Otmar - It’s a great team
Shortly before the Brazilian GP Force India announced that Otmar Szafnauer had joined the team in the role of Chief Operating Officer, replacing Simon Roberts, who returns to McLaren after a year on secondment from the Woking-based outfit. The British-based American has held senior management roles at Ford, British American Racing and Honda and, as such, brings a wealth of experience to the role.
We talked to Otmar about his new job and how he sees the future.
How did your new role come about?
The first discussions were about a year ago after the team’s first season in F1. The team was looking at making some structural changes, including changing engine supplier and some personnel changes, and that’s when the discussions first started. At that time Honda had just announced they were pulling out of F1, and I was looking at where else can my skills be applied meaningfully. This team looked like they were on the path to doing what’s necessary to improve performance, and it seemed like a perfect match.
How did things progress?
On November 10 the McLaren-Mercedes drivetrain package was announced and Simon [Roberts] joined from McLaren to facilitate the partnership. At that stage, since everything was so new, the board wanted to see how the relationship would gel together. It came to September 2009 and as Simon’s secondment was nearing completion, I was asked to come to Monza and meet Dr Mallya. It came together very quickly as working closely at that level it’s more than experience that counts, it’s also personality and chemistry. It’s a great team, and Vijay is fantastic. He runs lot of businesses, but the minute he’s focussed on F1 he has instincts about what he’s talking about, and asks the right questions.
What is the biggest challenge you face?
My biggest task is to maintain this current level of performance, but it will be a very difficult thing to do as the path of improvement has been so steep already and it’s going to be much harder the higher we go. If you look back a year ago to what’s happening now, there has been a big step. This jump in performance came for a few fundamental reasons, and I don’t think you can duplicate that for the next step. Yet somehow with the resources we have, we need to keep improving. That will be looking at procedures, processes and understanding the team’s strengths and areas requiring improvement, then implementing the enhancements with the goal of improving performance.
How will you go about that?
My philosophy is before you make any changes, you have to understand what you have, otherwise you get lost. My short term steps are to deeply understand how the team works, what areas could require more resource, with the goal always of improving performance. There have been a lot of people in the industry who come in as a new management team and they make change because they think that’s the right thing to do. I’ve seen it in F1 teams, where a big company puts a new management team in: sometimes that works, but for me that’s like closing your eyes and throwing a dart! Sometimes you hit the dartboard, but not always. You should see where it is before you throw. From what I see so far the team is massively in the right direction, so it will be about honing rather than making fundamental changes.
How excited are you by your new role?
I’m very excited. It’s very different from my previous teams as the size is different. The job is the same, you have to go racing, you have to be competitive, you have to design a car, you have to build a car, you need quality control, you need a marketing group. You have to do all the same tasks, just with fewer people so that means the people you have have a wider sphere of influence. I really like this ethos as you also get satisfaction from performance when your involvement is bigger. With that comes the fact that you’ll be able to know more intimately every individual, which is a very important point when you are building a team. It is about personalities and understanding who everybody is, to make sure they work together and go in the same direction.
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