Who is F1's best team principal?
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What makes a great F1 team principal?
The Athletic.
The race is on. And with Formula One's team principal lineup more volatile than ever, we ask what makes a great leader and how much has the role changed over the years. All in a bid to decide who is F1's best team principal. I'm Ed Shaw and joining me to take on this challenge are Mark Hughes and Nate Saunders. Well, mate, we'll have to come to you first from ESPN F1, of course. Should we get the painful bit out of the way?
Yeah, absolutely. The cringeworthy bit. Do you want me to... I should have magicked it up out of nowhere.
Yeah, if you're a professional book promoter.
Yeah, absolute nightmare. I was halfway here and realised the one thing I should have bought. I do have a book out at the moment, like I assume most people you have on at the moment can plug similar. Lando Norris' book on his championship winning season last year.
How has the role of team principal evolved in F1?
A hundred pictures as well from Getty Images. And yeah, just a really nice kind of...
journal i think of his uh of his title winning year so lots of photos not so much not so much basically yeah they just said look we just need words to go with these photos that's all they wanted so yeah so hopefully the words do it justice excellent well we've got the plug out of the way that's obviously a regular formula one journalist so uh that's what yeah that's the first time someone said that so that's nice Yeah, you are part of the club, as it were, so regular in the media sense.
And last time we did this show, the only time I've been on the race podcast, we talked about how Carlos Sainz hadn't had a podium or a good result for Williams. And then the next week, he literally seven days later went and got one. So maybe it can bring some similar magic. So you're a good omen. Well, hopefully. Or maybe that was it. Maybe that was... got it all out of my system there.
Well, let's do this as a test, see if we can replicate the results. And Mark Hughes, we're going to talk about team principles today. It's an interesting topic, isn't it?
What are the six key areas of expertise for team principals?
Because the team principle, it's very nebulous as an actual job title, isn't it?
It's evolved, hasn't it? It used to be the person who founded a team and who owned the team and who was boss and, you know, he'd do whatever he saw fit within his budget and within his own vision or their own vision. And I think as the sport has expanded and it becomes such a complex management job to control all these different departments and thousands of people, it's become the team principle. Capital T, capital P has become a recognized principle. It's a position. It's an employed position within the management structure. And he's basically there to run the team on a day-to-day basis and at the track. And he's the face of the team. But, yeah, it's quite often they have someone above them, an owner or a CEO or a COO.
And even within that, it's very different in terms of the job, exact job that they may do. It's changed massively as well as there being amazingly high turnover. That's the really strange thing, isn't it? How quickly things change.
How do politics influence team dynamics in F1?
Basically, everybody apart from Toto Wolff, the team principal has changed in the past few years. And even Toto Wolff, has only been there for 10, 15 years, less than 15 years, in fact. So the days when you'd have decades of these team principles have pretty much gone.
Yeah, they are. And I mean, when you sent me the list through and you actually, to that point, you read the names there and you compare to even at the start of the last rule change, it's completely different, you know, and people moving around. And there's not a... The other thing that that brings out weirdly is that there's not actually a giant pool of available managers. You'd think that there'd be loads of team principals or people with team principal experience, but there's a lot of moving around, a lot of people moving up positions. So when somebody does leave a job, it's not like a football manager job where there's suddenly 16 candidates that you could look at. It feels like still quite a small...
you know a small pool of people you can pick from despite the fact that the turnover is quite quite quick like you said yeah which is bizarre given the job is in some ways nebulous or at least very adaptable in terms of what actually involves but the reason i sent you that list is we're going to go through the 11 team principles but we're going to approach it in a slightly different way we're going to try and answer the question who's the best team principal and to do that we've picked out six different categories that cover elements of their job to talk through that and i'm
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What makes a great F1 team principal?
0:02–0:53
2
How has the role of team principal evolved in F1?
0:53–1:42
3
What are the six key areas of expertise for team principals?
1:42–3:03
4
How do politics influence team dynamics in F1?
3:03–4:15
5
What are the challenges of team building in Formula 1?
4:15–6:12
6
How important are media skills for F1 team principals?
6:12–7:53
7
What role does technical understanding play for team principals?
7:53–9:13
8
How do team principals manage driver relationships effectively?
9:13–1:00:07
Speakers
4 identifiedMore from The Race F1 Podcast
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