F1 Technical Director and Aerodynamicist Salaries

F1 technical directors and chief technical officers earn a base salary of £500k-2m ($663k-2.7m) on our figures, and a bonus could take that to £2.6m ($3.4m). Fourteen people on this page sit in that band, including James Allison at Mercedes and Pierre Waché at Red Bull.

Heads of aerodynamics, chief designers and trackside chiefs earn £180k-350k ($239k-464k). The top band is wide because survey pay for technical directors runs from £120k ($159k) to £3.25m ($4.3m), and exceptional recruits can go beyond it.

Andrew Shovlin has led Mercedes‘ trackside engineering since 2017, coordinating the engineers on both cars across every race weekend. He’s one of the few technical figures with a reported pay figure, a 2025 estimate of £800k-1.2m ($1.06m-1.59m).

We put his whole package, bonus included, at around £1m ($1.3m), and his net worth at about £4m ($5.3m).

Fourteen technical chiefs share the top band of £500k-2m ($663k-2.7m), so the bars can’t split them on our figures. Rob Marshall, McLaren’s chief technical officer and chief designer, and Loïc Serra at Ferrari are among them.

Reported numbers are rare in this group. Shovlin’s is the clearest, and it sits inside the band.

Only a few technical figures have a net worth on record. Shovlin’s is put at about £4m ($5.3m) and Waché’s at around $4m, both built on long careers of senior engineering pay rather than any stake in the team they work for.

The best-known exception isn’t on this page. Adrian Newey, now Aston Martin’s team principal, is worth around £50m ($66.3m) and owns part of the team, which shows how far design success can take an engineer.

A technical director is responsible for the car. They set the development plan, decide which ideas go into production and make sure the design, aerodynamics and vehicle performance groups build one package that fits the rules and the cost cap.

Aerodynamicists work under them, shaping the car in CFD and the wind tunnel, while trackside engineers turn the design into lap time at each circuit. Nearly all of them hold engineering degrees and spent years as aerodynamicists or designers before taking charge.