Who Wants to be an Engineer?

At the 2020 US Grand Prix in Austin, Chase Carey unveiled the new regulations for the 2021 season onwards.

The Engineering Station in the Mercedes garage. Photo by Mercedes.

This included a budget cap, which required the three top teams, Mercedes, Ferrari and Red Bull, to significantly reduce their spending, specifically, cutting engineering jobs.

At the start of the 2025 season, Adrian Newey has said that they are struggling to recruit engineering staff.  The F1 community gasps in collective horror.  once again, despite it being completely predictable, the Formula One management has failed to understand the potential consequences of their actions.  Cutting engineering staff was always going to come back to bite them.

When it comes to cutting jobs, the management can choose who will leave the team; they cannot control who will choose not to stay with the team.  A lot of highly qualified, talented engineers will have seen their career path turn into a cul-de-sac.  If staff see their long term promotion prospects suddenly fading as engineering teams are slimmed down, then it would not be unreasonable to expect them to look elsewhere.  Furthermore, if Formula One has imposed an arbitrary budget cap once, then there is no reason to think that they won’t do it again further down the track.  This introduces uncertainty and anxiety and does not make for a healthy work environment.

The then CEO of Formula One Management, Chase Carey said that he hoped that staff from the top teams will be absorbed by the smaller independent teams.  This assumed that the smaller, independent teams would be able to offer the same high salaries and generous bonus packages that the top teams were able to provide.  Why would engineers accept lower salaries, just to stay in Formula One?

German Laura Mueller, F1's first female race engineer, joined the Haas team in 2022.

When I worked in Formula One it was a very different employment environment.  Back then, if you were an ambitious engineer who wanted to work in a highly innovative, high profile industry, motorsport generally and Formula One in particular, was pretty much it, certainly in Europe.  Every day I received letters from hopeful young graduates trying to get into the industry.  Every vacancy would produce a high pile of CVs.  We now live in a world where there are very exciting innovative categories of motorsport, particularly WEC hyper-cars and Formula E.  Outside of motorsport, there are any number of exciting, state of the art, ground-breaking companies looking for engineers (of which, we are constantly told, there is a shortage) to create everything from drones to flying cars.   Formula One engineers are very attractive hires for these companies.

Hannah-Schmitz, chief of strategy engineers of Red Bull Racing.

Formula One has to understand that when it comes to engineering staff, they are in a competition to attract the calibre of people they need.  The attitude displayed by this budget cap shows that the engineering staff are taken for granted and not valued.  Jean Todt stated that engineers would stay just for the honour of working in Formula One.  What he and the management failed to understand is that the top talent is no longer fighting for places in Formula One, Formula One is fighting to attract and retain top talent.

The budget cap was a poorly thought through idea, with expectations of its success based on arrogance and assumptions about the attractiveness of the employment it offered.  The management of Formula One has been such a closed shop for so long, that it has failed to notice how the rest of the world has changed.  It has spent years talking to itself and looked only inward for solutions to their problems.  In the end, the budget cap has told a generation of engineers that they are not valued by Formula One; that they are a cost to be cut and that the honour of working in the industry should override any complaints or issues they might have.  In a world competing for top tech talent, Formula One has asked for more, whilst offering less. Now Formula One is having difficulty recruiting the engineers it needs.

Formula One will now have to rethink its budget cap and consider ways of making a career in Formula One attractive again.  I remember a song I learned in Primary School about the Steam Engine Fireman that seems apt.  The song went “The driver thinks he runs the show, but if I’m not there, the train won’t go.”  Formula One will find it needs its engineers.

 By Clare Topic

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