tell them how to effectively navigate the organization?

What changes need to be made to a team's environment to allow them to be high performing in the "real world"?