IN CONVERSATION WITH

The Mercedes technical director recently gave an in-house interview from lockdown, in which he talked about the integrity that underpins Lewis Hamilton’s driving genius and his immense gratitude to Mercedes for helping him through personal tragedy

Mercedes’ James Allison

How have you been keeping busy during this isolation period?

Well, there’s been an amount of F1-type meetings, where senior figures in each of the teams are meeting with the FIA and F1 to discuss how to best get through these difficult times. But that’s only been a small fraction of the available time since we’ve been in this lockdown. I guess I’ve been quite lucky – I’ve got a nice garden so I’ve been out felling trees, and making a nuisance of myself. And I’ve been working on a wardrobe I actually started about two years ago, which has been progressing at a glacial pace. So, the one silver lining in this ugly period is that my wardrobe is at least coming on leaps and bounds.

Twenty-nine years behind you in F1 and some quite different leaders you’ve worked under: Flavio Briatore, Toto Wolff. Have you combined different styles of leadership into your own?

I’ve worked under many people that I would admire, but I think none more so than Bob Bell. That might be a name that’s a little bit of a surprise given that I’ve worked with some big names in the sport, but anyone who’s been lucky enough to work for him would have nothing but good things to say about him. He’s got the most fantastically good, clear judgment. And to top that, he has a level of unimpeachable integrity. I think he’s probably the person, as an engineer, that has influenced me the most – someone who always would put the team first and himself second. As a team principal, head and shoulders clear of the rest, would be Toto – because of the warmth and vitality he brings to our company, the trust he places in us and the fact he gives everyone working for him a certain amount of space and leeway to make their own decisions with a high degree of autonomy, while requiring high standards from us all and holding us to account in a clear and straightforward fashion if we’re not cutting it. I’ve been particularly lucky at Mercedes because I have Toto as a boss. I also work in an engineering environment that’s very much the legacy of the way Bob set it up. There’s little we’ve changed in the technical structure to the way that Bob architected it a few years back.

What was it like for you, your first day at work, joining this group [in 2017] that had been together for so long?

It was anxiety-making or intimidating in a couple of ways. It was a team that had dominated the sport for three years running. It was a team full of engineers of the highest calibre. It was a very settled team with professionals in every level of the team who absolutely knew their job, and arguably they just didn’t need me. They would have gone on to great things without my arrival. That knowledge is already sobering. But, coupled with that, the time I started at Mercedes it was only a few months after my wife died, and I was something of a wreck. I’m still grieving today, four years on. Back then, I was crying in my car on my way into work and crying on my way home. I hoped I would be useful at work, that I would find my feet again, that I would be able to carve out some sort of world for myself after Rebecca died. But it was more of a hope than a certainty. And one of the things that I feel particularly grateful to Mercedes for is that in a part of my life

“I WAS VERY, VERY FORTUNATE TO BE GRANTED A PLACE IN A TEAM THAT IS EXTRAORDINARILY WARM-HEARTED”

where everything was turned completely on its head, and where nothing felt normal, the most familiar part of it was my work. Because there the rhythm of the racing season, the pressure to get a car out, the pressure to develop it, the thrill of winning, the challenges the season throws your way – all those things felt familiar and they were about the only part of my life that did. I was very, very fortunate to be granted a place in a team that is extraordinarily warm-hearted, and with a group of people who didn’t need me, but opened their arms to me and made me feel welcome, provided a space for me to work, and created an environment where I could be useful and where I could grieve and recover while having the most enviable and brilliant job.

You mentioned earlier, when you were talking about Bob Bell, the word ‘integrity’. You’ve used that word about Lewis Hamilton as well – obviously it’s something important to you.

It does matter a lot to me. I was brought up in a forces household – my father was in the RAF and the armed services place integrity very high up on the totem pole of values. That is a characteristic that marks out Lewis. He’s one of the oldest drivers on the grid now; still drives like one of the youngest. But in a career of multiple championships and countless wins, you will struggle to find a moment on the track where you see Lewis do something ugly. You’ll see him do many, many breath-taking things; you’ll see him do brave things, but you won’t see just crude, dodgem or bumper car stuff – or any sort of artifice to the way he drives. I hope he manages to keep this going for the remainder of his career, because it’s an unblemished record. Among multiple world champions it’s also unprecedented to have all that success without anything that has even the hint of a shadow of poor sportsmanship hanging over it. It’s impressive.