McLaren staff being poached by rivals? 'This does not worry us'
F1 News
In Formula 1, it is common practice: if a team is successful, its competitors try to snatch their best personnel. Red Bull Racing knows it all too well, following the recent exits the team has experienced. McLaren is now the top team and, almost naturally, the British now have to deal with what Red Bull suffered from for a long time: staff being poached.
Mercedes, Ferrari, Red Bull? No doubt they have reached out to the top people at McLaren, the team that enters the new F1 season as favourites. Team boss Andrea Stella confirmed in Melbourne to, among others, GPblog, that the vultures are indeed circling overhead.
"Yeah. We have noticed a certain interest to our people. In fairness, this is a position that doesn't upset us. I think it's just natural that teams look at, you know, acquiring expertise from each other," says the Italian, whose main focus is on making it so attractive for people not to want to leave McLaren in the first place - not only in terms of salary but also in creating the right working conditions.
Brown doesn't see teams 'stealing' people
Zak Brown, McLaren's CEO, adds that the latter seems to have succeeded. "You hear over the years that people steal your sponsors, people steal your drivers, people steal your employees," says the American. "You hear over the years people steal your sponsors, people steal your drivers, people steal your employees. They don't. You'll lose them. If someone can get a logo off of our shirt, that's on us, more power to them."
Brown cites with pride that McLaren has seen no changes in key positions within the team this season. "Because we've worked very hard to create an environment where people want to be at McLaren. Their families want to be at McLaren, and that's something that I think Andrea and I and the leadership spend a lot of time on making it an environment that people wanna be at, where we don't have to rely on contracts to have people stay at McLaren."
This article was written in collaboration with Norberto Mujica.
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