Today, Aston Martin stands as one of the largest teams in the racing world, but it wasn’t always this way. The team has faced significant financial struggles in the past. It was only after the wealthy Lawrence Stroll invested his millions that the team began to see stability. Former team boss, Otmar Szafnauer, recently revealed that during the Force India era, he had to dip into his own pockets multiple times to pay the staff.
“I paid the salaries out of my own pocket twice,” Otmar Szafnauer shared on the High Performance podcast. “We’re talking about millions. I paid this with the help of my partner at Soft Pauer (a software company and sponsor). We had money in the business, and I had my own finances. I knew that the salaries wouldn’t be paid otherwise, and I knew how hard that would be for some people.”
‘A Huge Risk’
“Some people have to live from paycheck to paycheck – I understand that,” Szafnauer explained. “So, the money had to go out, but the Formula 1 revenues would only come in later. I could have waited and paid our staff later, or I could pay the salaries with my own money and then wait until I got it back. Of course, that was a huge risk; what if that money never came?” Szafnauer added, “Or what if someone had knocked on the door and said, ‘Hey, you owe me two million dollars, and unless you give me this money, I’m shutting you down?'”
“At the same time, I knew that the team was performing well because we took care of each other,” Szafnauer explained. “There was a real sense of team spirit, a camaraderie. In the end, we had about four hundred staff members, while we were competing with teams that had about thirteen thousand employees. We had a budget of ninety million pounds, and the others had a budget of over two hundred and fifty million.”
