Not Just Newey: Why do F1 teams have so many engineers?

An explanation of comparative advantage in economics through Formula One.

F1 2024 has been widely known on social media as the ‘silly season’, where breaking news appeared weekly and crazy decisions were made across the entire sport, including the famous Hamilton move to Scuderia Ferrari.

One of the, if not the most hyped-up moves was Adrian Newey moving to Aston Martin. Newey is the former chief technology officer of Red Bull Racing, and Newey-designed chassis at Red Bull won a total of 12 World Constructors’ and 14 World Drivers’ Championships. As an engineer, aerodynamicist, and automotive designer, Adrian Newey seems to have all the skills needed to build a car, and Aston Martin offered him 150 million pounds to join their team for five years.

However, despite their sky-high offer to get Newey as a technical director, Aston Martin still has an employee team of more than 900 people, with a large engineering sector. It seems weird – anything an individual engineer can do, Newey can do better. So why spend a valuable part of the cost cap on engineers? The same is true for the other teams: the leading director will likely have more experience and be able to do each task to a higher standard than the new rookie engineers, so why can’t they do everything themselves? The answer lies in economics: Comparative Advantage. Just because Newey can do everything better doesn’t mean he should.

Even though Newey technically can do all the tasks required to build a Formula One car, each job he takes on comes with an opportunity cost– the benefit forgone from the next best option that wasn’t chosen. He is only human, so his time and energy are limited. This means that Team Principal Andy Cowell will have to make the executive decision for Newey to focus on one thing and assign other tasks to the rest of the engineering team. Such comparative advantage can be illustrated on a simplified table showing the maximum of each task Newey can do versus an average engineer.

Table 1: Comparison between the capabilities of Adrian Newey and Engineer X in a week (Not factually accurate).

Although Newey can do more of each task than the engineer in a week, for each bolt he refines, he could have designed three components; on the other hand, engineer X could only have designed one component for each bolt refined. Thus, Engineer X has a comparative advantage in designing components as it comes with a lower opportunity cost.

If Adrian Newey focuses on both tasks of designing components and refining bolts, only 15 components are designed and 5 bolts are refined. Yet if the two work together specialising in their comparative advantages, 30 components can be designed and 5 bolts can be refined, making them better off overall.

This is why Team Principal Cowell will most likely assign Adrian Newey to design race cars, which is what Newey is best at. Whether this new collaboration works is another question to be revealed in the coming years; yet considering Newey earns 3.4 grand every hour, it is best for Aston Martin not to waste his talents.