McLaren first cut staff and is now increasing

At McLaren, they began to strengthen the engineering corps, because in an attempt to fit within the current financial constraints, the team overdid it a bit, reducing staff, and this led to undesirable consequences.

It should be emphasized that McLaren management has been extremely active in supporting the transition to constrained budgets, and in 2020, in preparation for this, the team started reducing the number of technical workers. However, in two seasons it turned out that miscalculations had been made, which must now be corrected.
“I am very pleased that we launched an important initiative two months ago: you may have seen the announcements that we are hiring new staff to significantly strengthen the engineering department,” Andreas Seidl, McLaren team principal, quoted The Race. – It took a lot of work on a detailed analysis of the financial side of the team’s work, to find opportunities to improve the efficiency of the other divisions and thus free up the resources needed to increase the workforce.

Probably all teams had similar problems when they had to downsize due to the transition to limited budgets. In the end, you need to accurately determine the size and structure of the team, but at the same time avoid overspending, which is especially difficult in the first years of work in conditions of financial constraints.

That’s exactly what we did as we prepared for the transition to a constrained budget in 2021, and it turned out to be painful as we had to lay off some people. But when we handled it in the early stages, it was quite normal for the team to look for internal efficiency reserves, which would free up certain funds.

McLaren Racing CEO Zack Brown began a massive reorganization of the team in 2019, while at the same time it was led by Andreas Seidl. But last season turned out to be his worst ever, as he manages a team from Woking: according to the results of the 2022 championship, McLaren took 5th place in the Constructors’ Championship, losing not only to Red Bull Racing, Ferrari and Mercedes, but also to Red Bull Racing, Ferrari and Mercedes. also to Alpine.

The construction of a new wind tunnel and a new modern simulator should not be completed until 2023, and to some extent this will help create the 2024 chassis, but these critical tools can be used with maximum efficiency already in development of the car in 2025. However, not the most perfect infrastructure is not the only problem the team has to solve.

“When we ask ourselves where exactly the miscalculations were made, we always have to admit that they weren’t just in one area,” said Zach Brown. – Have we distributed our resources, including personnel, properly, have we distributed our time and attention correctly? Or was it just a mistake we all made together?

We have to analyze all this in hindsight, when we try to understand what led us to such results. I think we are all just learning to work with limited budgets. The same goes for Red Bull – I don’t think they deliberately went into cost overruns…”