Wolff stunned: 'Why did he not come to Mercedes?'
F1 News
- Nicole Mulder
Otmar Szafnauer, former Formula 1 team boss of Alpine and Force India (now Aston Martin), has shared an interesting anecdote about Toto Wolff. He says the Mercedes team boss was confused when he heard that the customer team had pulled a big name from Red Bull Racing.
"Were 280 people when I started, 408 when I left. So I hired some people. All of them, I hired personally," Szafnauer said on the High Performance podcast. "Together, we assessed areas of competency that a Formula 1 team required that we didn’t have. Then we went out to recruit the best people that we could in those areas."
Why was Wolff baffled?
"How do you get good people to leave Red Bull and come to Force India? You've got to make it a good place to work. I called Toto and I don't know what we were talking about but I said 'we've got this senior aerodynamicist guru coming from Red Bull to join us'. And he was like 'what? Why is he not coming to Mercedes?'"
He continued: "He couldn't believe that a guy from Red Bull at a senior level would actually entertain going to Force India, but that's because we had a reputation of, go there, it's a good place to work'. I remember people telling me that Toto would walk around in the pit lane and look to see who had the nicest garage set up. You could see from the pit lane into everybody's garages. He would walk and benchmark the best. I think it was Red Bull at the time."
"And he would say to his sporting director, Ron Meadows, I want something better than that. Which is great. And he did that. And that translates into a lot of other things too. But like I said, the one thing that I wanted, at Force India, because I knew we didn’t have the money to do those things; even if we wanted a better garage, you can’t, is a good place to work, and that was our differentiating factor," Szafnauer said.
This article has been created in collaboration with Matt Gretton
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8 October 2024
