McLaren rejigs engineering team
Hamilton's engineer Phil Prew has been promoted to principal race engineer
Also In The News
|
By Darren Estwick. |  |
Monday, 11, Jan 2010 04:43
By Adam Leveridge
McLaren has reshuffled its race engineering team in order to facilitate the arrival of Jenson Button to the outfit alongside Lewis Hamilton.
In December, it was revealed that Button had opted to switch from Brawn GP to McLaren to provide him with new challenges after reaching his lifetime ambition of winning the formula one world drivers' championship in 2009.
Since the announcement of Button's move was made, the reigning world champion, who raced with the same team in different guises for seven years, faced tough criticism.
The Briton was warned about the 'Hamilton orientated' McLaren team, with many concerned that he wouldn't get the attention he deserves while working at Woking.
However, McLaren has reconfigured its engineering team and managing director Jonathan Neale believes this will help Button settle in and feel welcome.
"When Jenson visited the McLaren Technology Centre (MTC), one of the questions he asked was, 'Is this Lewis's team?' and the answer was 'Yes, of course it's Lewis's team - as it was Heikki Kovalainen's team, Fernando Alonso's team, Juan Pablo Montoya's, and Kimi Raikkonen's. And it will be your team as well'," said Neale.
"Is this Lewis's team to the exclusion of any other high-performance driver? Absolutely not.
"At McLaren Mercedes, we love winning drivers - and we want to go about telling the world that story."
Neale said there are several reasons for the reshuffle, the first of which was to make use of the newly-trained staff, rather than sticking with Phil Prew, who has worked in his role for over 15 years, and Mark Slade, who worked with Kovalainen during his two-year stint with the team.
"We also want to build an engineering team around Jenson, in exactly the same way we did with Lewis back in 2007," said Neale.
"We want to create a strong group of individuals who can bring out the best in Jenson's naturally smooth style.
"With the resource restriction agreement affecting the number of personnel we'll bring to the races this year, we also saw this as an ideal opportunity to look at how the process works and to make some changes accordingly.
"Now that we have Jenson confirmed to drive alongside Lewis, we want to make absolutely sure we can do an equal job for both drivers."
To smooth this process, Prew, who has been Hamilton's engineer since he made his F1 debut in 2007, is going to begin a new role as McLaren's principal race engineer - managing the engineering teams on both sides of the garage.
Andy Latham, who has been steadily working his way up the ranks since joining McLaren in 2000, will head-up Hamilton's team, while 39-year-old Jakob Andreason will lead Button's.