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Mercedes announced earlier today that they would promote their Technical Director James Allison to a newly created position of Chief Technical Officer, while Mike Elliott would replace him as Technical Director. With the 2022 regulation changes, a team like Mercedes deciding to restructure its technical department comes as no surprise.
Allison has been the head of Mercedes’ technical department since 2017. The new role as chief technical officer will ideally have him overseeing the team's plans beyond the new regulations. While Allison will focus on the overall developmental side of the team, Elliott will focus on the current cars.
After Paddy Lowe’s exit post the 2016 campaign, Allison played a fundamental role in shaping Mercedes’ dominant success story. He quit Ferrari after losing his wife and having to shift base to his homeland to remain closer to his children. The job at the Brackley-based outfit worked perfectly for him, however, it also came with pressure and rigorous travel.
However, after years of success since Allison took over as Mercedes’ Technical Director, this reshuffle may have come as a result of Allison wanting to step back, a fact the team understood. Losing a talent like him to a rival team would be an enormous loss, therefore creating a new role for him to oversee the operations for 2022 and beyond, helps in retaining him within the Mercedes family.
Elliott, who has previously served as the Head of Aerodynamics at Mercedes and as their Technology Director, worked under Allison. He will have ‘big shoes to fill’, at his newly promoted senior position. While Allison will play a key role in coordinating the strategic and regulation challenges for 2022 and beyond, Elliott will bring his expertise to focus on current cars and operations.
Could the changes affect Mercedes on track?
Mercedes' current reshuffle will keep Allison within the team structure without any larger impact on their future in F1. But Elliott’s transition into the new role and the shuffling process could have a short-term impact on the team. For a mammoth organization like Mercedes, who have been a dominating force in F1, reshuffling and restructuring their departments plays a key role in shaping its future.
The engine development freeze and aerodynamic changes, in accordance with the regulations for 2022 and beyond, demand such restructuring and shuffling in the senior technical leadership at Mercedes. A large part of the team's success has been a part of their organizational structure, their ability to manage their talent pool and extract the best performance out of their skill set.
Unlike their rivals Ferrari, whose performance reflected the lack of organizational structure and loss of key senior team leadership, Mercedes restructuring its staff will not impact their functioning on track. Instead, it helps them meet new challenges by distributing their workforce and signing them into different areas, a precision perfect modus operandi within its human resource functioning that has played a vital role in shaping their dominance in the sport.
