Why are F1 teams not wary of moving team bosses?

With the departure of Mattia Binotto at Ferrari, a silly season began among F1 team bosses for the 2023 season. Frédéric Vasseur and Andreas Seidl are making a move to a rival team at very short notice. In the case of team bosses, why is it so easy?

F1 team bosses move freely

The reason why this is remarkable is because when personnel are exchanged between F1 teams, care is often taken to transfer confidential information. The engineer from one team can take his know-how and sensitive information from his team to the other, and that can be a bad thing in the sports world. The team the engineer moves to thus has an unfair advantage.

So what about the game of musical chairs of team bosses that took place this week? Can't these team bosses provide important 'inside information' to the new team they will be working for? Binotto is out the door at Ferrari from 2023, with Alfa Romeo team boss Frédéric Vasseur taking over his spot at the Scuderia. McLaren team boss Andreas Seidl was due to move to Audi-Sauber from 2026, but has now brought forward his move by three years. The hole at McLaren left by Seidl will be filled from within by Andrea Stella.

Brown allows Seidl to leave McLaren 'just like that'

In this situation, Seidl is the most interesting move to watch. Vasseur makes a big step up with the move to Ferrari and it is doubtful that the Scuderia has much use for Alfa Romeo's confidential information; Alfa is precisely Ferrari's customer. With Seidl, it would be better to wonder what the German brings to Alfa. Seidl was part of rebuilding McLaren after the disastrous years with Honda and he made McLaren the fourth team on the grid. In 2022, McLaren struggled against Alpine, yet Alfa Romeo was beaten by McLaren by a whopping 104 points difference. The team of Valtteri Bottas and Guanyu Zhou has a lot to gain from Seidl's know-how.

Yet McLaren did not seem to care and CEO Zak Brown decided that Seidl may make the switch to Sauber as early as next year without 'gardening leave'. And that is striking, because in recent years, in particular, this term has resurfaced more often. In major personnel moves from Mercedes to Red Bull Racing and from Red Bull Racing to Aston Martin in the past two years, the teams and the F1 world more often drew the card that unfair advantages had been gained from the personnel changes.

Does gardening leave only affect engineers?

Gardening leave means that employees are not allowed to be active with the current team prior to their move to the other side. The reason is that these employees do not have the latest information and the information they do still have from the team is outdated by the time they make the move. Brown decided that Seidl could go immediately without 'gardening leave' because he maintained a good relationship with his colleague and granted him the new challenge.

One of the more recent big moments where the 'gardening leave measure' was widely publicised was around Poland's Marcin Budkowski, who joined Renault F1 Team as an FIA engineer in 2018. There was a surprised reaction on the grid to the move of the FIA engineer who had gained many insights from the various F1 teams since 2014 at the umbrella body as technical coordinator and later as technical director. It resulted in an interesting discussion between the teams and the FIA.

McLaren breaks with F1 custom

Perhaps it is that team bosses are not as deep into the business as engineers and cannot copy winning tricks one-to-one. In any case, McLaren seems to be breaking a long-standing custom in F1. Brown is not worried now, where it was in the past two years. Red Bull Racing showed unwillingness to simply hand over aerodynamics expert Dan Fallows to Aston Martin in 2021. The Briton did get nine months' gardening leave and did not start at Aston Martin until April 2022. The same applied to the Mercedes employees who were snatched away by Red Bull to work on the Red Bull Powertrains. Ben Hodgkinson was approached in 2021 but could only start at Red Bull in May 2022 and was also not allowed to be involved with Mercedes in the meantime.

McLaren, in letting Seidl go, is taking a leading role in breaking the use of gardening leave. Appointing new staff with this system does not seem to benefit anyone; the team where the engineer in question is currently employed is disadvantaged and the new team still has to wait for the reinforcement. But the fact that this game of musical chairs among team bosses happened very last minute in 2022, right around the time when the new F1 cars are almost - and therefore just barely - finalised, may still make it a precarious situation. Should the ever-strengthening Sauber suddenly be even stronger next year, McLaren should stand tall and not point the finger at Seidl, but instead stand behind the choice it has now made.