Opinion: Rodi Basso
The former Ferrari, Red Bull and Mclaren engineer on what he’s learned about successful teams, and what the famous Italian squad needs to do to get back on top
“A counterproductive blame culture was paralysing any attempt to change their destiny”
In the history of racing, Ferrari and Formula 1 have always appeared to be the two faces of the same medal. Their endeavours have inspired and changed many lives, including the life of this writer. It was a privilege to start my F1 career there (in 2000), where I learned the potential of a worldwide marketing, technology and business platform.
I was also incredibly lucky to start working in a company such as Ferrari where my eyes could appreciate and learn what human, strategic and operational excellence look like.
But it is not only a matter of tech and business. Before everything, F1 is a sport and an entertainment. For this important reason, a fairly balanced turnover of winners has to be guaranteed.
There are active and passive levers to change the destiny of a championship. The first lever is changing rules, and this is when regulators challenge the engineers and the drivers with new concepts and technical paradigms possibly aligned with the automotive road maps. The second lever refers to a natural evolution within the teams, where the right balance between leadership and domain knowledge can make the difference between drinking champagne on the podium or only an orange juice on the flight back home. Let’s get to the point. Ferrari’s last constructors’championship was back in 2008 under the helm of Stefano Domenicali. What is needed for the next title and when is it going to happen?
Back in 2000, I started working in a very successful team, but I was always reminded of the path to get to those successes by those who were there previously. They told fascinating stories and proudly showed the scars. The Ferrari of the early 1990s was completely lost (just ask Alain Prost). Then Jean Todt arrived, and I’ve been told that he spent a lot of time with the employees in the garages, workshop, production and all the functions of the team.
The Ferrari of those days was disjointed and divided in silos, with a counterproductive blame culture that was paralysing any attempt to change the direction of their destiny. Each department was trying to do the minimum, hide the risks and be as conservative as they could in order not to be the reason for a show-stopper.
Then, across 1996-97, Michael Schumacher, Ross Brawn and Rory Byrne came on board from Benetton. They spent the initial phase understanding the nuances of the Italian culture and then started the revolution by bringing in new racing people, coming up with solutions, and promoting a system view that has not only an engineering focus but also a human approach that acts as glue.
I will never forget when Ross asked us to picture the car in the middle of the meeting room and to make the effort to address two tasks. The first was to understand how each department could contribute to the lap time. If every department could take one tenth of a second off, this would result in a second of performance as you added up all the contributions.
The second challenge was to understand how each department could help fix the issues of the other components they were interfaced with. This has always sounded to me like the instructions you hear when you are in an aircraft before
take-off: in case of emergency, put the mask on you first and then you can see if you can be of any help to those around you.
This is leadership.
When I joined Red Bull in December 2005, it was in some ways a new team built from the legacy of the Jaguar squad. That was another chance to see with my own eyes what it takes to build a winning operation, and I can proudly show some interesting scars myself now. In this case, Christian Horner and Adrian Newey were leading the charge. It took them about a year to understand the culture and what could be saved. Then, again, they started hiring racing people from all the teams (especially Renault), and this made that experience an amazing journey as you could learn all the possible design, production and race engineering approaches to running an F1 car.
The injection of new people generates a boost of new energy and the disappearance of the usual silos or old expressions such as‘we’ve always done it like that’, which is a podium killer. In addition, it fosters the mindset of rewriting the history of the sport through hard work and pursuit of excellence.
In my lucky life, I also had the chance to be close enough to the Mclaren F1 team while I was leading the motorsport unit of the sister company Applied Technologies. When I joined the group in 2016, the team was not in great shape. The innovation process was assertively top-down and complex. The pressure on results led to a rising blaming culture.
It was the time when Honda joined F1, and the slope of its learning curve certainly didn’t help the team. Zak Brown joined to attract sponsorship and he made many changes in the top technical management, including bringing in Andreas Seidl to lead the team.
The two of them worked on restoring the F1 team spirit and simplified the organisation by getting rid of the idiotic matrix organisation. As a result, the clarity on roles and responsibility came back, together with the ownership of all the contributions every employee was coming up with. It took three years to benefit from this change and see results.
At this point, it is crucial to highlight that I have met incredibly good people in my race life, and most of them may perform or not depending on the working conditions and team culture. It is down to their alignment to that specific team chemistry.
The commonalities of these successful recovering strategies are: understanding the current culture; hiring new people with an established reputation in racing (vertical competence); and creating the right environment to make them work well together (leadership and organisation). In addition, all the teams I have mentioned had a clear priority: winning races to promote a brand.
One of the main challenges for Ferrari is its success in the stock exchange as a group. Sergio Marchionne successfully detached the success on the race track from the success on the (finance) market. He also reduced the fixed costs in the team by hiring either automotive employees or low-profile racing engineers in leading positions. Strategically, today #essereferrari (#beingferrari) recalls the Hamletic doubt: to be or not be committed to win?
This is what Mattia Binotto has inherited and what doesn’t make his life any easier. Will he have the autonomy to follow the recovery plan he knows well to compete for a championship title? I wish, for him and the tifosi, that this is the case, with the caveat that they will need to be patient for another three to five years for changes in the team, commitment from the board and efficient work before celebrating. And the rumours about
Philip Morris not being willing to renew their sponsorship agreement from 2022 will only make it more challenging.
Enzo Ferrari used to say:“many people love cars, but maybe I never found someone with my perseverance and animated by such a dominating passion in life. I have no interests other than racing cars.”
Forza Ferrari.