Scott Mitchell-Malm

I don't like that teams and manufacturers have become you know so invested in say less don't we don't want to talk about our weaknesses and bad moments because they underestimate how valuable it is to bring people along in in that journey and one of the things McNish and he won't you know he won't be pleased that he's had this experience but it might help him now is he did that really well in Formula E because when he took over it was when the Audi works team entered

They took over the Apt team, which had just won the championship with Lucas de Grassi.

And they had a really bad start to the season.

The car, the package that they developed was really high potential.

But they got disqualified for like, they got one number wrong on a seal in the scrutineering document or something like that.

So they lost a win on their debut weekend.

And then they just had this recurring, I can't remember what it was, it was like driveshaft or something like that, like within their powertrain, it was a chronic problem, recurring problem, kept failing.

And they thought they'd fixed it, and then they failed again.

And McNish just had to basically be the front man for this, obviously, because he was the team boss, but he was really good.

at explaining it he didn't shy away from yeah we thought we'd fix this and we haven't so that's bad and just actually kind of explaining what the timelines were where the setbacks were and eventually they got on top of it they had a really strong second half of the season they won the team's championship they couldn't win the driver's championship but they did sneak the team's championship and McNish was a key part of that as a leader but also as a public facing element of it so I think he'll be a good asset as long as he's able to do what he's clearly capable of doing

You're missing a better one.

You're missing a better one.

I guess is the big unknown is whether McNish, Bonotto or anybody else sees racing director as above or below or, you know, adjacent to the team principle.

Um, he's assistant to the LDF one head rather than, uh, the LDF one heads assistant.

It's, it,

trackside guy who does the media stuff right so it seems a bit more linear but just a different way of looking at it yeah but crack hates doing that whereas mcnish will actually be quite right quite good do you i mean i mean i guess the key test of what freedom he has as racing director and how comfortable he feels you know really owning his moments is whether or not he's going to feel like he's allowed to speak officially when he sees people like ed straw wandering around cold in the chinese grand prix paddock

Well, if you just look at what they've gone through at the first part of the season...

And what was really frustrating in the first couple of races was they had a situation where they'd failed to put two cars out for the Grand Prix in the first two rounds of the season, which was, you know, regardless of the clear potential in the package.

And the fact that they actually started the season really well as a brand new works team, you know, in the context of where Sauber was and what they were realistically taking over, where they could have tripped up and so on and so forth.

But it was also a bit embarrassing that you don't have anything reliable enough or proven enough