Mark Hughes: Firing an F1 team boss won’t suddenly bring success

When Gene Haas opted not to renew the contract of his team principal Guenther Steiner just before New Year, it made Mike Krack – who joined Aston Martin in 2022 – the third longest-serving team principal in Formula 1! Only Christian Horner and Toto Wolff are ahead of him, emphasising the extraordinarily rapid turnover of team bosses in recent years.

A number of factors have driven it. But fundamentally it’s about F1 readjusting to the new post-Covid, Netflix-based, cost-capped landscape. How so? First, here’s a recap of the recent changes.

Franz Tost has retired, replaced at the former AlphaTauri team by Laurent Mekies. Ferrari being Ferrari – hugely pressured if doing anything less than winning titles but controlled by an autonomous parent group – tends to have a high turnover of bosses regardless of era and Mattia Binotto didn’t survive the churn. Which led to Frédéric Vasseur departing Sauber to replace him. This left a vacancy at Sauber, which will soon become Audi, leading Audi to recruit Andreas Seidl. Which in turn left McLaren needing a new team principal, and it solved this by promoting Andrea Stella a year ago.

Around that time there was a genuine falling out between Williams owners Dorilton and its original nomination of team principal Jost Capito, partly connected to the dismissal of the Capito-recruited marketing executive Claudia Schwarz and her subsequent £80m lawsuit against the team. Capito was replaced as team boss by the former Mercedes strategy chief James Vowles.

Otmar Szafnauer [who is interviewed elsewhere in this issue] has been fired twice in the last two years – once from Aston Martin (where he was replaced by the aforementioned Krack) and once from Alpine in the latter part of last season. It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly what Szafnauer had done wrong at either team other than not immediately meeting the aspirations of the respective owners for quick success.

“Ron Dennis, one of the great bosses, presided over many fallow years”

It used to be that the owners were also the team bosses so there wasn’t this churn. Sir Ron Dennis (he was knighted in the New Year Honours list), one of the greatest team bosses of all time, presided over many fallow McLaren years. It was part of the fascination of the sport to see how he would rebuild it over the years. Any suggestion that he would be fired because of those interim years would have been ridiculous.

The Covid pandemic (F1 became the only global sport to watch in 2020) and Netflix’s Drive to Survive series combined to massively boost F1’s commercial value. With the franchise business model introduced by F1’s owners Liberty Media, team values increased accordingly. Concurrently, the cost cap has placed an upper limit on just how much performance a big team could buy over a medium or small one. Opportunity was in the air, so it seemed, for those smaller teams as F1 was potentially set for a more equal playing field with no financial concerns for any of the participants and a solid ceiling of expenditure for the top ones.

The competitiveness of the grid has compressed, it’s true, as the following average qualifying performances confirm:

2014	2017	2023
Gap between fastest and slowest
4.4sec	3.4sec	1.3sec
Gap between fastest and second-fastest
1.8sec	0.3sec	0.15sec

 

There are, of course, other factors at play here, principally the big Mercedes power unit advantage at the start of the hybrid era in 2014. But it’s not just that. The deficit of the second-fastest car then would see you trailing the back of the field by 0.5sec per lap today. The performance spread has compressed hugely and the cost cap and franchise model have played a major part in that.

“We have a P9 car,” says Sauber’s technical director James Key, “and a few years ago if you looked at the overlay between a P1 car and a P9 car over the lap, the line would just rocket off the chart. Now, it’s hardly anything. In fact there are some corners where we are actually quicker than the Red Bull. But we’re still a P9 car.”

The best teams are still the best teams, with the best collection of talent and resource. Furthermore, those who could afford to invested heavily in capital expenditure before the cost cap applied, making them even better-resourced. So although the performance gaps have shrunk, the order has remained very similar.

No smaller team has broken through (although the sleeping giant McLaren has latterly shown some signs of doing so). The competitive cycles – how long it takes to turn a competitive deficit into an advantage – are as long as they have ever been. It takes years. It’s almost irrelevant that the deficits are smaller.

Perhaps some team owners impatient for success – especially when it seems so tantalisingly doable in theory – haven’t fully grasped that fact and so with a soccer club mentality have fired the boss. As that’s where the buck stops. But it’s really not that simple.

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Since he began covering grand prix racing in 2000, Mark Hughes has forged a reputation as the finest Formula 1 analyst of his generation
Follow Mark on Twitter @SportmphMark