maygun wrote: ↑30 Jul 2025, 17:59
mclaren_mircea wrote: ↑16 Jul 2025, 12:10
ralphster7 wrote: ↑10 Jul 2025, 17:28
James McKenzie Senior Aerodynamicist, Mercedes -> Principal Aerodynamicist, Williams
When it will stop??? We can downplay it but reading the last 10 pages on this thread Mercedes is losing by far the most senior engineers compared to the other top teams. Ferrari and Red Bull to had big organisation but it is nowhere this bleeding. The 1200 employees before the budget cap it is only sand in the eyes because many of them are from Brixworth not Brackley. The key to understand their difficulties is here, in this informations, not correlation, wind tunnel, or slow thinking. They go for cheap yound engineers or they pride with arrogance that they can promote from within. That ,,within" is not enough and they should be more humble. In the first years or of the next regulation all this problems will be masked by the superior engine and the better integration compared to other engine car or with their own customers. But they will be gradually caught when the others will build better chassis, better suspension systems, better aerodynamic platforms.
Toto runs the team as a company; he is a businessman first, not a sportsman. As long as the team is in the green, he wouldn't care too much about winning, hence not caring about recruiting top talent.
Personally, I think that’s a very narrow view. Every top team, across decades, has struggled with losing top talent.
Highly talented people often seek new challenges — whether it’s to grow their skills, experience a different environment, make a lifestyle change, or due to personal reasons like relocating. It’s normal. People move on for a wide variety of reasons.
Mercedes isn’t the first, the only, or the last top team to face this challenge. They've simply enjoyed a long run with exceptional talent, and now it’s part of the natural cycle that some of those people are moving on.
As for the idea that Toto Wolff isn’t interested in sporting achievement — that’s laughable. He’s every bit as competitive as any other team principal. He just expresses it in his own way — and if you’ve paid attention over the years, that approach has delivered huge success.
One more thing worth mentioning is the budget cap. One of its key purposes was to stop the biggest teams from hoarding all the top talent and locking others out. Before, a top team could afford to stack its entire organisation with the best people across every department. Now, under the cap, teams have to make tough decisions. You can’t have a massive design department and still maintain depth everywhere else. This forces teams to spread talent more evenly and opens up opportunities for others — ultimately making the grid more competitive... Which we are seeing
