Former F1 team boss reveals he paid team’s wages twice: ‘It was in the millions’

Your support helps us to tell the story

Support Now

Our mission is to deliver unbiased, fact-based reporting that holds power to account and exposes the truth.

Whether $5 or $50, every contribution counts.

Support us to deliver journalism without an agenda.

Louise Thomas

Editor

Find out more

Former F1 team principal Otmar Szafnaeur has revealed he paid “millions” worth of his team members’ salaries out of his own pocket after Force India fell into dire financial straits.

Szafnauer joined Force India, which became Racing Point and now Aston Martin after Lawrence Stroll’s ownership, in 2009.

Force India enjoyed success in the mid-2010s before the team fell into administration in 2018.

During those tough years financially, Szafnaeur has now revealed that he decided to pay the salaries of team members himself – but refused to divulge this to his employees.

“It wasn’t that much,” he told The High Performance Podcast. Szafnauer then added: “It was in the millions.”

Explaining the situation in full, the Romanian-American motorsport executive said: “I paid it with the help of my partner at Soft Pauer [software company]. We had money in the business. I had my own money. And I knew the salaries were not going to get paid and I knew how difficult that is for people.

“Some people live paycheck to paycheck and I understand it. We had to pay the salaries and the Formula 1 money was coming in five days. So say the salaries are due on a Friday and we’re getting the Formula 1 money the following Wednesday.

“So I could have waited, not paid on Friday, or paid with my own money and then waited until Wednesday to get that money back from when the Formula 1 money came.

open image in gallery

“In between that Friday and the Wednesday, there’s a huge risk of, well, what if that money doesn’t come?

“Or what if that money does come, and somebody else knocks on the door and says, ‘Hey, you owe me $2 million, and unless you give me this money, I’m shutting you down.’

“So that was five, six, seven days of ‘what if?’ I knew that the team did well because of the team spirit, the camaraderie we had — the looking after each other.”

Szafnauer left Aston Martin in January 2022 before joining Alpine as team principal, a position he left in July 2023.