Formula 1 discusses mandatory staff rotation

Mercedes technical director James Allison says discussions are ongoing between the teams, the FIA ​​and Formula 1 about introducing a possible limit on the number of stages team staff can work on during the season. In theory, such a measure will reduce the number of days per year that people spend on business trips and avoid problems associated with excessive staff fatigue.

Next year’s World Cup calendar will consist of 24 stages, although as early as 2023, when there were 22, many in the paddock said the end of the season, with five Grands Prix in six weeks, was too tiring.

With pre-season testing taking place in Bahrain from February 21 to 23 and the sprint races included in the six-stage programme, the workload for the team staff will indeed be excessively high. To prevent this it is necessary to have a rotation of racing crew personnel.

Ellison confirmed that there is already discussion about the possibility of introducing a new rule, the essence of which is that the number of phases on which each employee, including team leaders, will work, could be limited. The only exception to this rule is of course racers.

“If you consider that there is still winter testing to be done and you are one of those people who travels all the time, you end up being on the road for over six months,” Ellison told the Performance Podcast. – All this is quite tiring and requires a lot of effort.

All people who work at the team base and continuously support the racing team during races also experience serious stress.

That’s why a discussion about this issue has recently started, because team budgets are limited and you can’t say, for example: “Since there are quite a few races, we should double the number of employees going on business trips to give people the opportunity to be a part of the races to miss.”

The economic reality is that it is impossible to do this within a limited budget. That is why there is already discussion behind the scenes about the possible introduction of some rules that will ease the burden on staff.

Suppose a season consists of 24 races, then no employee, with the exception of the drivers, is allowed to work on all 24 stages. For example, this number could be limited to 20 races, although I called it arbitrary. Therefore, if an employee previously spent the entire season, he can now only work in twenty stages and teams will have to look for alternative approaches to compensate for the absence of some employees in the remaining four stages of the season. This is an interesting task, and we’ll see how everyone handles it…

This will also mean that Toto Wolff, the team leader, will also have to adhere to this rule. This also applies to racing engineers, who have the closest relationship with the drivers. At four Grands Prix throughout the year, other people’s voices will be heard in the drivers’ headphones.

But we still need to determine how to properly solve all these problems.”