Force India boss Vijay Mallya says that the team’s technical director Mark Smith will be staying with the team until April 2011. This makes no sense at all. Smith has been named as the technical director of Lotus Racing and is expected to join the Norfolk team after the statutory six months of “gardening leave”.
With the announcement of his appointment at Lotus it is clear that Smith wants to move teams. Mallya cannot force Smith to do anything. The engineer has a legal right to terminate his employment contact on one week’s notice. The Human Rights Act of 1998 means that no one can be compelled to work for someone they do not want to work for. However, if an employee fails to honour the terms of a contract then he can be sued for the damage that his departure will cause. Mallya might like to do this, but such a course of action is hopeless as it is almost impossible to prove a specific financial impact of the departure of a single employee. This is why F1 has worked with the system of “gardening leave” in recent years. This is specifically designed to create a suitable balance which protects teams from the damage that can be done if an engineer takes trade secrets from one team to another, without it being a restraint of trade.
Smith will know these rules – as all F1 engineers do – and so he is not going to be bamboozled into staying on with Force India. In any case, staying on at Force India voluntarily makes very little sense. There is no incentive for Smith to do a good job for a team that he is planning to leave, indeed it is ultimately in his interest NOT to do a good job as this will help his new employer in the longer term.
One gets the feeling that Mallya may be talking in this way to impress the Indian press, which may not know all the above.
joeblogsf1 
I wonder if Mark Smith is trying to build up some goodwill – especially useful if he thinks some more Force India employees may follow him or there’s a possibility, however distant, of a return – by staying around for a couple of months to give Force India chance to get his successor used to the job before beginning “gardening leave”? By negotiating a gradual exit instead of leaving straight away, he doesn’t leave his old team in the lurch (because he’ll go just before the meat of the design cycle) and doesn’t enter his new team halfway through a design cycle (which could unsettle the current team). Instead he can jump straight to evaluating and improving upon his predecesor’s work.
It would be fraught with complications for Mallya and Force India, notably because Mark won’t have lost his legal rights to act as you have stated, but if the settlement could be pulled off, Mark could come out of this with his reputation enhanced. Given that Vijay has already taken an unusual approach to employment transfers once (with Fisi last year), I cannot rule it out here.
He needs to stop being bitter and get on with it otherwise no one will ever want to work for him!
Management 101 – Don’t keep somebody on that doesn’t want to be there.
Joe,
All this business about Mark Smith and other staff departing to Lotus must get up Mallya’s hooter.
When talented and senior staff leave something must be a miss, I thought it was all going well now Big Bad Gazza had gone and everbody was happy (according to Vijay).
Maybe Big Bad Gazza wasnt the problem?
Could it be a team owner poking his big nose into engineering matters?
Just idle thoughts………………………..
Off topic: Joe, Just listening to the sidepodcast: your discussion about secret agendas at Red Bull…got me thinking about the Helmut Marko’s complete lack of celebration following the Monaco result (images from the pit garage with the rest of the ecstatic team) I don’t know much about this bloke – he is Germanic, but you’d expect him to at least crack a smile for a 1-2 at Monaco??? I think that may say it ALL. The guy has a lot vested in the RB young driver programme…
Mark Smith may have a big notice period, the senior staff in most organization have longer notice period ranging from 6 months to a year & may or may not include gardening leave… Force India will keep him till they get someone to replace him and do a proper transfer… i’m sure his contract demands a longer notice period which will be worked out as they get someone to take his position in the organization.
Dev
There are statutory rights. What is written in a contract does not overcome these.
“There is no incentive for Smith to do a good job for a team that he is planning to leave, indeed it is ultimately in his interest NOT to do a good job”
He may not be doing a great job in staying with a team that he doesn’t like to, but in this way Mallya can be sure that no trade secrets could be flowing in Lotus’ way following the immediate ‘transfer’ of the engineer.
“One gets the feeling that Mallya may be talking in this way to impress the Indian press, which may not know all the above.”
I am at least aware of the ‘gardening leave’. But then I am laughing ironically looking at the turn of events and remembering the book ‘The piranha club’
Joe your employment law interpretation is in my view incorrect..
Joe, you’re exactly right in what you say, trying to enforce the maximum term makes no sense. Unless you’re going to angle for a lot of money to let him go early and also to make the recent court case go away.
Haven’t Force India got a reputation for late payment of bills, perhaps suggesting money woes? I’m not saying they actually have, but it’s obvious that they prefer the money in their coffers rather than the suppliers or whoever. If you’re going to play hardball like that, then bargaining your (ex) technical staff away is nothing.
If one is paid to do a job, even for a complete and utter @##@$$## such as when I worked for the Murdoch empire, should one not do it to the best of one’s abilities?
Of course if you do a shitty job, you’ll bugger up your current employer but, surely, will you also make yourself less attractive to those seeking to hire?
Hmm! Conundrum. Ah, F1!!!
Any trade secrets that Mark Smith wants Lotus to know about have ar already i Mike Gascoyne’s possession. The one thing we learned from the Coughlan/Stepney plan to do a deal with Honda is that all the trade secrets were sorted out before they even approached the team.