Formula 1's real 'best team'

Money is everything in Formula 1. The bigger your budget, the better your facilities can be, the greater the number of staff you can employ, the more likely you are to be successful.

The top level of F1 is most often a closed shop, only open for business to the biggest and wealthiest outfits. Ferrari, Mercedes and Red Bull have the three largest budgets in F1 currently, and between them they have won all but three of the constructors' titles since 1998.

The other three were shared between the Renault works team of the mid-2000s (not exactly a poorly funded outfit) and the independent Brawn GP squad that rose from the ashes of Honda in 2009 and which the following year became the Mercedes factory squad F1 knows and fears today.

But behind the giants - and the Brawn anomaly - there is one team on the current grid that has consistently bucked the trend. Not in terms of challenging for world championships, but by regularly overachieving despite lacking the mighty resources and infrastructure of its rivals.

Based on the latest available figures, Force India operates on the smallest budget among Formula 1's current crop of 10 teams at £90million a year. Yet it keeps on rising ahead of much bigger fish.

Force India has been steadily on the up since the ailing Midland/Spyker F1 project was bought out by controversial Indian entrepreneur Vijay Mallya and rebranded ahead of the 2008 season.

Since then, Force India has methodically morphed from being a backmarker outfit incapable of scoring points, to one that managed to finish fourth in the 2016 world championship - ahead of Williams (which spends £105million), McLaren (£185million), Toro Rosso (£100million), Haas (£100million), Renault (£150million) and Sauber (£95million).

There can be no doubt that Force India is pound-for-pound the best team on the grid, especially when you consider the three teams ahead have an annual outlay two to three times greater that its own.

By financial rights, Force India should be finishing 10th every season, yet it continually defies expectations. But surely fourth is the ceiling? Not in Force India's eyes.

When unveiling the team's 2017 challenger, the VJM10, at its Silverstone launch in February, team boss Mallya said: "If we do not dream big we would not have finished fourth in the world championship last year. To be in the company of Mercedes, Red Bull and Ferrari is a huge accomplishment. We will always dream big. We will never have conversations that we cannot break into the top three - that will certainly be our objective."

But surely that's exactly what this is - just a dream. The financial void is simply too vast for Force India to somehow genuinely compete with the top three, isn't it?

"For us there is no limit," counters the team's long-serving technical director, Andrew Green. "We are just learning all the time and that mentality is top-to-bottom.

"It's good, in a way, that people are writing us off and saying, 'Yeah we've peaked, this is as high as we're going to go and we're not going to do it again'. You can think that as much as you like, but we know inside that it's not like that at all.

"We have a drive internally that just keeps us pushing forward and it's fun to witness. It's great to be part of a team that is a real team - we really do work together. It is a special place to be at this moment in time.

"If we can out-think and out-develop these people, over time we will overtake them, and that's been our mentality for the last few years. We don't think of boundaries."

That may be so, but Force India's best realistic hope is to finish fourth again in 2017. Red Bull has had a tricky start to the season and Force India such a good one that only 19 points separated them heading into the recent Monaco Grand Prix.

But a big score for Red Bull - thanks to a podium for Daniel Ricciardo and fifth place for Max Verstappen - combined with Force India's first non-score of the season, means the Silverstone-based squad is now isolated in fourth place, 44 points behind Red Bull and 24 clear of Toro Rosso.

Nevertheless, Force India owes Green a huge debt of thanks. Under his technical leadership it has risen to become F1's top independent team - Red Bull excepted. He is credited with implementing a methodical culture that has allowed Force India to become greater than the sum of its parts.

"We've been quite blessed with some good technical directors," says deputy team principal Bob Fernley. "James Key was with us at the beginning [2009], when Mike Gascoyne departed. With Mark Smith we managed to continue the programme and what Andrew has done is lift the team to a higher state.

"He provides not only excellent direction in terms of mechanical and aerodynamic process, but his strength is his attention to detail and correlation - checking our simulations against reality.

"He brings a very disciplined approach to Force India. While we tend to look a little like we shoot from the hip, we're far from that - very structured, extremely so. I like the idea that we look a little maverick, but in reality, behind the scenes, we're not."

Force India needs all of Green's eye for detail right now, as the teams battle to get on top of immature aerodynamic regulations that offer huge potential for adding performance to the cars. The mighty Mercedes is struggling for consistency; Red Bull has had issues with windtunnel correlation; and Force India has been battling to cure rear instability on the VJM10 that has been present since pre-season testing in Barcelona.

New rules mean new windtunnel models, which means added complications for everybody. But there have been signs of improvement recently, as Force India has become a regular feature in Q3. Its pin-sharp race operation - including two excellent drivers in Sergio Perez and Esteban Ocon - has generally been maximising results from a difficult car in the meantime.

Yes, Force India is benefiting from Williams having only one driver scoring points regularly, from McLaren being held back by Honda, and from Renault still being in a rebuilding phase after buying out Lotus, but that should take nothing away from the excellent job Force India has done to take advantage of those opportunities.

Those who work under Green say Force India punches above its weight so often because he has helped create a hugely productive working environment, one that is focused on the right things, devoid of ego, fosters true teamwork, and engenders fierce loyalty to the cause.

Green is also very devoted himself, to the point that leaving Force India to go to a bigger outfit would constitute an act of "betrayal" in his eyes. This no doubt encourages similar loyalty in his staff, who also tend to enjoy the fact that being in a smaller team allows them to express their talents and avoid becoming over-specialised and pigeonholed, as they might in bigger teams.

"Within the team there's a real core of people who've been there a long time," says chief engineer Tom McCullough. "Therefore you're not relearning and redoing things with lots of changes of people.

"That stability of people, who respect each other and work in a structure where it's open and the feedback is not political in any way, [is key]. The ethos is very much, 'Let's do what we can do and help each other'.

"Andrew doesn't say a lot, but when he does speak everybody listens. Every word he speaks is worth listening to. Some people like to talk - he says what he needs to say, and he has such a good understanding of all the different areas that no-one ever tries to bullshit him.

"His knowledge in all the areas - from tyres to controls systems - he has a good enough level that the people who are specialists bounce off him. Also, this job is hard, so to make it enjoyable and engaging is what everybody likes. Andrew and [COO] Otmar [Szafnauer, pictured above with McCullough] really understand that.

"The whole culture of the company, from Otmar running the shop, down, is just brutal honesty on where we are and where we need to work on to improve.

"That makes it a nice place to work. It sounds corny, but it does. This job is hard enough as it is. When you put egos and politics in, and sit in meetings where one side is against the other, it's a disaster."

Szafnauer is responsible for the day-to-day running of Force India, and has presided over its remarkable rise since joining in 2009 after leaving the canned Honda F1 project. He has played a major role in instilling the philosophy that has driven the former Jordan team to its present heights.

"If you have 400 people you can easily get lost and not realise that what you're trying to do is make the car go as quickly as possible," he explains. "We're a race team, and we have to make sure we never forget that - and that everyone we hire has that at the back of their minds.

"When I got here, the team didn't work this way. There were a lot of financially driven decisions that went against the performance of the car. That was completely wrong.

"I remember early on, we had some development part [in the pipeline] and it wasn't ready to come out to the race with us, so everyone said, 'We'll just bring it out next race'. I said, 'We've got to fly it out. Get somebody on an EasyJet flight for £500 or £250, whatever the hell it is, and fly it out!' Before, it would have been, 'Yeah, yeah, next race', but that ain't racing!

"When I first got here, what they'd do when they didn't have the money was stop development. The windtunnel would stop, the CFD would stop, and I kept thinking, 'I can't believe this!' The one thing you don't stop is development.

"What you stop is building the real car parts, because this development can continue [in the background] and when you do have the money you can then make a huge leap. That's not how it worked. They would stop the development and then when more money came in they would start the development again, then build the car parts.

"But you're losing time that way. I was thinking, 'No wonder you're running 24th, four seconds off the pace'."

Force India today is a lean, mean, focused operation, spending its money wisely and reaping the rewards. Szafnauer concedes a technical tie-up with Mercedes has given the team the advantage of F1's best engine in recent seasons, but some key investments in infrastructure have also allowed it to make the most of its opportunities as Ferrari and Renault have closed that gap.

"We made two significant changes," adds Szafnauer. "One was investing in the latest CFD technology [in 2013], so we had 30 teraflops of our own. When I first arrived, we had five teraflops. You're allowed 30 and we were nowhere near, which is just crazy. We screwed around trying to rent CFD from Tata [Communications] and it broke down. It was just a mess.

"The other big thing we did was move from a 50% model in our own windtunnel to a 50% model at Toyota, at first [in 2015], and then the 60% model [last season]. That was a good strategic manoeuvre."

Force India is still ultimately limited by a vast chasm in resources compared to the top outfits, although there are plans to grow the team towards 450 people by bringing more manufacturing in-house, which Szafnauer says will save the team money in the long-run by reducing spending on outsourcing.

A team of Force India's means must always think strategically. Unless, and until, F1's income is redistributed more evenly, it will always need to be that way. Restrictions on development within the regulations help level the playing field to a certain degree, but it's not enough to prevent the richest always rising to the top in the end.

A Ferrari, Mercedes, or Red Bull (and a McLaren or Renault for that matter) operating at 100% will always beat a Force India operating at 100%. But these bigger teams inevitably get away with inefficiency - operating at maybe 85% of their potential every year, whereas Force India is probably closer to 95%.

In this way, Force India can arguably be considered the best team on the grid - making more efficient use of limited resources than bigger teams are making of their vast wealth.

"To get those top three, it can be done but you've got to do a lot of things right," says Szafnauer. "I think our driver line-up is fabulous, but do you think it's as good as the Mercedes driver line-up? Nope. Do you think it's as good as the Red Bull driver line-up? Nope.

"In terms of where we're at, they're great, but for us to beat those guys, our car has to be marginally better if we say they have better drivers. If the cars are the same, and they have better drivers, they should beat us. There's a lot of things we've got to do right to beat them. But it's not impossible."

Force India is the team that keeps dreaming, keeps believing, and keeps delivering. Maybe this underdog has finally reached its ceiling, but on past evidence it would be unwise to bet against it somehow smashing through it.