Why F1 team principal sackings now resemble football managers' revolving doors

New York Times

7 days ago

Christian Horner's shock departure from Red Bull Racing last Wednesday ended the longest tenure of any Formula One team principal from the current field.
Horner had been in charge of Red Bull's F1 operation for more than 20 years. Horner's fierce rival, Toto Wolff, who took charge of Mercedes 12 years ago, now claims the title of longest-tenured team principal.
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But after Wolff, it's Andrea Stella, who has been in charge of McLaren's race operations for less than three years.
In less than eight months, half of the grid has experienced a change in team principal, marking a significant change in F1's leadership landscape. The time allotted for results to be delivered is growing shorter and shorter, more akin to the managerial merry-go-round seen in football than a sport such as F1, where turning a team around is hardly the work of a moment.
Yet time is not a plentiful currency in F1, especially in the current era where the performance gaps between teams are finer than ever and underperformance is felt all the more acutely. Unlike past decades, few seats atop the pit wall are guaranteed for long.
At the start of 2020, F1's roster of 10 teams had, for the most part, long-serving and well-entrenched leaders heading up their teams.
Wolff and Horner's long tenures were not outliers. Franz Tost had been at the helm of AlphaTauri (now Racing Bulls) since its debut in 2006. Claire Williams had been hands-on leading her family team on a day-to-day basis since 2013. Otmar Szafnauer (then Racing Point), Guenther Steiner (Haas) and Fred Vasseur (Sauber) were all years into those roles and a big part of the identities of all those teams.
Of the 10 team principals (or equivalent role, looking after day-to-day operations) that led a squad into the delayed 2020 season, only one — Wolff — remains in the same position. The only other person who was in charge of a team in 2020 and still is today is Vasseur, who left Sauber at the end of 2022 to take over at Ferrari for the 2023 season. Mattia Binotto, who was Ferrari's team principal in 2020, remains in a senior F1 role as the CEO of Sauber amid its evolution into Audi for 2026.
A notable shift in the make-up of F1's team principals has been toward those with a background in engineering. Red Bull's decision to replace Horner with Laurent Mekies is just the latest step in that trend. Of the 10 team principals in 2020, only two — Andreas Seidl and Binotto — came from something of an engineering background. Now, nine of them are, with Wolff the main exception. Vasseur, although a trained engineer, has not held any F1 engineering posts.
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There has also been an uptick in the number of team principal changes throughout the grid. From 2018 to 2020, there was only one change per year, occurring at McLaren, Ferrari and Williams. Since then, there have been at least two changes in leadership per year, rocketing to six in 2022 and already reaching five in the first six and a half months of 2025.
Team principals moving from one F1 squad to another do raise this figure a small amount, such as Szafnauer going from Aston Martin to Alpine ahead of 2022, or Mekies' current move from Racing Bulls to Red Bull. But teams rather than individuals have instigated the majority of changes in this period.
Horner's exit was the end of an era for Red Bull. Having been appointed to oversee its debut season in 2005 after Red Bull purchased the ailing Jaguar team at the end of 2004, working under Horner is all that most at the Milton Keynes factory will likely have ever known.
The departure of such a long-serving figurehead is one that a handful of other teams have also experienced in recent years. The Williams family's decision to sell its team to Dorilton Capital in the summer of 2020 led to Claire Williams stepping away from her role, while Tost's retirement at the end of 2023 brought about change at Racing Bulls.
Over the past 15 years, F1 team principals have also largely moved away from boardroom involvement or shareholdings in the squad companies. They are now more typically direct employees.
The times when Frank Williams or Ron Dennis would be calling the shots at Williams and McLaren, with their own money invested, are essentially a thing of the past. The exception — again — is Wolff, who owns one-third of Mercedes. As powerful and entrenched as Horner was at Red Bull, serving as a director of its F1 companies, he was always an employee. This meant that once the shareholders decided his time was up, they could opt to, as they framed it, release him from his operational duties.
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The result is a paddock that now shuffles its team bosses with brisk precision — their futures dictated less by long-term stewardship than by near-term results.
The main underlying desire behind changing an F1 team principal is to bring about performance improvement on the track. The old cliche that the stopwatch never lies rings true, particularly in Horner's case. Red Bull winning papered over the growing cracks at that team. Its on-track struggles throughout the year meant they became too great to ignore.
Ferrari has long operated on this principle. Since the team last won a championship in 2008, it has gone through five team principals. Change has beeb implemented whenever it considered results unsatisfactory. Stefano Domenicali resigned early in 2014 after a disastrous start to the season, after five years in the role; Maurizio Arrivabene and Binotto both delivered wins, but never championships. Vasseur, in his third season, now faces pressure with Ferrari winless to date in 2025.
But many teams recognize that a team principal needs time for their changes to take root. By far the most successful recent example of this is Stella, who, upon taking charge at McLaren in December 2022, made clear the team would struggle early in 2023 after missing its previous development targets. But once he was able to make changes and set the direction of the team, its results swung upwards — leading it to last year's constructors' title and looking bound for both championships in 2025.
F1 team owners know this takes time, but they also lack exhaustive patience. Williams didn't see a positive change in direction under Jost Capito, prompting the team to bring in James Vowles for 2023 instead. His leadership has been heralded as a great success. Aston Martin's F1 CEO, Andy Cowell, took on team principal duties from Mike Krack in January as part of an internal restructuring amid that team's downturn in performance. The revolving door at Alpine has stemmed from not only changes at the top of its Renault parent company and shifting desires in what the French manufacturer wants from its F1 team, but also from Alpine's struggle to join F1's front-runners.
It speaks to the ruthlessness that has always been part of F1, regardless of history.
Steiner helped Gene Haas set up his eponymous F1 team in 2016, only to be informed on the phone while at the supermarket in 2023 that his services would no longer be required. Both parties felt they'd be better off without one another. Steiner has since established a bustling media career, while Haas enjoyed its best season for six years under his replacement, Ayao Komatsu, in 2024.
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For all of the change that has taken place in the F1 team principal market over recent years, all 10 teams naturally hope they won't need to make another swap anytime soon.
Some have made firm commitments to their existing bosses — rewarding the stability and success they have brought. Stella secured a new long-term McLaren contract at the end of last year, while Williams moved to lock in Vowles last month. Both are successfully building these teams in their visions.
There are also early positive signs from Komatsu at Haas and Jonathan Wheatley at Sauber, with the latter only taking up his role in April after a long stint at Red Bull as sporting director, but already helping snare an unlikely podium with Nico Hülkenberg at Silverstone last time out. In both cases, there's plenty of time to build things up.
The same will be true for incoming Alpine managing director Steve Nielsen, who will oversee the day-to-day running of the team and report to its executive advisor, Flavio Briatore. Now that Alpine is onto its sixth team principal (or equivalent) in five years, stability is greatly needed.
In taking over at Red Bull, Mekies has a mighty job on his hands, given the length of Horner's tenure and the loyalty felt toward him from within that team. But there is a trust in place, with Red Bull motorsport advisor Helmut Marko writing in his column for Speed Week that Mekies was a 'natural fit' to take over. Again, time will be given.
These things move in cycles. Similar to how F1's driver market exploded in 2024 after a dormant 2023, it may enter a period of calm and some semblance of security for the current team principals, with so many new figures now in charge. The downward swing after 2022's flurry of changes serves as proof that we may get less movement amongst this group in the near future.
But as ever in F1, the need for results remains, especially with big car design rule changes beckoning for 2026 that could come to define where success goes in the years that follow. Some time will be afforded, of course, yet that can only buy so much patience from those at the very top.
(Top photo of Christian Horner and Guenther Steiner:;)