The Formula 1 paddock, like many villages, has grown in recent years but still not by so much as to acquire town or city status. Add in the fact that most of the teams on the grid are either based in Britain’s ‘motorsport valley’ or have R&D footprints there, facilitating regular moves of personnel, and word gets around.
It does so particularly when an organisation is perceived as troubled, and people contemplating an approach from headhunters ring around their old friends and acquaintances to run the ruler over whether taking the paycheque is worth the aggro. If you nurture a belief that personnel working for opposing teams don’t talk to one another, you would be very wrong.
