Revealed: The Toto Wolff phone call after Force India made shock Red Bull move
After Force India signed a key player at Red Bull, Toto Wolff couldn't believe it.
If you were Toto Wolff, the principal of one of the foremost Formula 1 teams, how would you react if you found out a high-caliber Red Bull employee had bypassed your team in favor of… Force India?
Thanks to a recent appearance on the High Performance podcast by Otmar Sznafauer, we have the answer.
Otmar Szafnauer: Toto Wolff “couldn’t believe” Red Bull aerodynamicist went to Force India
Otmar Szafnauer long served as the Chief Operating Officer of Force India, a race team built from the remains of Spyker and that is now still part of the F1 grid going by the name Aston Martin.
In a recent appearance on the High Performance podcast, Szafnauer revealed the hiring spree he went on when he first joined the outfit.
“[There were] 280 people when I started, 408 when I left,” he said of Force India. “So I hired some people. All of them, I hired personally.”
One of his first hires, he revealed was Andrew Green, who would serve as the technical director of Force India.
“Together, we assessed areas of competency that a Formula 1 team required that we didn’t have,” he said. “Then we went out to recruit the best people that we could in those areas.
“And again, recruiting — how do you get good people to leave Red Bull and come to Force India?
“You’ve got to make it a good place to work.”
Though Force India was never a high-budget team — something Szafnauer speaks about in depth with the High Performance crew — he noted that the workplace culture of Force India really set the team a step above the rest.
Remembering Force India:
? Lawrence Stroll on what convinced him to buy Force India
? When Sergio Perez brought down his own team to force Aston Martin breakthrough
In fact, Force India even managed to attract Dr. Guru Johl, who had been a senior aerodynamicist at Red Bull Racing.
Recalling the hiring, Szafnauer said, “I called Toto [Wolff], and I don’t know what we’re talking about, but I said, ‘Oh yeah, we’ve got this senior aerodynamicist guru coming from Red Bull to join us’.
“And he was like, ‘What? Why is he not coming to Mercedes?’
“He couldn’t believe that a guy from Red Bull at a senior level would actually entertain going to Force India, but that’s because we had a reputation of, go there, it’s a good place to work.”
Wolff may not have been able to believe it, but Szafnauer took ample inspiration from the Mercedes boss when it came time to translating values into action and making sure the little details counted.
“I remember people telling me that Toto would walk around in the pit lane and look to see who had the nicest garage set up,” Szafnauer recalled.
“You could see from the pit lane into everybody’s garages. And he would walk and benchmark the best. I think it was Red Bull at the time.
“And he would say to, you know, his sporting director, Ron Meadows, I want something better than that. which is great. And he did that. And that translates into a lot of other things too.
“But like I said, the one thing that I wanted, at Force India — because I knew we didn’t have the money to do those things; even if we wanted a better garage, you can’t — is a good place to work, and that was our differentiating factor.”
