Red Bull F1 team boss Christian Horner says it was painful for him and his team to say goodbye to some people due to budget cap that took effect this year.
As of this year, the teams have limited budgets of $ 145 million per year that do not include driver salaries, the top three paid managers and marketing activities, and the the three biggest teams had to make most cuts – Mercedes, Red Bull and Ferrari.
McLaren and Renault, which was renamed Alpine this year, had to make only minor cuts, and the other teams did not feel the budget cup which should lead to more even competition in the coming years.
Some teams have managed to relocate some of their employees to other departments, so Ferrari has relocated some of its people to Haas and to a new racing program for Le Mans to which they return in 2023.
Mercedes’ Toto Wolff says his team has just under 1,000 people while McLaren’s Zak Brown said McLaren’s F1 programme employs just over 800 people.
Horner admits there are about 800 people in his team, but that they had to reduce the head count last winter to cut costs.
“We’re at about 800 people,” Horner said.
“But we have a lot of activities where, for example, we deliver gearboxes to Toro Rosso [AlphaTauri] so these people are included in that number as well.”
“We had to go through a painful process of reducing the number of people over the winter, we had to change our size and it’s really hard to say goodbye to some people some of whom have been here for 25 years [under previous team names like Jaguar and Stewart].”
“It was a really tough process and continues to be a significant challenge, especially for bigger teams.”
“The number of people is your biggest expense. That’s why we need to be as efficient as possible.”