What’s triggered F1’s team boss merry-go-round?

Just look at how Sebastian Vettel’s decision to retire before F1’s summer break set off a chain of events that ended up with Fernando Alonso at Aston Martin, Pierre Gasly at Alpine and Nyck de Vries at AlphaTauri (and that’s ignoring the Oscar Piastri to McLaren shenanigans).

What is much rarer is for this kind of crazy merry-go-round to involve Formula 1 team principals to the extent it has this week.

While movement of top brass is not uncommon in F1 – as Otmar Szafnauer’s switch from Aston Martin to Alpine last winter showed – the fact that four teams are going to have new team bosses next season is pretty extreme.

In fact, it’s hard to recall a day as crazy as this, where Ferrari confirming a new team principal in Fred Vasseur was overshadowed by the shock of McLaren losing Andreas Seidl and promoting Andrea Stella to replace him.

While this week’s changes at Ferrari, Alfa Romeo, McLaren and Williams are all the consequence of slightly different circumstances, there is one common theme that unites them: it’s that in F1’s cost cap era, the buck stops at the team boss like never before.

There was a time, even as recent as a few years ago, when one of the key roles of the team principals was to go to the company board, or parent car manufacturer, and try to extract the funding needed to get the proper job done.

And, if the desire was to move up the grid, turn around a potential decline, or address getting a car concept wrong, then the best way to get things sorted was to ask for another cheque to be written so that a team could spend its way to better performance.

Those days are long gone now though. With the budget cap in place, F1 is no longer a spending competition where mistakes can be covered up with extra cash.

Instead what matters now is being efficient, being disciplined, having a proper plan in place and, above all else, being smart.

Finite budgets, which are equal up and down the grid, mean there is also no longer the means to hide behind the excuse that rivals are only doing better because they have got bigger budgets.

Everyone has now got the same. So mess it up, and it’s only your own fault.

In contemporary F1, team principals have more responsibility than ever for whether or not ambitions on track have been achieved.

In Jost Capito’s case, Williams had not delivered on the progress that owner…