McLaren is already starting to rotate its staff to prepare for the extra workload of 24 races this season
Whoever has been listening into Lando Norris’ radio over the past few races might have noticed a different voice than usual. Because instead of his usual race engineer Will Joseph, the voice heard at Silverstone, Budapest and Spa-Francorchamps was that of Jose Manuel Lopez, who is usually a performance engineer at McLaren.
This swap is only temporary, however, and for a reason: McLaren wants to be proactive in the face of the monster 2024 calendar with 24 races and has already started rotating engineers to reduce the workload.
“There, even on a personal level, it becomes a challenge to manage all the races,” says team boss Andrea Stella about the ever-growing calendar. In addition, the swap also provides for a possible emergency if an engineer should spontaneously drop out. “We want to create a long chain of people who can support the driver,” he says.
For Lando Norris, who has to make do with another engineer in his ear at times, this is not a problem, according to Stella: “Lando is happy with that, and it’s in his own interest to promote his own engineers, because those are the guys who have to make him fast to be successful in the future,” the team boss says.
“So a driver is not just the receiver in this process. He is actually the one who leads. And Lando is doing that very well.”
Stella is quite fond of this process at McLaren because it ensures that there is a larger group of very competent engineers who can interact with the driver and also with other people like the strategists.
“And you have to do that with a minimum of words to communicate what you need to communicate and you have to understand each other in terms of terminology. So there’s quite a lot to get used to as part of the race engineering teams,” Stella said.
“That’s why there’s so much rotation, because we need to give all the engineers as much experience as possible. That’s the reason why we’re doing this. And I’m very happy with what I’m seeing here.”
Given the ever-increasing travel load, rotation of staff is also a key issue for other teams.
