Formula 1 careers are rarely tidy, but few illustrate the sport’s capacity for chaos quite like the seven days Otmar Szafnauer spent in the early 2000s, a stretch in which he resigned from one team, was fired from another team before his first day, negotiating his own severance from an office he’d visit exactly once, and then started an entirely new job at a third team a week later.
Szafnauer’s route into F1 was already an improbable one by the time any of this happened.
Born in a Romanian village without running water, he emigrated to Michigan as a child, worked his way through an engineering degree, and spent his twenties racing Formula Fords and Formula Mazdas on a privateer’s budget before Ford put him to work developing concept vehicles.
It was there that he struck up a relationship with Adrian Reynard, who in 1997 asked him to help build a new F1 team from scratch – British American Racing – funded by British American Tobacco.
Szafnauer said yes on the spot, and by 1999, the man from Semlac was operations director of a grand prix team.
It began with an offer that looked, on paper, like a natural step up.
Szafnauer with Mario Theissen (BMW) and Norbert Haug (Mercedes) on the grid before the 2004 Hungarian Grand Prix
Grand Prix Photo
Szafnauer had spent several solid years as operations director at British American Racing, where the team had climbed to a respectable joint-fourth in the 2000 constructors’ championship.
Then came a call from Bobby Rahal, who was running the Jaguar F1 team while also trying to manage his own IndyCar operation from the other side of the Atlantic.
“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,” Szafnauer recalls in an interview with Motor Sport‘s Matt Bishop.
“It seemed like a good move into a senior and stable position, so I said yes.”
That stability lasted less than a week.
“I handed in my notice at BAR in the usual way,” he says. “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.’”
Rahal had been ousted, and with him went the job Szafnauer had already quit BAR to take. What followed was less a career move than damage control.
“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,” Szafnauer adds.
He allows himself a characteristically dry postscript: “It worked out OK.”
It worked out better than OK, in fact, because the phone rang again almost immediately – this time from Honda, which had just agreed to buy BAR outright and wanted someone inside the deal who understood both sides of it.
“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,” he says.
“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.”
