Mekies: We will close the Bicester base, it will move to Milton Keynes

Laurent Mekies, head of the Visa RB team, confirmed that the Bicester, UK, facility will be closed and the aerodynamics department based there will move to a new building in Milton Keynes.

This facility has been operating since 2009, while the team’s main base is in Faenza, Italy. But Mekis, together with Visa RB CEO Peter Bayer, plan to reorganize the team, including plans to seek closer technical cooperation with Red Bull Racing.

“It’s simple: in Faenza we have an excellent, well-equipped base, and Franz Tost has done a great job modernizing it. In my opinion, this base was built in 2015 or 2016,” RacingNews365 quotes Mekis. “We believe this will allow the team to fully grow and develop, but what we currently have in Bicester does not suit us in terms of infrastructure.

Historically it was a very small building, and we have outgrown it, although we continue to work there because we use our wind tunnel. But now that will change. We have decided that this branch will be closed; in fact this is our aerodynamics department. The specialists who develop the chassis concept, as well as employees who perform several other functions, are also located there.

In place of the old site, we are building a completely new base in Milton Keynes next to the Red Bull campus, and it will be a beautiful modern facility – the same standard as our base in Faenza. The plan is for our staff to move from Bicester to Milton Keynes as the new buildings will allow us to organize work more efficiently. We will be able to invite new engineers if, regardless of their previous experience, they want to work in Britain.

These may be racing engineers, simulator specialists, aerodynamicists or design engineers. It seems to us that it is quite possible to organize one department, even if our employees work in two different places.

Historically this has been considered a disadvantage in Formula 1, and there aren’t many successful examples of this approach to organizing work, that we know. But we believe that the world has changed a lot since then, and this is not just about technology, it also applies to people’s psychological mood. We will try to make our new approach effective, and we think we can turn it into an advantage.

We have people who want to live and work in Italy, and we have staff who want to stay in Britain, and we will try to ensure that this is our strength, not our weakness.”