Takeover of the tech-heads: new trend in F1 team bosses

F1 team principals often used to be former racers who owned their squad, but the model is rapidly changing in favour of staff with engineering or management qualifications, writes Adam Cooper

James Vowles in front of computer monitor in Mercedes F1 pit garage

Mercedes' strategy guru James Vowles has moved to be team principal at Williams

DPPI

The appointment of James Vowles as Williams team principal reflects an intriguing recent trend in the sport, and as such perhaps it shouldn’t have been as much a surprise as it was.

More than ever before the current crop is predominantly comprised of guys with strong hands-on engineering or technical experience, rather than folk from the commercial or marketing side. The days of a Flavio Briatore figure calling the shots appear to be long gone.

Team principals have always been a mixed bag. Decades ago they were predominantly people who formed their own teams, and as such they had varied backgrounds. However former racing drivers, often guys who had enjoyed modest careers, were a common theme.

Over the years the F1 world has changed, and these days team principals are employees, chosen by owners for the skill sets they provide. The outlier is Toto Wolff, who has a substantial shareholding in Mercedes GP, but ultimately he is still answerable to Stuttgart.

Toto Wolff with Karl Wendlinger in 2004 race

A former racer (seen with Karl Wendlinger during 2004 FIA GT Championship) and team co-owner, Toto Wolff is now an exception

Jean Michel le Meur/DPPI

There are still former drivers in the current crop, most obviously Wolff and Christian Horner, who are also among the last bosses who don’t have formal qualifications of some sort. Their CVs contrast dramatically with that of Mattia Binotto, until last year the other boss of a top three team, whose background was in engines.

Franz Tost and Otmar Szafnauer also started their careers in the sport in the cockpit, albeit at a modest level. Both studied management before working their way towards team principal roles, although the American also had a degree in electrical engineering that gave him a technical background, albeit not within racing.

Fred Vasseur and Guenther Steiner both studied engineering, but the latter didn’t finish the course and worked his way up from a starting point as a rally mechanic.

The recent crop of team boss recruits has further reflected a move towards technical backgrounds. Andreas Seidl was an engineer with the BMW Sauber F1 team before honing his leadership and management skills with Porsche, while Mike Krack took a very similar path, gaining early F1 knowledge with the Hinwil team before broadening his experience in other categories.

Looking outside F1 and choosing Seidl represented bold thinking by Zak Brown and his McLaren colleagues, and the same could be said for when Lawrence Stroll and Martin Whitmarsh identified Mike Krack as their man. Both proved to be very capable, and Seidl has now returned to Sauber, where as overall boss of the organisation – above a yet to be named team principal – he is preparing the ground for Audi.

Looking further than F1 doesn’t always work. Jost Capito appeared to be a brilliant choice for Williams, given his wide-ranging experience across various disciplines, but ultimately his face didn’t fit. Alpine really went outside the box when it hired Suzuki MotoGP boss Davide Brivio in a key management position, albeit not in the team principal job, but the Italian struggled to make much of an impact, and slipped into a background role.

Davide Brivio, Suzuki MotoGP 2020

Davide Brivio was a bold F1 hire for Alpine but has faded into the background

Photo Studio Milagro / DPPI

The two most recent team principal hires are perhaps the most intriguing. Andrea Stella’s step up from McLaren executive director of racing to become the replacement for the departed Seidl is a rare case of promotion within a team, given that usually outsiders are hired in an effort to encourage change for the better.

The Italian is a highly qualified engineer, with a PhD, and having been in Woking since 2015 he’s fully immersed in every aspect of the team. However the McLaren case is a little different to some others in that as overall CEO Zak Brown carries the commercial and political responsibilities.

His background is in computation and mathematics, but strategy guru Vowles has done a lot of other stuff within the team, and has even had a go at racing himself. Nevertheless his move to Williams, never having had overall responsibility in a team or organisation in another category, represents an unusual step.

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So why are we seeing so many engineering or technical guys taking the top jobs? Has the skill set changed in recent years?

One obvious conclusion is that running a team has become such a complex operation, especially in the era of managing resources around the budget cap, that a deep understanding of the technical side is now a must.

“I think the common denominator is that some of the successful team principals have, and James absolutely fits into that, is [they are] over-ambitious and less talented racing drivers,” jokes Wolff when Motor Sport asks him about the trend. “James isn’t over that midlife crisis yet, he still tries!

“But I think coming back to your question, this is such in a way niche position, because you need to have the commercial understanding, the political perspectives, you mustn’t be fooled by what you’re being told by someone in the engineering and technical area. And [it helps if] you’ve been in a car. And I think James ticks many of these boxes.

“On the commercial side, he was very involved in many of the activities that we’ve done in the last few years. And basically, just before the last step was done, he came to me and said, ‘What do you think about that?’ And most often, we were very aligned. And I think the commercial side he absolutely understands.

“So even though James’s background is an engineering background, I would much more put him in my camp in terms of skills and not skills than let’s say a pure engineer.

“But having said that, it’s about the personality, you can have an engineering background and still be the right personality for team principal, or you can have a business or finance background, and also be able to contribute well to an organisation.”

James Vowles pours champagne over Lewis Hamilton

Vowles had been taking an increasingly central role at Mercedes

Ferenc Isza/AFP via Getty Images

Wolff has made it clear that he saw Vowles as his successor at Mercedes, and had gradually been diversifying his workload to help him gain experience in other areas. Thus Vowles could one day have mirrored Stella’s internal promotion. However with Wolff having no intention of stepping aside any time soon Vowles is moving to Williams to make full use of the knowledge he has gained.

“I think one of the successes in our team was planning succession,” says Wolff. “It’s clear that you can’t freeze a successful structure. You need to almost reinvent yourself whilst keeping what’s good. And with James, we always had a very open discussion, where the paths would lead him to.

“The strategy was his core activity, and then we kept adding responsibilities to his job. And some of that was already a team principal’s work. And therefore, in a way we knew that this is going to happen. It could have happened at Mercedes. And now it happened at another team.”

“James has been part of this journey of developing our culture. And certainly he’ll be able to translate that into Williams”

“There are many more pros in James leaving and becoming a team principal in Williams than negatives. From a personal side, obviously James will be missed. I’ve been working closely with him for many, many, many years. We were strong sparring partners when making the difficult calls in the race.

“And we almost never disagreed. James was flying the plane and I was trying to be that sounding partner. And that is definitely a loss from a personal standpoint, and from a professional standpoint of him being the chief strategist.

“But he’s bigger than a chief strategist, he will grow into this team principal role, and this is what he deserves. And you cannot stop someone that’s reaching out for the stars. You just need to embrace that.”

Wolff has always stressed that running a team is all about getting the best out of people, and having been a Brackley man for two decades Vowles played a key role in shaping the organisation. As such he’s developed relevant skills that will now be useful.

“Obviously when we started the journey the kind of prevailing philosophy was this is a race car,” says Wolff. “And a race car needs good aerodynamics, and a strong engine, and so on and so forth.

“But it was almost always neglected that a racing team is a group of people that have joined on a journey. And these people have hopes, dreams, objectives, anxieties, all of that. In Mercedes we’ve embedded a structure where it’s all around the person: we believe and we care.

“And we set up an organisation that demonstrates that every day, you can achieve extraordinary performance. The culture and the values are the immune system of any organisation. And this is where it needs to start. Everywhere, either in a conventional business, or in a racing team.”

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Wolff clearly believes that Vowles has what it takes: “James has been part of this journey of developing our culture, about setting objectives. And certainly he’ll be able to translate that into the Williams organisation.

“When I joined Williams in 2009 as an investor, and then in 2011-12 in a more active role, what I found is a good group of people there. Sometimes you only see the ones that are more at the senior levels, but I have no doubt that James within the organisation will discover talent, will discover committed and ambitious people.

“And if he embeds all of that within a positive mindset, a safe environment, a caring team principal, I think Williams can very much turn around and move forwards. It always starts at the top and then it needs to cascade into the organisation.”

It’s easy to speculate that Wolff has given Vowles his blessing on the basis that the younger man will one day return to Mercedes as a fully trained team boss, in much the same way that George Russell did his apprenticeship elsewhere. Inevitably Wolff downplays the suggestion.

“Never say never, because James is great. I hope that he’s going to have a long career as a team principal in Williams, and hopefully we will see him more often in the press conference after successful weekends. And if things go well there, he could, as I do now, have a 10-year stint there. And that’s why you just need to let the bird fly out…”