Who was Mercedes F1’s first ‘team principal’?
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Mercedes
Mercedes are a very respected name in automotive and racing history. However, their history in Formula 1 – the pinnacle of motorsport, is rather short, but still incredibly storied. In fact, out of a total of 15 seasons competed in F1, they have won 9 Driver’s championships and 8 Constructor’s championships.
Their current team principal (and CEO, in addition to a 33% shareholder) is Toto Wolff, who is now ubiquitous with the Mercedes name and the position of a team principal. However, he is certainly not the first team principal Mercedes had. The answer of who the first-ever Mercedes team principal is…complicated. First, we go back to the start of the previous decade.
After a 55-year hiatus, Mercedes re-entered Formula 1 in 2010, through the Brawn GP team (who had won both championships in 2009), rebranding the team as the ‘Mercedes GP Petronas Formula One Team‘. Ross Brawn stayed on as the team principal. If you go by the role’s name, he is Mercedes’ first-ever team principal. However, back in the 1950s, Mercedes was managed by one Alfred Neubauer.
Neubauer was the racing manager of Mercedes from 1926 to 1955 and under him, Juan Manuel Fangio won his third and fourth championships in 1954 and 1955, respectively. 1955 also happened to be their final year in Formula 1, as the team withdrew from all factory-sponsored motorsport after the horrifying Le Mans disaster, which led to 84 deaths. Following this, Neubauer also retired from motorsport.
The state of Mercedes at present
Mercedes started 2022 with a considerable gap in performance to the top two teams – Red Bull and Ferrari. This was a surprise, to say the least, as they had won every WCC since 2014, and even in 2021, they only narrowly lost out in the Driver’s championship. However, they developed well, and bridged the gap to Ferrari, with their reliability helping them along the way.
In the second part of the season, they were on a relatively equal footing with Ferrari – who had started the season far and away superior. They had a few slim chances to win a race in the second half of the season, with the wait going on till the Brazilian Grand Prix, which was by all accounts, an almost flawless weekend for them, with a 1-2 finish for George Russell and Lewis Hamilton.
They eventually finished third in the championship – which means they will have more wind tunnel time than Ferrari, and a whole lot more than Red Bull (whose aerodynamic development time was docked by 10%). Considering the gap between the three teams is far smaller (while still significant between Red Bull and the other two) than it was at the start of the season, it is a small boost to them for 2023.
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Aniket Tripathi
(1002 Articles Published)