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Otmar Szafnauer Has a Plan for Aston Martin Racing

Photo credit: Bryn Lennon - Getty Images
Photo credit: Bryn Lennon - Getty Images

Otmar Szafnauer has been with the team currently known as Aston Martin through ten drivers, three names changes, and a very complicated change of ownership. In that time, he has taken the team that was once Racing Point, Force India, Spyker, and Jordan F1 to its first win since the 1990s and secured four championship finishes inside the top five. Perhaps more importantly, he has kept the team out of the bottom three every season he has been there. It is a strong resume, but not what Aston Martin is looking for. New team owner Lawrence Stroll has championship aspirations within the next five years, so Szafnauer has been tasked with building a serious contender. With a cost cap introduced in 2021 and a new set of regulations forcing every team to design completely new cars for 2022, he might just have a chance.

In a roundtable discussion with American motorsports press ahead of this weekend's United States Grand Prix,, Szafnauer talked about the specific changes the team is making to build toward its most ambitious aspirations:

It doesn't happen overnight, you've got to put the infrastructure into place. Our factory will be done in about a year and a half. We're working on a wind tunnel, that's on just under a two year critical path. Within the new factory we'll get manufacturing facilities, better R&D facilities. In the meantime, we need to hire more talent, more like-minded individuals. When we have those things in place, that's when you'll be seeing race wins. If I had to guess, that's maybe not next year but the year after. Within that five years, about halfway through, we should be winning races, then we'll quickly learn how to put them all together and win championships.

As he stresses, catching the best in Formula 1 is more than just building a great new car with the same money and hoping you match up with Mercedes and Red Bull. Those teams have a major infrastructure advantage, one Aston Martin is just now building to match:

They've spent a lot of money in the past and put that infrastructure into place over time. That all has a big cumulative effect; you spend 50 million a year on capital expenditure a year that stuff doesn't go way. You just add to it. Better simulation facilities, better dynos, better wind tunnels or upgrading the wind tunnel, all that accumulates. Before you know it, you've got the infrastructure and all the people that can use the tools. We have to shortcut to get there. In the short term, that'll be more difficult, but in the medium term, we should start challenging them.

It's all that infrastructure that they have. For us, we're at about 575 employees and growing. We started 3 years ago at 400, and we've added. Mercedes are still at 800 to 900 employees. They have almost twice the staff, plus all the infrastructure. Now, where they spend their money and how much money they spend, that's capped, but they still within that cap have the decision-making to spend some here, spend less there. They have the infrastructure, the human resources, that we are now getting but don't yet have.

While this means that Aston Martin may not expect to fight for titles immediately, Szafnauer believes their first chance to move up is coming up quickly:

Next year. These cars were originally designed without a cost cap, the ones that you see racing now, and we froze them apart from some aero changes made by the FIA. We went to a token system, so the cars that are racing now are the remnants of spend as much as you want. Next year's car, totally different technical regs and developed under a cost cap as well as a cap where we reduced both dyno times and aerodynamic runs. That itself should bring the competition closer together, but let's see if that happens next year. It's not that far off, and I do believe, come 2022, the field will be much closer.

While Aston Martin is building its Formula 1 operation to match up with the best in the sport, it has no plans to follow McLaren's new-for-2020 business model and integrate an IndyCar operation into its existing structure:

That's something we haven't considered. I think, growing at the rate we're growing, we have plenty to do here before we say "Well, let's start looking further afield." I think our main focus, all of our resources we have now, are to do the best we can in Formula 1. Once we get to a decent level, we'll start looking elsewhere.

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