How to start a Formula 1 team

There was a time when starting a Formula 1 team was relatively straightforward. Yes, it required serious cash but nothing like today and it was at least possible, all the more so if you were an existing racing team competing in junior single-seaters or sportscar racing and seeking to make the transition to the top level. F1 teams were recognisably racing teams – maybe a few designers, a bunch of mechanics, some engineers and not much more than that. This broadly held true for decades even as teams gradually expanded.

But during the late 20th and early 21st centuries, F1 teams ceased to be simply big racing outfits and became something else entirely. The 10 teams that design, develop, build and race Grand Prix cars today are massive organisations. Even with the cost cap (don’t let the baseline figure of £135m per year fool you as there are myriad exclusions that take the real spend far beyond that) you need  a minimum of 700 people on the staff before you can think of becoming a winning team.

Yet the regulations state that just 58 ‘operational personnel’ should be on site to run the cars over race weekends, which illustrates the scale of the factory-based operations. In 1992, when Williams dominated F1 with Nigel Mansell and the legendary FW14B, it spent around £30m and employed 200 people. That was the cutting-edge, high-tech, big team of its day, yet now that budget (about £58 million in modern money) and headcount wouldn’t even scratch the surface of what’s required to get on the back of the grid, let alone anywhere near the sharp end.

Which brings us to Michael Andretti, son of racing legend Mario. Andretti Global fields cars in multiple series, most famously IndyCar, and is pushing hard for its recently announced GM-backed, Cadillac-branded project to be granted an F1 entry. It ostensibly ticks a lot of boxes, including the desired involvement of an OEM, but that doesn’t mean they should just be welcomed aboard without the bid being scrutinised in greater depth. The problem is that currently there is no formal entry process in place, though that is set to change soon.

Setting entry requirements aside for now, and supposing that Andretti had been given the green light to come into F1, say for 2026, that’s when the real work would begin. Andretti is attempting something that has only been done six times in the 21st century – creating a genuine F1 start-up team and going racing. While there have been many more new team identities, most are simply new names for the same operation. Even the famous Brawn GP fairytale, when a ‘new’ team rose from the ashes of Honda to win the championship spearheaded by Jenson Button, was the product of vast sums of money spent over the previous years.

Of those six new teams, only Haas still exists. The other five – Toyota, Super Aguri, Virgin (later Marussia/Manor), Lotus Racing (later Caterham) and HRT – are all long gone. Yet Haas is existentially reliant upon a technical partnership given Ferrari not only supplies its power unit and gearbox, but also much of the nuts-and-bolts of the car. This is thanks to F1’s regulations demanding that to be a constructor, and therefore eligible to compete, you only need to design certain key parts – most significantly the monocoque and all aerodynamic surfaces. The idea is that you must create the key performance parts yourself, but you can get the rest from elsewhere. It’s a model that is halfway to customer cars and one that allowed Haas to buck the trend and be an immediate midfield success when it appeared in 2016.

However, any new team today would need to do more than this, with the kind of technical partnership Andretti appears set to create with Alpine only an interim measure at best. The number of parts in an F1 car varies according to who you ask and how these are defined, but it’s a huge number, with the top-end figure around the 80,000 mark. Every one of those has some kind of impact on car performance, even if it’s only in terms of weight, packaging or reliability. Ideally, you’d want to design and produce many of those yourself.

That means you need not only the people to design these parts, but also to test, develop and manufacture them too. And that requires a vast number of high-end CNC machines working away to make parts to within razor-thin tolerances. Visit an F1 team’s base and there will be a shop floor packed with such kit, much of it operating all day and night, seven days a week.

You’ll need autoclaves to ‘bake’ your carbon fibre bits, composite specialists to produce the key car parts, paint shops, an electronics department, pattern shop, non-destructive testing, ideally your own state-of-the-art 60 per cent scale wind tunnel, multiple ‘shaker’ rigs, a driver-in-loop simulator, vast computing power for CFD, a strategy department capable of managing the race and assimilating countless threads of information in real-time, a design office of hundreds, a legal team, financial specialists, well-structured management, tyre specialists, mechanics, scores of engineers… The list goes on and on.

And even if you have the capability to produce a car, you still need to get everyone to work together as a team, ensure your processes and planning functions work as expected and gradually build up the vast knowledge needed to produce a quick and reliable car. F1’s best teams have their own proprietary technology and processes, for example for carbon fibre layup and even paint techniques, plus well-established partnerships with specialist technical partners and years of off-the-shelf existing designs and technology to build on.

Even to be a ‘bad’ F1 team, for example Williams, you must do all of this at least well. In 2022, the Williams FW44 was on average only two seconds off the pace. That’s still a seriously quick car, its disadvantage being the aggregation of endless small deficits and weaknesses that will take years to claw back compared to F1’s pacesetters even if everything is done perfectly.

None of this is a reason to deny new teams the opportunity to come into F1. But it does illustrate just how far you must go compared to the days when a small group of, say, a few dozen people could produce respectable cars straight out of the box. Last year, Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff said a new team would need to spend $1bn to have a chance of emerging as a frontrunner over time.

That includes the famous $200m ‘anti-dilution’ fee that is effectively a buy-in, given that a new team will force the existing ones to accept a reduced share of the same pot. But most of it is just brute-force spending on facilities, people and equipment. That’s because today’s F1 teams are like miniature industrial conglomerates of countless interconnected departments – only a few of which have been mentioned above – needing to work in close harmony to get anywhere near the pace.

Any new team has to be closely scrutinised. Even an organisation like Andretti, which has enjoyed huge success in IndyCar and multiple other categories, cannot immediately be waved aboard, even with GM’s backing.

And if Andretti is allowed onto the grid, which it unquestionably should be provided everything is as presented, that’s where the hard work really starts: becoming a credible presence in F1 and standing on its own two feet season after season is where the real challenge lies.