Behind the Pit Wall, Part II: The Managerial Roles That Decide Championships in F1

 Abstract

The first article of this series[1] mapped the visible architecture of an F1 team: who leads, who engineers, who executes. This one goes further. It follows four specific roles through the people who currently hold them, and through two careers that has crossed both sides of the regulatory table, FIA to team or vice versa. None of these four people has ever touched a steering wheel despite all four carry more weight, right now, over where a championship goes than most of the drivers actually chasing it.

The Team Principal: A view From the Regulator's Side

Laurent Mekies became Red Bull Racing's Team Principal midway through 2025, taking over from Christian Horner after two decades in the job. What is important to underline in this change at the apex of the team is the résumé behind the new TP. From 2014 Mekies worked inside the FIA itself, first as Safety Director, then as F1 Deputy Race Director, before Ferrari hired him as Sporting Director in 2018. He has sat on both sides of the race control desk, wearing the regulator's hat and then the constructor's. Few Team Principals can say that. Someone who once had to write the interpretation of a rule now argues against it, and the reversal shows in ways that rarely make a press release: it shapes how Red Bull approaches the FIA on every grey area that comes up, because Mekies knows which arguments a steward will actually consider valid, and which ones collapse in five minutes.

 

The Sporting Director: Where the Regulation Actually Lives

Diego Ioverno has been Ferrari's Sporting Director since the 2023 Belgian Grand Prix, when he took over from Mekies and started reporting straight to Fred Vasseur. Unlike Mekies, Ioverno never worked a day at the FIA. His path runs entirely through Maranello: joined Ferrari in 2000 fresh out of a mechanical engineering degree in Bologna, start building knowledge of the team in gearbox assembly, moved into trackside operations, then spent years as Team Manager before landing on the pit wall with sporting authority. The role is where the Team Principal's negotiating stops being theoretical. Ioverno is the one physically present when a regulation gets tested in real time, the document exchange with stewards, the mid-session clarifications, the appeals argued in the ten minutes after a chequered flag. Article 2 of Appendix L (and a lot other more) is just text until that moment. Then it becomes an argument made against a clock that does not care about legal nuance.

 

The Chief Engineer and the Cost Cap's Newest Battleground

Guillaume Dezoteux spent eighteen years at Red Bull's junior team, the last stretch of it as Head of Vehicle Performance, before leaving at the start of 2026 for Ferrari, where he now runs Performance Operations under Matteo Togninalli. Eighteen years is a long apprenticeship for what still gets described, lazily, as an engineering job. It isn't, not entirely. Car design belongs to one department. Squeezing the last tenths out of what the Technical Director has already built belongs to another, and that second job increasingly has its own chief. The reason has less to do with engineering than with accounting. A budget cap forces every headcount onto a financial report submitted to the Cost Cap Administration, and a team cannot structure its performance department the way it once could. Every trackside engineer is a line someone must justify on paper. Lap time still matters, obviously but it just is not the only thing that determines who gets hired.

 

The Legal Counsel: Where the Sport's Two Institutions Overlap

Shaila-Ann Rao's career does the best job of showing how porous the line between federation and team has become. FIA Legal Director from 2016 to 2018, then Mercedes General Counsel and next Special Advisor to Toto Wolff. In 2022 she went back to the FIA as Interim Secretary General for Motor Sport, replacing Peter Bayer a role from which she stepped down at the end of that season. Three years on, in 2025, the FIA brought her back again, this time as Presidential Advisor to Mohammed Ben Sulayem. Two institutions and one lawyer who is crossing between them more than once. While she held the interim FIA post, rival teams publicly raised governance concerns, and it is reasonable to see why this choice could cause issues. It is harder to argue with the location of the talent pool. It is small, and both the FIA and the constructors keep drawing from the same part of it. This means that good talent often does not get the chance to prove their worth.

 

Conclusion

Line up these four roles and the pattern the first article could only hint at comes into full view: the Team Principal negotiates the rules, the Sporting Director enforces them in real time, the Chief Engineer justifies every dollar spent chasing an edge inside them, and the legal counsel shuttles between the body that writes them and the teams bound by them. Not one of these four, except for Laurent considering the resonance and visibility a Team Principal has, ever appears on a broadcast graphic. All four, more often than a single overtaking move ever will, decide where a season actually ends up.

---

[1] D. Beatrice, Behind the Pit Wall: Understanding Key Managerial Roles in a Formula One Team, available at : https://dbmotorsportf1.blogspot.com/2025/04/behind-pit-wall-understanding-key.html