Hire and fire support staff

My question in short: How should I manage the number of support staff, especially Design vs. Mechnics/Engineers?

What I do now is the following: I fire all Mechanics and Engineers and put the max number of staff in the Designing staff. When I want to change the parts on my car I decrease the number of Designers and increase the Mechanics/Engineers to do the job. After the assembly is done I fire all the Engineers/Mechanics again and hire the maximum number of Designers.

In reality this is offcourse not really possible/smart. But how is it with this managing game. Does this cost me more money then just keep the engineers and mechanics employed eventhough I am not replacing any parts? Or are there other consequences in firing and hiring new support staff every other race?

Also, during the race I'll do pitstops. But do I need machanics and engineers for this and how many do I need? Is my pitstop faster if I have more?

Thx.

My answer in short to you question in shourt : This depends on your strategie beside the races and there exists no "Best Setup".

To the other thing, i hope you realised, that you spend with hireing and fireing a lot of money

These are good questions, but I wonder if you're asking them a bit late.  I wonder if you are trying to grow your team too quickly.  Perhaps adding staff little by little to guage yourself/team would have been a better strategy.  By doing this you could very well be able to answer these questions on your own.  I just can't imaging the hiring/fireing method being too profitable.          

Constant hiring/firing is the way to go, where else are you going to put your money?

I've been doing this from day one so I'll check the next few races how much cheaper it is to keep a decent amount of engineers mechanics on a steady parole. 

From the beginning it just felt useless to keep a bunch of engineers and mechanics if they could do something usefull like designing.

I tried the hiring/firing approach early on until I realised how much money I was wasting.

To refit every component before a race you need a total of  34 Engineers and 24 Mechanics.

Expense wise an Engine is circa 450k, the Chassis is 200k and Internals are 150k
Everything else is relatively cheap.

An engine change only requres 4 mechanics
The internals are the biggest drain and requre 10 Engs and 6 Mechanics.

Im at level 3 now and have the full compliment of staff requried for this so its static in staff levels now.

As Im only in a one car league at present Im guessing thats how many staff you need PER car for a full refit.

What ever is left over in staffing numbers is applied to design with the minimum of 1 assigned the Commercial Staff.

That's too few designers left, especially if you're running in a 2 car league, where it's double engineers and mechanics needed. I never did the hiring/firing thing, but I might start if I can be bothered ^^

If you are running a 2 car team then try getting enough staff to refit all parts on both cars or enough to refit all parts except internals.
 That way you can alternate part replacement, the same goes for design staff. You can alternate to getting new parts every day.
Getting Chassie, sidepods, front and rear wing today and suspension, underbody and internals tomorrow.
This will let you swap the design staff from 1 set to another daily.