The Force India team lived on the verge of bankruptcy for several years before going bankrupt in 2018. The team managed to be the fourth force, but former director Otmar Szafnauer revealed that he sometimes had to pay the salaries from his own pocket.
“Twice” replied Szafnauer in the High Performance Podcast, before ensuring that this “didn’t represent a lot”. But he finally admitted that the amount was “in the millions”.
“I paid them with the help of my partner at Soft Pauer. We had money in the company. I had my own money. I knew the salaries were not going to be paid and I knew how much It’s hard for people. Some people live day to day, and I understand that.”
“We had to pay salaries and the money from Formula 1 came five days later. So I could have waited, not paid on Friday, or paid with my own money and waited until Wednesday to get the money back from the Formula 1.”
“Between Friday and Wednesday there is a huge risk. You wonder if the money doesn’t arrive or if someone else knocks on the door and says ‘you owe me $2 million and what if you don’t give me this money, I’ll shut you down.”
“Or if the money comes in and someone else says ‘you owe me $2 million and if you don’t give me that money I’ll put you out of business.’ So we would spend five, six, seven days wondering what would happen if we didn’t get the money.”
He describes how the team managed to achieve good performances despite a lack of resources: “I knew the team was successful because of the team spirit, camaraderie and caring for each other.”
“There were only 400 of us, or 408, or something like that at the end. And at the time we were competing against teams that had no budget cap. There were 400 of us and we had a budget of 90 million pounds. The others had a budget of 250 million pounds.
“We can say that it is three times the budget. This is not the case. It is 100 times the budget, because part of this budget must be used to buy the engines, to go to the races , to buy the tires, to build the car.”
“In the end, out of the 90 million, we had four million left for development, while the others probably had 60 or 70 million for development. It’s the four million versus the 60 or 70 million that constitutes the real comparison, because the rest is spent on things other than going fast.”
Few people on the team knew that he sometimes paid salaries: “A few people knew it. The finance department knew it, Andy Green knew it too”but he didn’t tell the other employees. “I didn’t think it was necessary. What I thought was that everyone needed to be paid on time.”
