[David]

Hi guys and gals.

I need a fair bit of help on this, please… as a rookie, i would be interested in some details, info and even guesses, about a fictional but totally realistic F1 Team.
How big would a new team need to be (2-3 years old team), to have 2 racing cars plus the test car/team, while already functioning properly and competing?
How big would the leadership be? I know it also needs mechanics, designers, commercials, media, security, but what other main positions, major groups and sub-roles are there/could there be? (as i am sure that i probably left out many major areas and roles).
Anybody could give some data, info, guesses on how many people would be in each area, that would be really cool.
If the team is also a Constructor, around what sized development and production team would be needed for that? Also… budget for said team is not an and issue.

Thanks for the answers in advance

[Alianora La Canta]

Sorry for the delay – I don’t go to the forums very often. Also, warning: long post alert!

For an F1 team, I would note the following (if you just want numbers, scroll down to “Estimates”):

– Every team is a Constructor, though as you will see in the factory notes, some construct more than others.

– Your budget is always an issue when it comes to headcount. Toyota, last decade, were always a midfield team. But they spent more money than any other team in F1, and had more headcount than any other team (slightly over 800) until Ferrari and Mercedes broke their record in the early 2010s. Some midfielders in current F1 have half the headcount of others, and half the budget of others – the two are pretty closely correlated, because in F1, people power matters.

Trackside explanation:

– You can have 46 (last I checked, which was admittedly back in 2015) people work on your cars over the weekend. They get different paddock passes to everyone else, which allow them access to the various places where they might be needed – some get access to the grid and pit lane, but all will get garage access.

– Some of these will be “truckies” (they drive the lorries and typically set up your motorhome), while others are race engineers, data engineers, mechanics, front/rear jack staff, gearbox technician, tyre changers, refuellers, part replacers, electronics engineers and storespeople. All of these roles are somewhat flexible, in that if a task needs doing, one or more of the 46 will do it, but everyone will get an assigned role or combination of roles. If you can see Guy Martin’s documentary about participating in a Williams pit stop earlier this season, that assigned-role-with-flexibility combination is demonstrated very well there. They are vital, and every team will indeed use their full total of 46 car-working staff.

– This count of 46 does not include your race drivers. Absolute minimum would be 2 (the race drivers), but unless you have a close enough association with your engine manufacturer to borrow a spare, Superlicence-holding driver at short notice (no supplier seems to have a constant supply of these), you’d be well advised to have a reserve driver as well.

– You would probably also have 1-3 simulator drivers and 1-2 young test drivers (unless you can borrow these from your engine supplier – and Ferrari, at least, can consistently manage this). These are all part-timers – you’d pay for them to do X number of days in your (or your engine supplier’s) simulator/your car, and the rest of the time they’d do whatever their usual job happens to be. I think Force India has one nearly-full-time simulator driver (Nick Yelloly), but that is very much the exception – it’s more usual to have 1-3 drivers doing a few weeks/months each, to cover possible clashes with racing commitments.

– Don’t forget to include yourself and your deputy boss (or someone authorised to lead the race team in your absence) in your staff count. The deputy boss typically helps out with media, marketing or administration if you are able to lead the race team throughout (which is most team boss’s plan for most races), but the FIA will require the deputy to be present even so. If you are in Force India’s position and, as boss, you knowingly cannot travel to most of the races, you’ll need to employ a deputy’s deputy in case your deputy is incapacitated or simply attending an emergency when the FIA needs a team representative. (I think the rule got brought in because in a junior sportscar series, all the team managers got called to an emergency mid-session meeting and someone realised one team couldn’t because their team manager was in the car at the time…)

– It is theoretically possible to have the staff of your team consist only the above people. Manor did this at the start of 2015 (I tried to visit their Dinnington warehouse-factory with cake and sympathy the day after Melbourne – they didn’t qualify – to find there was nobody at home as everyone was on a plane. Had to convince their neighbours that Manor hadn’t gone bust for the second time in three months…) However, any team that does this is highly unlikely to make it into the midfield, at least that year!

– Optional but useful people to have on your travelling team include people who do marketing/PR (typically 1-2 people for the drivers, perhaps 4-6 for your sponsors depending on how many you have, 2-3 for the media – and in a small midfielder there is crossover between marketing and PR), catering (perhaps 6 people serving food and another 2 in the bar area, if your motorhome has a separate one) and a driver coach (1 – you can bring them to races, but some teams make it a factory-based role and others subcontract it, so you have options).

– You will work with 3-5 engine technicians, perhaps 3 tyre technicians, 2 managers, 2-10 driver’s friends/family/assistants/entourage members, some FIA officials and no end of hangers-on, but you don’t employ any of these people. So let’s not worry about them right now ;)

Factory explanations:

– There’s considerably more guesswork here than for the race team complements.

– Unless you are running an old (pre-2014) car because you are training the next Lance Stroll, you don’t need a separate test team for F1. This is because the test car is one of the race cars (and unless you get a tyre test cancelled or something, you’ll never need two cars to test simultaneously) and the pit crew for tests is usually the same people who would work on that chassis on race weekend. In previous decades, there could be 30 people on the test team per car, and usually a full-time driver to do all those miles, in addition to all the other drivers I mentioned sharing the burden of testing. If you do want to run a program with an old car, that would be 20 people plus the driver (who I’ll assume is at least supplementing with testing in your simulator and therefore is in the driver count above)

– Then again, you may also want to have a demonstration department, like Ferrari and Red Bull do. Yes, they’re big teams, but Toro Rosso contributes people to the Red Bull demo department occasionally, and if your budget is infinite, there could be payoff in running one. If you do, you’ll probably need 20 people, not including the drivers (who I’ll assume are included in the earlier driver count). Also, if you are running the old-car-test-team in the previous paragraph, they’re almost certainly going to be the same 20 people. They’ll probably be recorded as being part of a separate company for legal and tax purposes.

– Your factory staff complement is dependent on what arrangements you have for making parts once you have designed and prototyped them (and you will prototype them in-house!) Haas subcontracts its production to Ferrari. Force India subcontracts some and is doing an increasing amount in-house (this dates back to when it was Jordan, when it subcontracted to what seemed like half of Motorsport Valley and several companies further afield…) I think Sauber and Toro Rosso produce everything they are allowed to in-house, and Williams definitely does. I say “allowed to” because a handful of components – such as fuel tanks – have to be bought from one of a list of FIA-approved parts, none of which are made by an F1 team. A team that only makes prototypes, like Haas, may only have something like 40 people in Production, and some of these may only be needed at the time of peak prototype production (September-February). A team that makes everything it’s allowed to on-site may have 200, and can probably give all of them work for the entire year.

– Your engine supply deal has an effect too. All suppliers provide control software to go in the FIA-issued engine control unit, but some also provide staff specifically to help combine it with the car and keep it working through the weekend. If yours doesn’t, add 5 for that function.

– Finally, your windtunnel arrangements will influence your staff count:

If you are Renault and have exactly one windtunnel of the appropriate size (60%), you will have the staff to run it and also the staff to maintain it – maybe 30-50 people in total.

If you are Toro Rosso and subcontract your wind-tunnel work, you can drop that to something like 15-25.

If you are Williams and have two appropriately-sized windtunnels, you’ll employ 30-50 people to work on your F1 car in one tunnel and have 5-12 people in a separate company leasing the other windtunnel to other users (for the revenue stream – F1 rules only allow the use of one windtunnel, but by the time the rule existed, some teams already had two).

Finally, if you are Force India and own one tiny windtunnel using outdated technology, you have maybe 5 people leasing out that windtunnel – and send the other 35 members of your team to the full-sized tunnel you’ve subcontracted… …to then test a 60% model. Take your pick from those scenarios.

– There’s no getting around it: you’ll need a design crew. There are many specialist parts to an F1 car and this is a particular guessy guess, but 60-200 would seem a plausible range.

– A surprisingly small crew is needed to maintain the supercomputer you’ll use to aid the designers – probably 4-6 people.

– Some teams subcontract cooking and cleaning. Others employ them directly. If you do the latter, you’ll need 6-12 kitchen/catering staff, depending on how long you need the catering hall to be open, and 10-15 cleaners.

– You will need a company lawyer, even though every team subcontracts unexpected legal problems (and, sometimes, expected legal issues that happen to be large, like changes to taxation law). This is for preventative purposes: someone up-to-date on company law helps the HR staff keep things like contracts in good state and advises on ways your team can avoid silly reasons for court cases (I seem to remember Jordan not having an in-house lawyer that time it tried suing Vodafone for £150 m on the basis of an unsupported mobile phone call. I’m talking about avoiding that sort of error…)

– Marketing is a significant area, unless you are Haas or Toro Rosso (where there is one big sponsor, rather than multiple smaller ones). Even those two will probably have 10-20 people in marketing. Expect more like 40-50 in a team like Force India, whose budget is based on a gridful of smaller sponsors, and expect some of those to be specialists in looking for and/or securing new sponsorships.

– PR is probably more consistent between teams, though some teams may not treat it as a separate department. 5-10 people, regardless of what sort of midfielder you are.

– Expect 1-3 factory-based security staff to be employed, unless you are subcontracting the job. This does not count reception (who may help security with things like paperwork, without being involved in any actual throwing out of uninvited guests).

– Do you plan to have a gym? Many midfield teams do, for mechanics and drivers in particular but open to all other employees. Expect 6-20 staff to be needed, depending on how many hours it’s open. The latter figure would include some people dividing their time between keeping the gym open and other tasks such as HR and administration.

Factory supplemental

– You will also need IT people to maintain your networks (separate from the supercomputer staff), fend off viruses and keep all these people working. Plan on 1 person per 100 staff (and for 1-3 of your 46 car crew to be IT specialists, looking after car and pit garage electronics as a major part of their roles).

– For every 100 staff, you’ll probably need 3 HR/administration people, 1 of whom will be an accountant. The others will process other forms of paperwork and do other office jobs that help keep your team running and looking good. Sure, you don’t have to have a receptionist on all office hours, but you’ll impress more sponsors if you do.

With that in mind, I’d give estimates for a team fighting in the midfield battle:

Estimates:

Travelling team

Drivers – 3 full-time, 2-5 part-time (of whom 0-2 attend each race)
Mechanics/engineers working on cars at races – 46 full-time
Marketing staff attending races – 8-11
Hospitality – 6-8
Driver coach – possibly 1
Deputy bosses/managers – 1-2
Subotal – 64-73

Factory:

Old-car-test/demonstration crew – 0-20 (probably 0)
Powertrain integration – 0-5
Wind tunnel technicians – 15-62
Production – 40-200, with some of that possibly being seasonal (winter) work
Designers – 60-200
Supercomputer – 4-6
Marketing – 10-50
PR – 5-10
Cooks/cleaners – 12-27
Company lawyer – 1
Subtotal: 147-581
Running total: 251-654

Supplemental staff – 4 per 100 people you have in the running total (round up to nearest 100)

Grand total: 263-682

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