An F1-designed submarine? Why GP teams are getting involved in bikes, boats & electric racers

It’s not that McLaren wasn’t already looking at different racing categories it wanted to be involved in – as CEO Zak Brown was always clear that he wanted to enter IndyCar and has also been considering the World Endurance Championship (WEC) alongside the likes of Extreme E and Formula E – but the reasoning was always if it didn’t distract from the F1 programme. Instead, there’s now a way it can help it.

There are limitations on what teams can spend from a capital expenditure (cap ex) point of view under F1’s budget cap, and so each investment made in facilities needs to be really worth it rather than just providing small gains. Or it could be spread across multiple projects…

“With some of the limitations you have on equipment and cap ex it’s hard to justify some items where it’s exclusively for one series,” Brown said on Monday. “So to be able to go ‘we are able to buy that and use it across three or four different series’ then that makes some of the cap ex more justifiable.

“But from a people standpoint we’ve already done all that work. We’re right-sized in Formula 1 now for the size of Formula 1, so there’s no crossover in that sense.”

Brown’s not alone in stating people aren’t moving, despite salaries making up a decent proportion of an F1 team’s budget now it is limited. Ferrari is working on a Hypercar entry for WEC but Antonello Coletta – the Head of Ferrari Attivita Sportive GT which runs the sports car programme – said at Le Mans there was no movement of personnel there either.

“[There’s been] no big recruitment because honestly I prefer to grow with a little number; if you grow a lot you lose the control of the staff,” Coletta said. “This is the philosophy of Ferrari. Honestly, we are not many many people, but just the people who work very well. It’s easier to control the process.

“Zero [have come from Ferrari’s F1 team] because our team is our team. We share knowledge but it is a completely different attitude.”

That’s not the case everywhere, though. A day after McLaren’s announcement, it was off to Milton Keynes to hear about a new Red Bull project. While Christian Horner and Adrian Newey sat among all of the team’s Formula 1 cars from the past, the creation of RB17 might carry F1 naming but is actually a track-going hypercar, the first that the company will make exclusively.

Designed to be close to F1 performance and quicker than the Valkyrie that Red Bull partnered with Aston Martin on, the big step being made by Red Bull Advanced Technologies has been facilitated – or enforced depending on your point of view – by the impact of the budget cap on one of the sport’s biggest-spending teams.

And Horner admits, that in this case it has led to the movement of personnel away from the grand prix team.

“It’s interesting because our staff are our biggest asset, and of course with the advent of the financial regulations, whilst Advanced Technologies has existed since 2014 and has been growing and developing in its own right, what it has enabled us to do is to re-home staff that otherwise would have been lost to the business but that are incredibly capable,” Horner said.

“So it has enabled us to retain that talent within the group. I think it has enabled us to bring in new talent and develop talent as well. On the campus here … it’s not just purely centric to Formula 1. Obviously Formula 1 dominates what we do but out of that comes more and more other activities and with the advent of Powertrains coming online as well.

“And of course through these Advanced Technologies activities we’re doing a car; we’re working in collaboration with BMC on bikes; we’re heavily involved the Alinghi team in Americas Cup; we’re designing a submarine for up to three to four passengers; so we’ve got many different projects going on within Advanced Technology. So with that variance as well, being able to retain and attract talent has been incredibly important to us.”

It might be the bigger teams that have had to make changes when it comes to its staff numbers in some areas, but as F1 becomes more profitable and the revenues grow, income can be used in different areas on other money-making projects.

At £5m before VAT, the Red Bull RB17 is certainly designed to be that, but as McLaren has shown that could also be another racing category that can produce an added benefit to the F1 set-up.

It’s not a situation that requires immediate attention by all teams on the grid, but as the budget cap situation becomes more familiar we could well be moving further away from the era of an F1 team simply going racing in F1 and nothing else.