In Formula 1 the optimal way to go racing is — and always will be — the one that wins. This season it is McLaren’s approach that is yielding results: with two leading drivers battling for the individual title, and a constructors’ crown that may as well already be in transit to Woking to sit alongside last year’s.
But it is not only their driver line-up that contributes to a winning formula; their secret is the relationship between the chief executive, Zak Brown, and the team principal, Andrea Stella. It is the model that many other teams down the grid are now adopting, devolving power away from one all-encompassing figure.
There are very few of those left, in the traditional sense at least. Toto Wolff is the team principal, chief executive and co-owner of Mercedes. He is ultimately in control of all elements of the business, but delegates to those who can manage them day to day.
F1 chiefs with the scope Wolff has at Mercedes are a dying breed
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Teams have grown from about 300 staff members two decades ago to approximately 1,000 in the modern era. Each team has a slightly different model, but McLaren leave Stella, who was a performance engineer for Michael Schumacher during his time at Ferrari, to manage the F1 team, while Brown has overall responsibility for the McLaren business — including other race categories, strategic direction, operational performance, marketing and commercial development.
As Brown recently explained in The Sunday Times, he does not understand the finer technical details of the engineering that can shave 1/100th of a second off a lap time but he likes to ask: “Do you need more equipment? How’s your headcount? Everything good?”
Christian Horner was sacked as Red Bull’s team principal and chief executive in July, partly because of poor performance but also “other things”, as Helmut Marko, the Red Bull special adviser, described it.
One of those is understood to be the amount of control Horner had over an array of Red Bull entities, far beyond the race team. Essentially he filled the roles of both Stella and Brown, while Pierre Waché, the technical director, provided the engineering expertise.
In an interview with ORF in Belgium last week, Marko said: “The scope of Horner’s responsibilities . . . he controlled everything and was involved in every detail. Naturally, that created areas where performance suffered. That’s why the focus now is on having a trained engineer in this position, with a strong emphasis on the race team.”
Mekies, Horner’s successor, has been vague about his specific responsibilities at Red Bull
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Marko said the long-term plan is to divide Horner’s former duties among several people. Laurent Mekies, his replacement as chief executive and team principal, has avoided outlining his responsibilities, saying it is “a bit early to talk about structure” when asked last week. It is likely to become clearer in the coming months, when the dust has settled.
Fundamentally, F1 remains a people business and utilising them is more important than ever now that the sheer scale of teams has increased.
“We call it the ‘hidden lap time’,’’ Mekies said. “It’s not a lap time that will appear on your wind-tunnel tracker or engine-power tracker, but it’s how much your people are engaged, how much they are motivated, how much they trust each other, how much they help each other.
“That’s where you can and have to make a difference. The difference between having everyone at 100 per cent or not sometimes outweighs one innovation or another.”
Teams are increasingly using a split method to achieve this. Sauber have Jonathan Wheatley as team principal, and he is predominantly track focused while Mattia Binotto, who is head of the Audi F1 (who have taken over Sauber) project, is more factory based. Fred Vasseur is the Ferrari team principal, operating under Benedetto Vigna, the chief executive.
Who’s who of team bossesMcLaren Zak Brown (CEO) & Andrea Stella (team principal) Ferrari Benedetto Vigna (CEO), Fred Vasseur (team principal) Mercedes Toto Wolff (CEO, team principal and co-owner) Red Bull Laurent Mekies (CEO & team principal)Williams James Vowles (team principal) & boardKick Sauber Mattia Binotto (head of the Audi F1 team project, chief operating and chief technical officer) & Jonathan Wheatley (team principal) Racing Bulls Peter Bayer (CEO) & Alan Permane (team principal) Aston Martin Andy Cowell (CEO & team principal) Haas Ayao Komatsu (team principal) Gene Haas (founder & owner)Alpine Flavio Briatore (executive adviser) & Steve Nielsen (managing director from September 1)
Aston Martin are, in some ways, going against the grain. While Andy Cowell has an engineering background, specialising in power units as managing director of the dominant Mercedes engine department from 2013, he has taken on both the team principal and chief executive roles at Aston Martin.
Their model previously involved a team principal, Mike Krack, and a chief executive, Martin Whitmarsh. Lawrence Stroll, the part-owner and executive chairman, thought that created too much crossover. Ultimately, one man needed to be responsible for the crucial decisions and Cowell was appointed.
Stroll does weekly factory visits so, in comparison with other teams, the reporting structure is fairly straightforward, something Adrian Newey remarked upon when joining as managing technical partner last year.
“If you go back 20 years, what we now call team principals are actually the owners of the teams — Frank Williams, Ron Dennis, Eddie Jordan,” he said. “In this modern era Lawrence is actually unique, being the only properly active team owner, and that does bring a different feeling. It’s back to the old-school model.”
The days of active and omnipotent team owners like Frank Williams have largely passed
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Cowell has compared the running of a modern F1 team to a large-scale relay race: “It is like watching 100 people all run 100m in sub-ten seconds, with perfect baton passes.”
That is where Haas have found that the appointment of Ayao Komatsu has paid off. As one source explained, Komatsu had a bank of experience from his spell managing the engineering department. When he then stepped up to team principal from Guenther Steiner, he was able to use that knowledge to make changes to the communication and efficiency of the organisation. He made Haas a better-organised team, which directly translated to on-track lap times.
So this is the so-called era of the engineer team principal. In the short-term that perhaps means less of the big characters that fill Netflix screens and were a hallmark of the sport of the past.
McLaren have the perfect balance: Stella as the astute and savvy team principal, unshackled by the demands of commercial and wider business commitments that Brown is able to manage deftly. He even has the time to occasionally prod his rivals.