By Joe Murphy
It’s official, no team boss is safe. While the revolving door for Team Principals is not uncommon in Formula 1, proven by Otmar Szafnauer’s switch from Aston Martin to Alpine last year, the fact that four teams are going to have new team bosses next season is unprecedented.
It’s been a bonkers few weeks in motorsport, seemingly started off with Ferrari confirming a new team principal in Fred Vasseur. This news was almost immediately overshadowed by the shock of McLaren losing Andreas Seidl and opting for Andrea Stella instead.
While the recent changes at Ferrari, Alfa Romeo, McLaren and Williams are all the consequence of slightly different circumstances, there is one common theme that draws them together: it appears as if in F1’s cost cap era, the pressure is on the team boss like never before. There was a time, even as recent as a few years ago, when one of the key roles of the team principals was to go to the company board, or parent car manufacturer, and try to extract the funding needed to get the final details right.
And, if the desire was to move up the grid, turn around a potential decline, or address getting a car concept wrong, then the best way to get things sorted was to ask for more money or increased sponsorship to be found so that a team could buy its way to improved results.
However, those days are long gone now though. With the budget cap in place, Formula 1 is no longer a spending competition where faults can be covered up with extra cash. Ferrari know this arguably more than any other team right now. The priority now is being effective, efficient and disciplined, whilst at the same time having a proper plan in place that utilises a collective intelligence of the team members.
No team has an unlimited budget, which not only creates equality across the grid’s constructors but there is also no longer the means to hide behind the excuse that rivals are only doing better because they have got bigger budgets. Ultimately, if you’re team fails, the principal gets it in the neck. In modern F1, team principals have more responsibility than ever for whether or not ambitions on track have been achieved. In the case of Capito, Williams had not delivered on the progress that owner Dorilton Capital had anticipated under F1’s new rules era. Therefore, the decision had to be made not to continue their partnership.
For Mattia Binotto, his resignation came after Ferrari chairman John Elkann and CEO Benedetto Vigna lost faith in him. In summary, they believed that Maranello had not delivered all that it should have been capable of during the 2022 campaign, even if the team did finish second in both drivers and constructors standings. Ferrari going for Vasseur wasn’t a surprise, and neither was Sauber luring Seidl as its new CEO.
Performance these days does not come from bringing a front wing upgrade at every race, whatever Formula 1 manager may lead you to believe. On the contrary, the money is simply not there under the limited budget to allow that to be the case. Instead, progress is about doing better in areas where progress effectively must come without cost.
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