Complaining about too many GPs? Franz Tost finds it 'a joke'

With as many as 24 Grands Prix, the 2024 season will be fuller than ever. Several teams and drivers have already expressed how tough it is to complete so many races under immense pressure in all corners of the world. Franz Tost, who stepped down as AlphaTauri team boss after the Abu Dhabi GP, does not understand why people complain about a busy calendar.

Franz Tost, now 67, calls complaining about too many races "a joke". In GP Racing magazine, he takes as an example the curfew at every race weekend, which requires mechanics to be in their hotels by 9 or 10 o'clock in the evening. Things were quite different in Tost's early years in Formula 1.

"In the old days at BWM, we changed an engine every day. On Friday we had the Friday engine, then the qualifying engine and then the race engine. And we never got back to our hotel before 1 or 2am. That was normal. And at 6 or 7 in the morning we had to get up and go to the track. Nobody complained," said the Austrian.

Burnout? According to Tost, at the time nobody knew what that was. "People didn't know what that was. The real people still don't know what it is. Burnout is for lazy people. The real people who like to work don't have it."

According to Tost, 23 or 24 races should be the maximum number per year anyway because employees of his (former) team are sometimes away from home for three or four weeks at a time. "For myself, that's absolutely no problem. But there are others. The mechanics have days off after each race weekend, but the engineers have less leisure time," Tost realises. "They come back after a race, analyse everything and prepare for the next race. And if they have family at home, that's a different story."