F1's flourishing new coaching trees. Plus: Yuki Tsunoda's tough luck

New York Times

2 days ago

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Welcome back to Prime Tire, where I'm contemplating how very Formula One it is to somehow have two season halfway points: the current point at 12 of 24 races and the upcoming summer break at the 14 of 24 stage.
I'm Alex, and with Luke Smith and Madeline Coleman enjoying some well-earned time off after their intense efforts in the first half of the 2025 Formula One season, later I'll be sharing some extra memories from the paddock at the recent British Grand Prix.
The new F1 team boss appointments that followed Red Bull firing Christian Horner resulted in two things.
First, that Mercedes' chief Toto Wolff is now the longest in post of the entire paddock (with 10 years over the next longest stint). Wolff's Mercedes team shareholding means he's unlikely to ever fire himself, which is how F1 teams used to work. Luke is going to explain this change to a football soccer manager mindset in a feature next week.
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But the second notable element of this team principal deck shuffling is how the new pack figures can be grouped together based on their previous career experience. And with this, two distinct Football coaching-like trees have suddenly bloomed in the F1 paddock among the team principals.
The Benetton Boys:
The Mercedes Mob:
The Ferrari Friends:
Alan Permane's last two years have been pretty packed. He was snapped up by Red Bull in the aftermath of his axing at Alpine along with Otmar Szafnauer to be Racing Bulls' racing director. Now, he runs the race team. But the squad where Permane spent the first 34 years of his long F1 career — Toleman/Benetton/Renault/Lotus/Alpine, aka Team Enstone — also hired four more of his fellow 2025 team principals over the changing seasons.
Steve Nielsen, who is in the process of becoming Alpine managing director from 1 September, worked at the team alongside Permane in the 1990s and again in the 2000s. So too did Jonathan Wheatley, who was one of Michael Schumacher's mechanics during his Benetton title-winning years in 1994 and 1995, before becoming chief mechanic. Current Alpine supremo Flavio Briatore was in charge throughout this period.
*Ayao Komatsu worked at the same team when it was known as Renault and Lotus between 2006-2025. **Fred Vasseur was actually the team's boss for a short spell in 2016.
The other main tree is comprised of Wolff, former long-time Mercedes race strategist and now Williams team boss James Vowles, and Aston Martin team principal Andy Cowell. He headed the ultra-successful Mercedes High Performance Powertrains division for 12 years, after it was rebranded from its foundation as Ilmor.
The smallest tree is the Ferrari intersection of McLaren's Andrea Stella and Horner replacement, Laurent Mekies, plus Vasseur. Stella was a Ferrari stalwart — performance/race engineer to Michael Schumacher, Kimi Räikkönen and Fernando Alonso — before he joined McLaren along with the last named of that trio in 2015.
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Mekies, meanwhile, started out at Arrows before joining Minardi before it became Red Bull's junior team and also had a successful spell at the FIA. He and Wheatley share a strong Red Bull branch, while Nielsen and Vowles are bonded by Williams service.
I admit the NFL coaching tree analogy isn't perfect. Briatore and Wolff are not Bill Walsh/Bill Parcells/Bill Belichick. And Stella was gone from Ferrari long before Mekies and then Vasseur (***as team boss) joined.
Plus, perhaps only Vowles — who said Wolff 'pulled me under his wing' when Luke asked about their relationship at the recent Monaco GP — has taken root as a team boss because of the direct teaching of another. Komatsu also worked at Mercedes when it was BAR, in his first F1 role as a tire engineer. But all those leafy links are clear to see.
And now, for something completely different, over to… me.
One thing flashed through my mind when I saw Yuki Tsunoda posting about losing his phone in Lake Como: when can this guy catch a break?
His dream move to Red Bull immediately became the same nightmare that everyone that isn't Max Verstappen has endured since Daniel Ricciardo flew the coop at 2018's end. Even in the chaos of the Silverstone rain, he picked up a very harsh penalty for contact with Ollie Bearman. Points, yet again since mid-May's Imola race, were out of reach.
Three days earlier, I was walking by the giant Red Bull motorhome/hospitality palace in the Silverstone paddock and Yuki was heading out to ride the track on his bike. He wheeled the black-and-silver Canyon down Red Bull's entrance ramp, climbed on and… immediately dropped his chain.
As a crowd gathered, Tsunoda spent several minutes putting things right before finally pedaling away. The crowd eventually included Horner, who did not get his hands dirty helping Tsunoda with his oily chain rearrangement. Horner seemed to be enjoying the chaotic energy bursting from Tsunoda's tiny frame.
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Now, Tsunoda and Verstappen will be preparing for next week's Belgian GP alongside Mekies instead. As Luke explained earlier this week, he's an 'engineer with a heart' and perhaps the Frenchman's own Racing Bulls promotion will be exactly what Tsunoda needs to recover his best form and finally shine at Red Bull.
After all, Mekies has experience of getting the best out of young drivers (including Sebastian Vettel and Ricciardo) and his touching 'welcome back' attitude for Liam Lawson when he went the other way to Tsunoda earlier this year was great to see. A new Red Bull era beckons and Tsunoda still has a chance of sticking around for the rest of this new chapter, even with his Honda backing departing to Aston Martin for 2026.
He just needs that break.
The latest article in our 75 Years of Speed series was released on Wednesday, thanks to our news team star — and big F1 fan — Sam Joseph.
We tasked Sam with explaining the lives and F1 influence of eight key figures from across the world championship's opening eight decades to this point in 2025. The important caveat to note was that we generally arranged them from when their influence in F1 really began (with one big exception!).
Find the chosen eight visionaries here.
The reaction to this piece was delightfully engaging, with plenty of readers offering their thoughts on our selection, as well as suggesting their own. Such pieces are always a subjective exercise, but that is a big part of the F1 fun.
Many people felt triple world champion Sir Jackie Stewart deserved a place for his tireless efforts to improve motorsport safety. I can tell you, even in his 80s, this effort is still ongoing — he once rang me up to insist his comments on the halo cockpit safety device be made stronger in an article I was producing for Autosport magazine. In the sanitized modern F1 world, drivers usually request the opposite!
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One of the reasons Stewart didn't make the cut was because we wanted to have a varied list of characters, with Schumacher and Hamilton getting the nod in terms of drivers. It's the same reason Ayrton Senna just missed out (also, while Senna really made aggressive driving far more common in F1, Schumacher took it that much further and changed the game in terms of driver professionalism too, hence that pick).
But we wanted to give you a chance to suggest additional figures deserving of inclusion from F1's long history, so please, send them to me here.
We'll post the best suggestions on a future Prime Tire edition.
❤️ Before they headed off for their extended weekends, Madeline and Luke filed several excellent stories. These included Madeline's poignant reflection on the life and death of Jules Bianchi, with his friend Charles Leclerc.
🏉 Luke spoke to Mercedes team boss Toto Wolff and ribbed him about his claim to have played junior rugby for Austria. British and Irish Lions? More like the Dutch Lion, if Max does make the transfer to Mercedes from Red Bull…
🇩🇪 And finally, give this lovely summary of Nico Hülkenberg's career a watch on F1's official website. It sums up his many F1 near misses well and highlights the wet-weather prowess that led to his Silverstone breakthrough.
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