STRAIGHT TALK
A NEW BREED OF BOSSES AT WILLIAMS
Mark Gallagher on F1’s move to truly professional team leadership
Among the unexpected impacts COVID-19 has wrought on Formula 1 is that we enter this season with the strongest line-up of professional team bosses in the championship’s history.
For an industry so closely associated with speed, the pace of progression away from Formula 1’s founding fathers has been glacial. For 40 years we have been held in thrall to that unique breed of team principal who founded, owned and ran their own team. Men who, as Eddie Jordan declared, made the final decisions because it was ‘their name over the door.’
Sir Frank Williams’ family’s decision to sell to Dorilton Capital last August might have drawn this period in Formula 1’s history to a close, but the latter part of the season felt like watching the end credits. It wasn’t until mid-december that interim team principal Simon Roberts was confirmed in his permanent role, along with news that he would report to incoming CEO Jost Capito.
With 17 years as operations director and chief operating officer at Mclaren behind him, Roberts is representative of the highly experienced, senior-level Formula 1 manager whom team owners can bring in to run the sophisticated operations of a modern grand prix motor racing business.
The appointment of Capito adds a level of strength and depth to Williams’ management board, such that the Grove outfit has gone straight from intensive care to being given a clean bill of health. The prognosis is good.
Capito’s impressive CV includes managing motorsport programmes at Porsche, Sauber, Ford and Volkswagen, while his experience in everything from Paris-dakar to World Rally Championship success, and Formula 1 to high-performance automotive programmes, shows skill and passion for the job.
The appointment of Jenson Button as a ‘Senior Advisor’ – a Swiss Army Knife role that makes him useful in a host of ways – confirms that Capito, Roberts & Co. are serious about accelerating Williams back to health on and off track.
In this new chapter of Formula 1, team owners can hire and fire according to their requirements. Team principals will have employment contracts, fixed term and open to renewal – or not – and the management structures are evolving to suit.
Thus, Mclaren’s Andreas Seidl might report to Zak Brown, but to all intents and purposes they are splitting the roles that the previous owner-founders once held. The same can be said of Roberts and Capito.
The demands of running a contemporary F1 team are such that it can be useful to split the operational leadership from the frontof-house role. It also gives shareholders the comfort of spreading the leadership challenge and risk a little more widely.
When we see how quickly Seidl turned Mclaren’s F1 fortunes around, albeit after a period during which Brown test drove other candidates, Williams’ board will be hoping for a similar outcome – particularly once the cost cap and new regulations really bite in 2022.
The flip side of the hiring is the firing, and the replacement of Cyril Abiteboul with vastly experienced Moto GP boss Davide Brivio at Alpine shows how quickly the leadership turnstile can operate.
It’s quickly going to become inadvisable to talk about having a transitional year for, well, more than a year…
With Christian Horner the veteran of team bosses, and Toto Wolff the only team principal to actually own part of the team he runs, 2021 bodes well for Formula 1. From front to back we have never had a more capable management line-up.