Fernando Alonso jokes it was tougher to negotiate contracts in the past due to strong F1 team bosses unlike now where it is engineers at the top.
The last few seasons has seen a jump on F1 teams naming team principals from engineering background or more from the technical side rather than people from business or commercial sector. Out of the 11 teams, seven outfits have someone from engineering or mechanical side as team leaders.
McLaren was the first F1 team to take the step in recent changes, when they named Andrea Stella as team principal in 2022. Williams followed by hiring James Vowles, as Haas promoted Ayao Komatsu. And then Laurent Mekies joined Visa Cash App RB and Jonathan Wheatley moved to Audi (Sauber).
Mekies then moved to Red Bull last year and Alan Permane replaced him, while Adrian Newey was named Aston Martin’s boss from F1 2026 onward. It is a shift in F1 which has been a more recent phenomenon, and one which has delivered results as well.
Naturally, it has its pros and cons, where F1 teams have to secure a second hand to distribute the workload. For Alonso, he feels the sport has move towards performance and data, which is why the strong personalities of leaders is not as much needed to showcase that extra edge.
He joked that contract negotiations has become a tad easier than in the past where they had stronger personalities, who were good with the commercial numbers and harder to convince. He reckons Aston Martin has a good mix, with Lawrence Stroll playing a big role on the commercial end.
“It is different, yeah, no doubts [from before],” said Alonso to media. “But the sport is different, and the world is different. So everything is more about performance now, trying to make perfection every weekend. The car is run by thousands of simulations and perfect setups and these kind of things, so there is less intuition into the things we do on the weekend.
“Everything is driven by data and things like that and the teams as well. I think in the past, you have to deal with strong personalities, and each of them were different, with Montezemolo or Flavio or Eddie Jordan or Ron Dennis. So maybe it was tougher to negotiate your contracts. Now it’s more about numbers and data and things like that.
“In our team, I think we are lucky because we balance the two of those things. We have great technical leaders, but at the same time we have a very strong commercial team, we have our sponsors, and we have Lawrence on top of that, who is still one of the old characters and the passion of racing is still in his blood. It’s not only data. It’s a fun team to be in at the moment,” summed up Alonso.
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