The Alpine engineers now have to work on several technical issues of the race car
The technical director, Matt Harman, explains in an interview for RacingNews365.com how the team allows its engineers to develop more than one part of the car instead of being "specialists" in a specific field.
Over the years, Formula 1 teams have specialized by recruiting increasingly skilled engineers, each in specific fields. However, in a period of budget restrictions, it is necessary to work with a limited workforce, and Alpine believes to have found a solution: allowing their engineers to be multidisciplinary.
« You can simply say, “Ok, we want to specialize in this” and then you can add more people. But now, we are almost set on our workforce, so what we have decided to do is to reduce the workforce a bit and have more multidisciplinary people, » he explains.
The goal is to respect the budget, but above all, to increase efficiency.
« This means that we can move people around, and if we decide one week that we want to shift from improving the rear suspension to improving the front wing, these people can adapt and be useful in that area, whereas before it was very compartmentalized. »
Since the implementation of this process, Matt Harman has noticed several advantages. Rotating the staff allows for a renewed sense of motivation. Working on different parts of the car makes the engineers more interested and enables them to come up with better ideas regarding its performance.
« Because specializations, at this highly advanced level of specialization, can sometimes become a bit stagnant – you’re only doing the rear upper triangle every year and it’s not good for ideas or the thought process. »
This decryption of Alpine’s processes echoes the statements of team manager Otmar Szafnauer, who recently explained that teams are now finding ways to circumvent the budget regulations by reallocating engineers to subsidiaries dedicated to the development of other sports, for example.
