Who are they and what do they do?

Want to become a Formula 1 team principal? Well, current evidence would suggest that if you’re white, male, somewhere between 50 and 70 and German is your home language, you’ll walk straight into a job.
Okay, so perhaps it’s not the most diverse group of individuals heading up the 10 teams that currently make up the Formula 1 field. But at least there are no fixed CV requirements for landing one of these coveted but challenging roles.

As you’ll find out in this article, it’s good to have an engineering background and a knowledge of how teams run – but former racers, skilled management types and hard-nosed businesspeople are also desirable. And it would appear that if you’re all of the above, you’ll go far in the team leadership game.
Let’s meet who have done exactly that – and take a closer look at what they do.

What is a team principal in F1?

In simple terms, the team principal is the boss of a Formula 1 team. In some languages – notably German, which six of the current set speak at home – ‘boss’ is effectively the word they use as job title. As such, the team principal’s position is clear enough. The buck usually stops with them as far as the Formula 1 team’s performance is concerned.

There was a time when team principals and owners/founders were often one and the same – think Colin Chapman (Lotus), Bruce McLaren or – most enduringly – Frank Williams. They might also have happened to design the car (Chapman), work on it in the pits (Williams) or drive it (McLaren). Nowadays, team principals don’t get their hands dirty, much less drive. They’re typically hired employees. They may hold shares, but that’s it as far as it goes in terms of ownership.

The fact that modern team principals are hired reflects the reality that F1 teams no longer operate in isolation. In some cases, they’re part of a wider organisation with which they share skills, people, premises and history – Ferrari being the classic example here. Red Bull Racing, on the other hand, is an example of a team owned by an entity from an entirely different world. Between these two extremes, there’s a range of ‘governance’ set-ups. But it suffices to say that F1 team principals all have bosses. Bosses who want a return in terms of results.

What does an F1 team principal do?

The one thing every F1 team principal does is serve as the public face of the team. They give endless…