venkyhere wrote: ↑13 Sep 2025, 07:33
f1isgood wrote: ↑12 Sep 2025, 23:50
You are overstating the amount of technical knowledge that a single person has in a team. Mekies will have to be a special one to have anywhere near as much success as Horner had on track.
You misunderstood what I meant.
Of course, no single person can have knowledge of all the minute details of any moderately complex technological product, forget an F1 car.
What I meant was - regarding the four broad aspects of an F1 car - powertrain, chassis, aero, operations/strategy , having a TP with engineering knowledge will allow him to better judge whether a proposal/idea falls in the category of possible/remotely-possible/absolute-BS/cartoonish etc. This is important, look what happened to Mercedes in the ground effect era. Look how Mclaren transformed once the changes were made at the apex of the technical org, and how Brown isn't the TP. Look how Redbull peaked in the early part of ground effect era, when Newey was in such a 'calling the shots' position. Time is very costly in this budget cap era of F1, so 'getting the calls atleast reasonably correct the first time itself' is more important than ever before. There isn't room to experiment, so not getting blindsided by any one department with an overtly optimistic proposal is important. The TP should be able to decide 'hmm.. maybe X is overestimating his teams ability'. Redbull had Newey in such a role, beside Horner (during both successful and non-successful eras) and that is an important reason for the hit-rate of this team.
It remains to be seen, how good Mekies is, in making such direction calls. Being an engineer is helpful, but not a guarantee. That was my point.
I think I disagree with you on basically most of the points as I think it ignores several aspects. But that's okay as we can all agree to disagree.
Red Bull, Mercedes and Ferrari were all going to the budget cap era with oversized teams, having to necessarily cut people and not expand as much. McLaren expanded during the budget cap era. This meant they could overpay for good people from other teams. Of course having people is only one aspect but putting things together is important and McLaren did that after failing for a good while. Again, I would give due credit to Stella but I would argue his role was much more minimal and what was important was Brown getting the right people and them taking time to put things together.
Mercedes essentially went down a completely different route to everyone else and that meant more undoing than everyone else. I think they spent more time ending up where others ended up a couple of years earlier and with all due respect, they are basically within the same ballpark as Red Bull/Ferrari in half the races. That's not too bad. It's just that when you start behind, it's much harder to chase the final few tenths. I also think they had the biggest brain drain of all teams and that had begun much earlier. From 17-21 they had to more or less iterate the designs to a certain degree, barring the front wing changes of 19 that they benefitted from -- so their relative drop in technical prowess wasn't that visible given they also had an engine advantage. I'd argue their aero team was tested only really in 22 and they got it wrong.
I don't think Newey was calling the shots and at least hasn't called most of the shots since 2018. Newey of course has fantastic experience the engineers draw from but I seriously doubt Newey's expertise is all that is central to a 1000 people team. In that case the team might as well downsize and just pay Newey 100m. You can see what Newey himself has to say about his role in his direct interviews with Mark Hughes from mid 2022. He's just there and if engineers want they'll use his expertise. He had essentially grown beyond most of the technical team's ideation stage. It's also hard to quantify the role he has - but I'd give credit where it's due - to the technical team outside of Newey mostly.
We have 0 evidence that Mekies can make a successful team. I hope for his sake that he can. But nothing we know so far shows anything of that kind but I'll leave this discussion to 2026.
Call a spade, a spade.
