Tost: The wrong people were in the wrong place

AlphaTauri had a tough start to the new era of Formula 1 in 2022, when the new ground effect regulations were introduced, and the difficulties continued in 2023, which pushed Tost to declare back in March that he had lost faith in what the engineers told him.

Fast forwards to the British and Singapore Grands Prix, and AlphaTauri delivered two major upgrades to their AT04, which seemed to work, turning the car around ever since, with more new parts added since, and working.

Tost admitted to a whole rethink of the aero department after the bad start in 2022, he told the media in Abu Dhabi: "We had to reshuffle the aero department. It was really difficult.

"Because you realize that the car doesn't work and I went to the HR director and said that we need three, four, or five senior aerodynamicists. And this is not from one day to the next day, because they are all blocked by one year or something like this.

"That means we started last year in March, April, to recruit people. And they started this year, one in April, one in July, the next in September, because of the garden leave period. And this was quite tough, because I'm not the most patient person. I wanted the success is here yesterday, not in a few weeks or months," he added.

"The wrong people were in the wrong place," Tost went on. "We brought in new people. I realized last year, in March/April that from the aero side we were not going in the right direction. We had a wrong philosophy. It's always difficult to convince engineers to go in another direction because they will never adapt this.

"Therefore it's better to bring other people in. This is what we did. But until these people can work, you wait a year. And this was the problem which we had, that they could start only in April this year although we recognized that we had problems last year already. And the team still is not fully recruited, they're still coming, some other aerodynamic people, he explained.

Tost revealed that he's been pushing the team to deliver upgrades for every race since Singapore, and indeed AlphaTauri have a new floor and diffuser in Abu Dhabi.

The Austrian revealed his reasoning behind that, he said: "I was pushing so much to bring the upgrades is to get an understanding whether this new group goes in the right direction, on philosophy, because otherwise also next year would have been a problem.

"And this is what I wanted to prevent under all circumstances. And the reason why everything came together in the second half of the year was simply because we didn't have these new people beforehand," he maintained.

Abu Dhabi will be Tost's last race at the helm of AlphaTauri, and for 2024, the team will have a dual leadership in the form of CEO Peter Bayer, a former FIA man, and Team Principal Laurent Mekies who is returning to Faenza from Ferrari where he used to be Sporting Director.

Tost was asked about the handover process, he responded: "First of all, Peter is with us since June and I think that we are working together very closely. He understands the team now much better and he has got a lot of experience. He knows Formula 1.

"And Laurent Mekies anyway was working with us, he knows the team from the past and I think that these two people are absolutely the right people to take over the team. And I expect that they will bring the team to another level because both of them have a lot of experience.

"Both of them know Formula 1 and I'm convinced that they will do a very good job," the 67-year-old insisted.