There are certain people in Formula 1 who arrive in the paddock through the front door, carrying with them polished CVs, silver-spoon assumptions, inherited contacts and accents that sound as though they were educated at Eton while simultaneously being dry-cleaned at Harrods. And then there is Otmar Szafnauer.

Otmar came from somewhere else entirely. Not merely geographically – although geographically too, emphatically so – but culturally, psychologically and existentially. F1 is and always has been a world built on improbable ambition, but even by its standards Szafnauer’s story feels almost fantastical: a little Romanian boy from a village without running water eventually becoming the leader of grand prix teams capable of giant-killing.

“You’re absolutely right,” he says when I suggest that rural Romania is not the likeliest cradle for a future F1 team principal, “and, although I don’t know exactly how many team principals we’ve had in F1 history, I do know that there have been only two of us from Romania: me and Colin Kolles [who held that position for the Hispania F1 team in 2011 and 2012]. But hopefully that’s where the similarities between us end.”

The line lands exactly as intended: dry, sharp and mischievous. Those who know Szafnauer well understand that beneath the calm managerial exterior is a man with a highly developed sense of irony and a memory capable of storing every political slight, every organisational inefficiency, every engineering misstep and every dramatic absurdity that the sport has thrown at him.

But before all that there was Semlac (do not worry: I will explain). “I left Romania when I was eight,” he says, smiling expansively. “We lived in a house that didn’t have running water, but that didn’t really matter to me because I was just a kid. I didn’t have a television growing up either, but my cousin did, so, because Saturday morning was always cartoon time on TV in Romania – American cartoons – I’d go to my cousin’s house to watch them on Saturday mornings.”

“I went back to work for Ford on the Monday with two trophies”

Already, listening to him, one begins to understand something important about Szafnauer: his worldview was forged not in entitlement but in adaptation. He has spent his life solving problems because life itself initially presented one enormous logistical complication. “I was OK with what now seems like deprivation because it was all I knew. But for my parents life was hard, because there was oppression from the government, led by Nicolae Ceauşescu. You didn’t have normal freedoms or basic human rights, and you didn’t have the economic scope to prosper and make yourself and your family better off. But as an eight-year-old you don’t understand how difficult that kind of thing is, because you spend your days going to school then coming home and kicking a soccer ball around with your mates.”

There is no self-pity in any of this. Szafnauer narrates hardship the way an F1 engineer might discuss understeer: as a variable to be understood, managed and overcome. “We lived in a rural area, in a small village in the Semlac commune of western Romania. We grew our own vegetables and we kept our own chickens and pigs. People in our village didn’t need grocery stores, so as a kid I didn’t feel the economic plight that urban Romanians felt when the grocery stores in towns and cities had no food in them. Instead we went into our gardens and picked potatoes, cucumbers and tomatoes that we’d grown ourselves. Every fourth or fifth household had a cow, and as a four-year-old I remember, every night, having to walk over with our little jug to get fresh cow’s milk from the neighbours who lived a few doors down. It would be really, really dark because there were no outdoor lights. My dad used to say to me, ‘Don’t worry about walking in the dark, because the moon will walk with you.’ And it always did.”

That last sentence lingers. It is lyrical without trying to be. Little Otmar’s father could never have imagined that his son would one day spend his evenings negotiating multi-million-dollar contracts with megastar F1 drivers in suites in five-star Monte Carlo hotels, having spent the previous afternoons arguing about aerodynamic set-ups with expensively educated Englishmen who had studied for PhDs at Oxford and Cambridge. Yet it happened, for Szafnauer has uniquely traversed the unlikely journey between that moonlit Romanian alleyway and the Monaco paddock and pitwall.

How did it even begin? “I don’t know why – I’ll never know why – but a school in my village bought two go-karts, and they set up a little oval dirt track in the playground that the older kids would race around. I got to drive one of those go-karts when I was six years old, and that’s when it started. Also my dad, who worked for a railcar manufacturing company, was one of only two people in our village to have a car. Just Dad and the doctor had one – everyone else had a horse and cart. So, because we had a car and I was able to have a run in the school’s go-karts, I fell in love with all that.

“Then, when I was eight, we moved to Warren, Michigan, just outside Detroit. Now we had running water and a TV, and, when I was 10, my neighbour, also 10, told me that his dad [Jim Halloran] competed in Pro Stock NHRA drag races. My mate’s dad would bring his race car transporter home every once in a while – it would barely fit in their driveway – and that, too, was fascinating for me.”

Detroit in the early 1970s was effectively the Vatican of internal combustion and Szafnauer absorbed it all. “Every birthday I’d say to my parents, ‘I want a go-kart.’ But every birthday I got a soccer ball, a basketball, or a baseball glove instead. I never got a go-kart because they couldn’t afford one.” Again: no bitterness; merely fact.

“The most significant difference between Ford and Honda was that the Honda guys were racers”

A remarkable aspect of ambitious people is that delayed dreams tend to ferment rather than fade. Hard graft almost always plays its part, too, and Szafnauer eventually found his route into racing not through privilege but via financial discipline and determination. “I graduated from university with an engineering degree at the age of 21, and I started working for the Ford Motor Company when I was 22. I was still living at home. I was saving 95% of my net earnings and I duly saved enough to go to the Jim Russell Racing Drivers’ School at Laguna Seca in California. In 1989 I got my racing licence. I then did a couple of Formula Ford races, and a few Formula Mazda races as well, then I decided to buy a race car of my own so that I could race more consistently and more often.”

What followed were the classic requirements of grassroots motor sport: ingenuity, hustle and endless toil. “I was in luck because at that time there was a racing series in Canada for Formula Ford 2000 cars, which was called Esso Protec because it was sponsored by Esso Protec [engine oil], but it was disbanded. When it was disbanded all the guys who had been racing in it went to race somewhere else, so they all needed to sell their Esso Protec cars, and I bought a Reynard Esso Protec car from a guy in Montreal called Stéphane Proulx, a gay guy, very fast, who’d moved up to French Formula 3. Sadly he died of HIV/AIDS in 1993, aged just 27.”

Szafnauer pauses solemnly when mentioning Proulx. Motor sport careers are often littered with such ghosts. “Anyway,” he goes on finally, “I bought Stéphane’s Reynard, and my first two races in it were at a road course, Nelson Ledges, in Garrettsville, Ohio. It’s a great story actually.”

It really is. “I needed an SCCA [Sports Car Club of America] licence, for which you had to do two race weekends plus a lot of classroom work, so that they could teach you the rules, the flags, the racing etiquette, all that. After the first class I did at Nelson Ledges they had a 15-lap race, I won it, and I lapped the field. Afterwards the officials said, ‘You know what? We’re going to give you your SCCA licence after only one weekend, you don’t have to do the second weekend. There’s an SCCA regional race here tomorrow and you’re welcome to race in it.’ Well, I did, and I won that, too. So I went back to work for Ford on the Monday with two trophies in my bag, because I’d won two races.”

You can almost picture the young man’s grin – indeed, sitting in front of me, the middle-aged man is grinning now. “I thought to myself, ‘I’m going to be F1 world champion,’ but obviously that was naive. Anyway the next step was SCCA national races, and after that was USF2000. But the farther up I moved, the harder it became. First, the competition became much more intense. When I was racing USF2000, kids were coming over from the UK, boys who’d won in Formula Ford in the UK. I was in my mid or late-twenties, they were 17 or 18, and they’d been karting forever. So they were really good.

“And, second, there was a fresh car development in USF2000 every year. The Van Diemen was the dominant car, so, if you wanted to do well, you had to have a Van Diemen, and every year they developed and improved it. So my old Reynard got slower and slower relative to the Van Diemen every year. I was getting better, but my car was getting worse, and the result was that I was always in the midfield.”

What matters here – and it matters a lot – is not that Szafnauer did not become a racing star. What matters is what he learned by not becoming one. “That frustrating pattern continued to be the case every year until 1995, by which time I was in my early thirties, when I rented a Van Diemen for a race at Indianapolis Raceway Park the night before the Indy 500. I wanted to see how good I really was versus the handicap of my ageing equipment, so to speak. I qualified quite well, seventh out of 44, but in the race I crashed. I understeered into the wall. I didn’t hit it hard, but I hit it hard enough to the extent that I couldn’t afford the spares to fix it.” That, in a few unsentimental sentences, is privateer motor sport distilled to its purest essence.

“I was annoyed with myself, so I drove home instead of staying to watch the Indy 500 the next day, which is what I’d been planning to do, and I missed seeing Jacques Villeneuve winning it in a Reynard. I’d like to have seen that actually.” Now comes a line that illustrates how he later became such an effective F1 operator: “That was it for me as far as racing cars was concerned. But, you know, I learned so much in those five years of owning, running and racing for my own little team, and the lessons I learned have been useful to me throughout my career ever since.”

Indeed they have – because F1, despite its opulence, is fundamentally a resource-allocation contest, and no one understands the allocation of resources quite like someone who once could not afford the spare parts to repair his own crashed race car.

Even so, Szafnauer’s route into F1 was delightfully improbable. “Here I was, racing in North America, in a Reynard, when Adrian Reynard decided to go IndyCar racing at the same time. So I called the Reynard offices in Indianapolis in an effort to buy spare parts for my Reynard race car, because I figured it would be cheaper than importing them from the UK, but they never answered my calls. I then ran into Adrian at an IndyCar race somewhere, and I said, ‘Adrian, I race a USF2000 Reynard. I want to buy spares from you, in North America, so that I don’t have to pay so much.’ And that’s really how our relationship started.

“But our relationship quickly developed further because I’d been tasked by Ford to come up with a few new concepts under the umbrella of sports and performance. My first concept was a hot version of the Ford Explorer, which Ford never pursued, but was ahead of its time, because almost every manufacturer sells sports and performance SUVs nowadays; and the second was an IndyCar for the road with an IndyCar-style carbon tub and IndyCar-style pushrod suspension.”

He is grinning again – and now, suddenly, I glimpse the engineer-dreamer within him. “We called it the Indigo, and it was fantastic. It had a stressed mid-mounted 6-litre V12 and a stressed sequential gearbox, and I’d lined up Reynard to build 150 of them per year. Ford never pursued that either though, sadly.”

Relationships matter in Formula 1 perhaps more than in any other sport – for although F1 is big, the paddock is small. Moreover, reputations travel at fibre-optic speed, and Szafnauer’s big break is an example of exactly that. “Not long afterwards, Adrian said to me, ‘Otmar, we’re starting an F1 team from scratch, called British American Racing [later truncated to BAR]. British American Tobacco are going to fund it, and we’re going to need to hire hundreds of people for it. Are you willing to leave Ford to come and work with us as our operations director?’ I said yes, and I quit Ford straight away.”

And just like that, the little boy from Semlac was in F1. “We did the deal in 1997, and I duly started in 1998 at British American Racing as operations director, based in Brackley, in the UK, readying the team for its debut in 1999.”

“We never had a lot of money at Force India. But we finished fourth in the constructors’ championship”

Those BAR years were risibly ambitious at first, then chaotic, then combustible and therefore quintessentially late-1990s F1 – yet, despite all that, Szafnauer successfully avoided most of the political crossfire. “I did that for a few years – difficult years because starting a new F1 team from scratch is always hard – but in 2000 we finished joint fourth in the F1 World Constructors’ Championship, tied on points with Benetton, which was encouraging. But, also in 2000, I was approached by Bobby Rahal, who was running the Jaguar F1 team, based in Milton Keynes, to be his number two, because he was trying to combine running the Jaguar F1 team with running his own IndyCar team and he was spending almost his whole life on long-haul flights, which was unsustainable. It seemed like a good move into a senior and stable position, so I said yes.”

But, F1 being F1, that apparently senior stability lasted approximately five minutes. “I handed in my notice at BAR in the usual way. Then, on the Friday before the Monday on which I was due to start at Jaguar, I got a phone call from a PA in Niki Lauda’s office saying, ‘Sorry, we’ve just fired Bobby so we don’t need you to work for us any more.’”

“So, although I’d signed a three-year contract with Jaguar, the only time I ever set foot in what was going to be my office was to negotiate my way out of that contract, with as much compensation as I could persuade them to give me. It worked out OK.” That little coda – “It worked out OK” – is probably vintage Szafnauer understatement.

“Then, immediately after that, I was approached by Honda, because they’d already decided to buy BAR and they wanted someone on their side who knew how big car companies worked and also knew how BAR worked. Well, having worked for Ford and BAR, I fitted that bill perfectly. So just a week after I’d agreed my goodbye deal with Jaguar, I started work for Honda, again based in the UK.

“The most significant difference between Ford and Honda, to my mind at least, was that the Honda guys were out-and-out racers. They’d do absolutely anything for performance, and I really liked that.” He is grinning again, and I sense genuine admiration. “But fast-forward to now and Honda can’t do that in F1 because of the cost cap. But if they could, they still would.

“Back then they did though – and when they bought BAR, and they renamed it Honda Racing F1 Team, which competed in F1 between 2006 and 2008, they always did. We won the 2006 Hungarian Grand Prix, and by 2008 we had three wind tunnels running in tandem, two in the UK and one in Japan. Then the world was plunged into financial crisis at the end of 2008, Honda pulled out of F1, and the brilliant double-diffuser Honda car that we’d developed became the Brawn car that won the F1 World Championship with Jenson Button in 2009.”

Szafnauer did a good job at BAR and Honda, but if his reputation was forged anywhere, it was at Force India and later Racing Point. There, his skill set aligned perfectly with circumstance: limited resources, ambitious targets, endless political turbulence and a need for calm operational intelligence.

“Vijay Mallya, who owned Force India, had done a deal with [McLaren boss] Ron Dennis whereby Force India would pay McLaren for the use of McLaren technology – 32 days in the McLaren simulator, plus use of McLaren gearboxes, McLaren hydraulic systems, the McLaren rear impact substructure, two McLaren software packages [Morse and Marple], and McLaren’s manufacturing and assembly expert Simon Roberts on loan.

“But after a year Simon decided to go back to McLaren, so now Vijay was looking for a replacement. He asked Bernie [Ecclestone], whom I’d got to know really well after I left Honda. I founded Soft Pauer, and in 2009 we developed the F1 app for the iPhone. Bernie recommended me to Vijay, Vijay went ahead and hired me, and my first race with Force India was Brazil 2009.

“Do you remember that I told you I’d learned a hell of a lot when I was running and racing for my own team back in the States? Well, one of the things I’d learned was how to make every cent count. We never had a lot of money at Force India, not compared with the big teams which in that era [2008-2018] were McLaren, Ferrari, Red Bull and Mercedes, just as they are now. But, even so, we finished fourth in the constructors’ championship in 2016 and 2017, and we’d have finished fourth again in 2018 had we not run out of money and entered administration [owing to large debts accumulated by the team’s owners].

“It was a small team, but we were a great bunch with a fantastic esprit de corps. I look back on those 10 years at Force India and Racing Point [as the team was renamed in 2018] with a degree of pride – pride in the team. OK, we stumbled a bit when we went bankrupt in 2018, because Vijay got embroiled in legal and financial troubles in India, but until then we were probably the most efficiently successful F1 team on the grid, point for point, pound for pound.”

That phrase – “point for point, pound for pound” – captures the essence of the operation beautifully, and now Szafnauer leans back in his chair and says something genuinely insightful about leadership. “As an F1 team owner Vijay was hugely underrated. He loved racing, he went to most of the grands prix, but he hardly ever visited the factory. He knew how to delegate, which is the secret of good leadership and clever management, and he let us get on with the job. He was the absolute opposite of a micromanager. In that sense he was very like Dietrich Mateschitz, under whose ownership Red Bull was fantastically successful, but rather unlike Lawrence Stroll, under whose ownership Aston Martin has not yet proved to be quite so successful.” There speaks a man perfectly capable of delivering a velvet-gloved jab.