McLaren has poached Red Bull Racing chief engineering officer Rob Marshall to bolster its new technical line-up.
Marshall will take up the position of technical director of engineering and design from January next year. He has been stood down from Red Bull Racing in the interim.
The 55-year-old British engineer was chief designer at Red Bull Racing during the team’s first championship-winning years of 2010–13 and was promoted to chief engineering officer in 2016, since when Milton Keynes has won two drivers titles and another constructors crown.
Marshall will report directly to team principal Andrea Stella as part of a three-member technical executive comprising former Adrian Newey protégé Peter Prodromou and former Ferrari chassis chief David Sanchez, who will also join next January after a period of gardening leave.
Long-time McLaren engineer Neil Houldey had been announced in Marshall’s position when Stella restructured the technical department in March. He will now be shifted into the deputy technical director role from next year.
“Rob’s appointment is one of the fundamental steps and a natural fit to aid the team’s journey to get back to our winning ways,” Stella said.
“We are a team with the ambition of fighting for championships, but over the last couple of seasons we have not shown a steady upward trend from an on-track competitiveness point of view. Over the last few months we have worked towards inverting this trend.
“The approach we have adopted is comprehensive and is based on strengthening the team from a people and expertise point of view, along with the ongoing projects to upgrade technology and infrastructure that will shortly come to fruition.”
It’s an approach that speaks to the new reality in Formula 1 in the cost cap era.
It’s not how much money you have, it’s how you spend it — and it’s who you have controlling that spend.
Formula 1 has always fundamentally been a competition of ideas. Whoever has the most effective solution to the problem posed by the technical regulations inevitably creates the fastest car.
Previously teams have been able to use money to generate ideas. More money means more designers and more runs in the wind tunnel and more time using computational fluid dynamics and more parts manufactured — just more.
But with the cost cap in place, money no longer has quite as sure a correlation with performance.
Every team has the capacity to pay for roughly the same staff size, time in the wind tunnel and manufactured parts.
Efficiency of spend is now crucial to performance, and the best way to ensure you’re spending development money efficiently is to hire designers with tracks records of success.
“People and culture are our most important resource,” Stella said. “We have recently invested and worked towards developing and empowering the internal talents available at McLaren, and we already perceive and measure the positive impact.
“In parallel, we have been strengthening our roster by bringing new talents on board.
“The list was already strong and encouraging, and the addition of a high-end and skilled individual like Rob will further consolidate our ability to establish the highest technical standards at McLaren and be in condition to design winning F1 cars.”
THE SHORTCUT TO SUCCESS
It’s no wonder McLaren has picked this as the route back to the top — it’s a path already well trodden by Aston Martin.
Aston Martin has masterminded an enormous jump from seventh in last year’s constructors standings to its current second position this season thanks largely to a recruitment campaign that has defied expectations for what is achievable in only 12 months.
This time last year the team was changing car concepts in the first season of the regulations. That put it on evidently an enormously fruitful development trajectory that has seen it as comfortably the most improved team this season — as shown below, with percentage year-on-year improvement in pure pace expressed as time gained over a theoretical 90-second lap.
Aston Martin: 1.55 seconds
Williams: 1.03 seconds
Red Bull Racing: 1.02 seconds
Ferrari: 0.93 seconds
Alpine: 0.39 seconds
Haas: 0.39 seconds
AlphaTauri: 0.31 seconds
Mercedes: 0.26 seconds
Alfa Romeo: 0.05 seconds
McLaren: -0.09 seconds
Many of the accolades for the jump have been bestowed on former Dan Fallows and Eric Blandin, former Red Bull Racing and Mercedes chief aerodynamicists respectively, who both joined the team last year, while the team is also helmed by former McLaren principal Martin Whitmarsh in the CEO position.
Of course there have been many more hires of lesser known names to bolster the ranks too.
The importance of Aston Martin’s staff is emphasised by the fact the team’s big-spending capital works program, including an entirely new factory and wind tunnel, haven’t come online yet. The team is still largely based in portable buildings near the worksite of its new headquarters.
Not only do external recruits bring ideas from previous teams, but their experience in the organisation of a successful racing team — Red Bull Racing and Mercedes are the only teams to have won championships in the last 13 years — is also invaluable.
Following the epic spray from CEO Laurent Rossi, Alpine team boss Otmar Szafnauer said Aston Martin has cemented the template for success for those teams looking to move from the top of the midfield into the frontrunning pack.
“You want to shortcut the process,” Szafnauer said, per Autosport. “Red Bull has an aerodynamic team of 50 people, it’s not one. But the guy who sits on top of the 50, he gets all the ideas. So when you displace him, his brain is full of all those learnings.
“But then once you’ve got that, you still need that team of 50 underneath to continue the development, because you only shortcut it one spot at a time.
“So what I said about Red Bull probably having 50 people — we’re at 38, we want to grow to 45, so we have spots for seven or eight senior aerodynamicists here. We have those spots.”
And in the era of capped costs, these midfield teams are more likely to be able to attract the talent they want given incumbent employers can’t just throw money at retaining them in the way they perhaps might of. Promises of seniority and progression are much more enticing now.
It therefore wouldn’t be surprising to see several more technical coups in the coming seasons, particularly as Sauber transitions into Audi.
SO WHAT’S McLAREN’S OUTLOOK?
Aston Martin has raised the bar so significantly that it’s effectively changed the game when it comes to how much progress teams can expect to make in a year of stable regulations.
That doesn’t mean it’s easy, however. Teams still need to click together, the environment needs to be conducive to creative decision-making and the resources need to be in place to properly harness the design office’s capacity.
But it’s clear McLaren is taking a very broad approach to the changes it needs to be successful. It hasn’t simply tweaked the team this season so much as completely reorganise it in a way that it thinks will be most efficient at turning theoretical ideas into real performance on the track.
That in itself is a positive and important sign. The team’s step backwards this year has been obviously disappointing, and a lack of action would have been demoralising not only for fans but for investors and personnel too.
Big signings like these can be morale boosters even before they’re capable of delivering on the track.
Meanwhile, the first steps tangible steps towards recovery will appear on the car next month.
The team said earlier this year that it was preparing a B-spec car for before the mid-season break — Stella has said it will be in time for the British Grand Prix, per Speedcafe — and that another significant upgrade package will arrive in the second half of the campaign.
Of course work on at least the first upgrade package will have begun before the team was restructured, and even now the new structure isn’t complete given both Marshall and Sanchez, two of the three key technical heads, won’t start work until January.
But the team’s engineering depth will be tested by these first steps in turning the ship around.
It’ll be an arduous journey, but Aston Martin has shown it doesn’t have to be quite as long as it used to be.
