WhenGeneHaasopted not to renew the contract of his team principal Guenther Steiner just before New Year, it made Mike Krack –who joined Aston Martin in 2022 – the third longest-serving team principal in Formula 1! Only Christian Horner and Toto Wolff are ahead of him, emphasising the extraordinarily rapid turnover of team bosses in recent years.
A number of factors have driven it. But fundamentally it’s about F1 readjusting to the new post-Covid, Netflix-based, cost-capped landscape. How so? First, here’s a recap of the recent changes.
Franz Tost has retired, replaced at the former AlphaTauri team by Laurent Mekies. Ferrari being Ferrari – hugely pressured if doing anything less than winning titles but controlled by an autonomous parent group – tends to have a high turnover of bosses regardless of era and Mattia Binotto didn’t survive the churn. Which led to Frédéric Vasseur departing Sauber to replace him. This left a vacancy at Sauber, which will soon become Audi, leading Audi to recruit Andreas Seidl. Which in turn left McLaren needing a new team principal, and it solved this by promoting Andrea Stella a year ago.
Around that time there was a genuine falling out between Williams owners Dorilton and its original nomination of team principal Jost Capito, partly connected to the dismissal of the Capito-recruited marketing executive Claudia Schwarz and her subsequent £80m lawsuit against the team. Capito was replaced as team boss by the former Mercedes strategy chief James Vowles.