Aston Martin joins Horner: 'Major concern'

All Formula 1 teams face a budget limit, so that also means that the racing teams have to be creative in terms of staff size. You can't just give engineers more salary, but you don't want to lose your best people either. Aston Martin agrees that it is a difficult puzzle to put together.

Ambitious engineers want to move up and at some point, they demand more pay. Aston Martin itself benefited from this initially by poaching quite a few employees from Mercedes and Red Bull Racing, but they too come to a point where certain trade-offs have to be made about how the salary house and the size of the workforce are set up.

Team boss Mike Krack himself at Auto, Motor und Sport, for example, cites that they also face the choice of whether to go for one person with a great track record or five guys who have only just graduated. "Those are very heated discussions we have about that. Of course, you always have to be careful: You always build a house with the foundation first. Those are the graduates."

More and more F1 engineers choose other job

Krack argues that graduates are the future and that they are often very capable young people. "We have these discussions, and we don't always agree," he agrees. The Luxembourger is particularly concerned that more and more engineers are taking up a challenge outside Formula 1 because they can earn more there. Not only Aston Martin is concerned about this, Christian Horner also raised it in a meeting with the F1 Commission the other day.

It is now up to the FIA to investigate any possibilities. For Krack, it is a "big concern" that more and more engineers are going to work in other industries.