Franz Tost: Sometimes employees have to be fired

AlphaTauri started the season weakly, but they unexpectedly improved in the last Grand Prix. The leader, Franz Tost, who left the team, spoke in an interview with the official website about the reasons…

Franz Tost: “It all started in 2022, when the regulations changed and we chose the wrong direction for the development of aerodynamics. I realized this in March or April. I went to HR and told the HR manager that we needed three to five senior aerodynamics engineers.

I talked to our engineers, it seemed like they were lost in the new rules, so I decided to replace them.

You have to change people, because engineers will never admit that they have gone in the wrong direction. They will always have excuses, they will say that the next update will be better, and then even better. I didn’t want to hear this nonsense anymore.

We were looking for new people and luckily we found them. But here too a problem arose: employee contracts always included mandatory vacation, so we had to wait.

As a result, we received our first new employee in April 2023, the second in July and the third in September. It was important for me to see if they could steer the team in the right direction. I insisted on updating every race to find out if they were doing well.

In the end, the new products worked, which I was happy with. The team can count on better results next year.”