05/04/2021
NEWS STORY
Christian Horner has admitted that 'losing' members of staff in order to meet the budget cap was "tough" and caused the team "pain".
As teams struggled to meet the budget cap finally introduced this year it was obvious that among those to be hit the hardest would be personnel.
It's what happens on Sunday that matters, and in their efforts to have the fastest, most reliable car it is understandable that when it comes to allocating where your $145m should be spent it is on updates, development and the like.
As a result in order to have as much available for the fight that lies ahead, a number of teams have had to make staff cuts, and while some have been able to move personnel to other divisions this has still resulted in redundancies.
According to Toto Wolff, Mercedes has "a little bit south of 1000 people", while Zak Brown numbers McLaren's personnel at "a little north of 800".
At Red Bull, in order to meet the financial target, Christian Horner admits that some tough decisions had to be made.
"We're in the 800s," he admits, "but we have so many activities as well where we supply, for example, a gearbox to Toro Rosso (sic), so those manufacturing staff are included within that number.
"Actually bespoke, working on the team?" he continues, having been asked how headcount compares to before, "if you... we would probably be at a similar number now...
"We've had to go through the pain of redundancies over the winter, we've had to re-size, re-package ourselves and it's really tough when you're saying goodbye to members of the team, some of which have been there for 25 years across its different formats.
"So it's been really been a tough exercise and continues to be a significant challenge, particularly for the bigger teams.
"It drives efficiency into the business because it quite simply has to. Head count is your biggest cost. Therefore it has to be as efficient as you can possibly make it."