mclaren_mircea wrote: ↑07 Mar 2024, 17:16
Mercedes built a strong engineering team when they poached Costa, Lowe, Willis, Bob Bell, Phil Prewh, Allison. And all of them are gone now despite the fact that all of them are younger than Newey. They are moaning that they are lost for the third year but they wont get to far with some young engineer from Williams or Sauber. You need the best. No matter how much costs.
Absolutely insane the amount of former TDs Ross Brawn had at Mercedes heading into 2014.
And that's ignoring the Honda/Brawn era guys who were still there.
maygun wrote: ↑12 Mar 2024, 21:21
gshevlin wrote: ↑07 Mar 2024, 23:20
The progressive application of the cost cap is resulting in a move of engineers from the best funded teams to the less funded teams. Teams like Mercedes were spending more money on staff than allowed by the cost cap, so they have been letting some staff go. If they end up at a Mercedes- supplied team, that would be the best outcome.
This does make sense to some extent. RB, Ferrari and Mercedes were spending probably around the same amount before the cost cap. While Mercedes lost a lot of their big names to other teams, RB and Ferrari did not. Either RB and Ferrari found better loopholes to keep their staff, or Merc does not care anymore to be in the top game. Whenever I check career websites for the teams Merc has none to few openings while RB and Ferrari have positions listed all the time.
Ferrari, even before the cost cap Ferrari had the habit of loaning engineers to Haas and Sauber/Alfa(that door is closed now.
And they did move a lot of F1 staff into Le Mans and other projects which is no doubt better than losing several engineers.
Even if those guys don't work on the F1 car directly they still can bounce ideas on them in the cafeteria which is a positive.