Cadillac F1 forced to fix phone ‘issue’ to satisfy FIA cost cap protocol
It can be hard getting up to speed when you are the newest team on the grid in Formula 1, as Cadillac bosses have found.
The US team, who joined F1 this year, are yet to win a point in their first four races – and off the track they have experienced the odd hiccup too.
F1’s cost cap rules include sweeping powers of investigation that allow governing body the FIA to inspect phones of team staff to ensure no undeclared projects are being hidden.
In the rush to get ready for their debut season, Cadillac didn’t get around to addressing all of those implications – such as needing to issue staff with company phones.
The result? A GDPR headache, as Cadillac F1 chief legal officer Caroline McGrory told the Sport Resolutions conference last week.
“The FIA have really broad powers – they can look at everyone’s computers, phones. We’ve recently had a few issues,” she said.
“We hadn’t given out company phones, so everybody was using their own mobile phone. Now we really have to do that [give out phones], because you end up with data protection issues if you’re asking employees to hand over their personal phones to see what their WhatsApps say.
“It’s created a mentality that everybody gets trained in the financial regs. So everybody across the whole team has to understand the basics. They live and breathe it on a daily basis.”
It is understood that relevant staff were quickly issued with company phones and that Cadillac have complied with both disclosure protocols and data protection legislation.
Sources close to the team said they always intended to issue company phones and said it was more of a question of data protection than cost cap compliance. Cadillac declined to comment.
FIA’s ‘really broad powers’ to probe cost cap
McGrory also praised the effectiveness of F1’s cost cap rules, which have made teams profitable for the first time and sent their valuations soaring into the billions.
“It’s really closely scrutinised and monitored, and that’s, I think, where the success has been,” she added. “Historically, the sport tried to implement a resource restriction agreement, it was called, but it was monitored by the teams themselves, and there were no real penalties. And so it didn’t really work.
“[Now] the teams have to submit interim reports in June each year, and at the end of the year they’ll submit really detailed information that will have been accumulated throughout the year. Then it’s really closely audited.
“The FIA will come in with groups of their finance team, and we’ll go through all the detail. They’ll ask people, do spot checks on things throughout the whole team. There are really broad powers.”