Innovation
How F1 team structures have changed – and could shift in the future
by Scott Mitchell-Malm
6min read
The fanfare around Adrian Newey’s September reveal as Aston Martin Aramco Formula 1 Team’s new managing technical partner was a break from the norm, given the attention it put on one individual in an era where Formula 1 technical teams are more vast than ever.
Partner article
The Aramco and Aston Martin Racing strategic partnership
While the technical side of an F1 team has always been crucial to its success or failure, the individuals and the roles they hold have often been footnotes.
Some, like Newey, are more celebrated than others – but the expansion of technical structures over time, from small, closely-knit teams of engineers and mechanics into highly specialised, multidisciplinary operations involving hundreds of personnel, has moved the narrative away from individuals and towards the collective effort.
“The main change from what I saw was the level of expertise we bring in the team,” says Red Bull technical director Pierre Wache.
“Before, the skills were quite broad. Now, we employ people with a massive expertise in a very detailed area.
“Then it affects the number of people you have in the team compared to 20 years ago,. but also how they work together.”
Red Bull team principal Christian Horner (L) with Adrian Newey (R) in 2024 preseason testing. Newey, a legendary F1 designer, is set to join Aston Martin Aramco Formula 1 Team
How F1 team structures have changed since 1950
The likes of Wache have experienced a version of F1 that is a world apart from its mid-21st century world championship origins.
In the 1950s, teams operated with minimal staff – a handful of engineers and mechanics who were generalists,. It was more a ‘jack of all trades, master of none’ era with more simple mechanical instruments and a reliance on experience and intuition rather than sophisticated data.
Specialised roles became more prominent through the 1960s and 1970s as the cars became more sophisticated and aerodynamics started to be a bigger feature in car design.
Windtunnels were also used for the first time in F1 across this period, which was key to greater technical expertise being sought beyond team members ‘just’ being mechanics.
Lotus F1 Team engineers with Ayrton Senna and Elio de Angelis in 1985
As aerodynamicists, chassis engineers, and tyres specialists became more commonplace, and teams grew their understanding in areas like materials science, early aerodynamic principles, and suspension dynamics, so team numbers grew into the 1980s and 1990s - in excess of 100 people - and a reliance on data-driven engineering became more prominent.
Teams introduced specialists in electronics as cars adopted computer-based technologies. Aerodynamic departments expanded with more advanced windtunnel programmes and F1 entered the very early stages of computational fluid dynamics (CFD). The 1990s also marked the beginning of onboard telemetry, allowing teams to monitor cars in real-time, which required data analysts.
But it was in the 2000s that the scale of F1 technical operations exploded. Staff numbers rose well into the hundreds and that has continued as teams evolved into multi-disciplinary and complex operations.
A Williams F1 team photo in 2000 showing the growth in numbers of trackside personnel
Different departments include aerodynamics, engine, chassis, simulation and vehicle dynamics. More recently, utilising cloud software and artificial intelligence has become a new battleground.
This has brought different challenges, Wache says: “The expertise overall in the team improves.
“But after, the capability for the people to see a wider view of the car performance, how the car is done, is diminished and the challenges for the people are different.
“The challenge to work together is different and is more challenging because the motivation to put the staff together, and for what the people are doing, is more difficult.”
In this most complex era of F1, people like Newey remain an outlier with his affection for a whiteboard, hand-drawn ideas, and his trusty notebook while eyeing up rival cars trackside.
McLaren celebrates its one-two finish at the 2024 Hungarian Grand Prix, with plenty more team personnel at the track
How F1 team structures could change in the future
There is obviously still a premium on experience and ingenuity, and how teams blend that human element with the advances in technical resources and possibilities has always been part of the demand of F1.
Former Aston Martin Formula 1 Team technical director Dan Fallows, an ex-Newey acolyte at Red Bull, says F1 teams are still getting their heads around the modern challenges.
“The structure has changed a lot over the last 20 years, in terms of just overall size,” says Fallows.
“The focus on what people are working on means that you have to structure yourselves very differently. Where we were before, there was a big lack of data from the track. That is an area that's really been a lot more sophisticated now.
With much of F1 teams’ work going on at the factory, teams are shuffling their structures to prioritise windtunnel and computational analysis
“It's a lot easier to understand what your car is doing on the circuit, particularly from an aerodynamic point of view, but also in a lot of other areas. And that means that you then have different demands on your technical structure and your engineers.
“Then more recently, obviously the cost cap has meant that you've had to really focus on where is the area that's going to pay the biggest dividends for you.
“There's been a huge amount of change. And I think in all honesty it's still a little bit in flux. People are still learning about where is the best place to spend your chips and get your engineers.”
With less time available to test parts on track and witness the cars’ behaviour in person, simulation tools, windtunnel analysis and Computational Fluid Dynamics have become a huge area of priority for F1 teams in recent years.
Fallows’ comments point towards a bigger emphasis on managing personnel at teams’ headquarters as more and more testing goes on behind the scenes. With a strict cost cap, teams are constantly allocating their budgets towards the areas that gain the most performance - those areas in the factory.