Paddy Lowe has been named as the technical director of McLaren Racing, moving up from his previous position as the team’s engineering director. Tim Goss, the chief engineer on the McLaren MP4-25 moves up to fill Lowe’s previous job.
Neil Oatley will remain in his role as director of design and development programmes.
“It’s great for Neil and me to be joined by Tim as another director on the technical side,” explains Paddy. “With the three of us, we’ll not only be able to more efficiently spread our workload, but, through Tim and me, we’ll also share race attendance. It’s very important to have senior technical management at the racetrack, because that’s where you score the points, but, equally, if you spend all your time away then you risk overlooking some of the hard work that happens back at the factory.”
The trio have between them a total of 62 years at McLaren.
It’s funny how a team with such a cold clinical image engenders such loyalty fom it’s staff. I guess it must be a nice place to work after all.
TimW,
In my experience McLaren is one of the most tight-net and loyal teams in the business. And one of the most principled – despite all the crap that has been levelled at them.
I’m related to Neil, some sort of cousin? (his mum and my half sister are cousins). But I haven’t seen or spoken to him since we were both teenagers.
They certainly have some strength in depth, I don’t have a favourite F1 team but I do support the ones that are clearly out to do the best job possible in the correct way, McLaren certainly make the list.
I wish you hade titled this
Meanwhile at McLaren
I have worked for what was McLaren automotive (as it used to be called) and the sense of pride working even for the sister company of McLaren International was immense.
We were proud of the F1 team, the history and the road cars. It would have felt wrong to produce something that wasn’t as good as it could have been.
I did leave, but just being involved with the company I feel a sense of loyalty I haven’t felt anywher else.
I am now a McLaren supporter, I wasn’t before I joined the company!
Loyalty has to be earned; “image”can be purchased. Mclaren knows this; many others do not…
The correct way TimW? Sureply spygate proved this to be otherwise. I think when you are in the world F1 in the line between right and wrong is always blurred.
smellyden,
I don’t agree. Spygate (horrible expression) was not at all as it seemed.
I once interviewed a guy who was employed at McLaren and looking to leave. I was WTF? I’d give my right nut to work there… why would you want to come *here*?
62 years and not better than Newey.
As a McL fan… maybe they can get their asses in gear and design a car that isn’t 1 second slower than RB.
Or maybe they won’t be 100% mystified by flexi-wings this year.
Good luck chaps.
f1addicted,
I think you will find that they all worked alongside Newey at McLaren and won a number of titles with him, so one might say that they helped him, or he helped them
I agree Joe. Only the anti-McLaren brigade believe “spygate” was much more than score settling between Max Moseley and Ron Dennis with some Ferrari hype thrown in. If F1 was so incensed by technology transfer they’d never let the likes of Adrian Newey move between teams and Renault would have been equally severely punished for the “J Damper” affair.
Incidentally, what happened to the J Damper? I’ve seen lots of technical articles about F1 suspension lately that don’t make any mention of it. Did a recent rule change outlaw it, or did it just prove ineffective?
Joe, we might say that, or might say a lot of things… but last year the car spoke for itself. Newey was there. They weren’t.
So it’s surely not possible to claim that they ‘helped him’ that much – unless they forgot what they taught him… D’oh!
Re McL vs RB
My guess is that the design staff structure is different.
RB following the “Mad Scientist” route and McL following the “precision honed team” route.
^ in a comic book world, maybe.
Nothing mad about 24/7/365 dedication and precision that won them the title though.
Giving all the credit to one person is insulting the large team that is involved. A car is a collaboration, where Mclaren stands out is that their technical staff are not attention whores.
A couple of years ago Mclaren had the fastest car without Newey, Red Bull was also struggling with Newey.
Re McLaren,whatever happened to Alan McCall? Him & John Muller, 2 of the original mechanics. They both told me hilarious stories about those days!
Some comments on this post seem not to have a basic grasp of the facts. Newey left McLaren in 2006 and I seem to remember Lewis Hamilton winning the 2008 championship. Maybe Newey popped back and designed that car or maybe McLaren actually knew a little about building cars before Newey and maybe they still do.
Surely Adrian Newey would have learned as much from McLaren as they learned from him.
For those who haven’t figured out the spygate nonsense yet it is simple. Nigel Stepney and Mik Coughlan made a joint approach to Honda (Nick Fry has confirmed this) and shared data so they could make the best pitch. That is why Coughlan had the dossier in his house. He clearly mentioned one or two facts from that dossier to Pedro de la Rosa but if he and Stepney were planning on going to Honda there would not be a great deal of sense in him giving large parts of the data to McLaren to make his job at Honda harder.
One thing I would like to know from those who believe the FIA’s official line is why did Nigel Stepney after working for years to sort out Ferrari with Brawn and co decide to just give McLaren all that information? Nigel Stepney was the many who put discplines and systems into the Ferrari mechanics. Why would he bust his butt for ten years doing that to give the opposition a huge advantage? If he wanted to do that he would have offered McLaren the data in exchange for a job and a nice lump sum.
Read the transcripts of the McLaren’s ‘trial’ by the FIA and compare it to Renault’s when they were found with McLaren data. Charlie Whiting took a team into McLaren and spent two weeks there. They did not find a single piece of paper or computer file from Ferrari. At Renault he went in alone for a day and found numerous papers and files including 28 back ups of each and each file had thousands of hits. In his report he said that McLaren’s new car had ideas that could have come from Ferrari. Quite how he decided who had the idea first is beyond me.
If you think there was not a campaign against McLaren why was Charlie Whiting allowed to lie to the WMSC by saying that Tony Scott-Andrews had changed his mind on a previous incident so Lewis Hamilton’s penalty was not unfair? McLaren’s QC produced signed testimony from TSA saying not only had he not changed his mind but WHiting had never called him. I can’t imagine many other organisations who would let a rules official keep his job when he had tried to affect a ruling by lying but to this day he is still there.
Surely that and Max constantly acting as defence attorney for Renault in their trial shows these matters were not about the what really happened and were motivated by something else.
Remember back in the mid 2000′s when Toyota – a company that has been proven to cheat in Motorsport was caught actually fabricating parts from plans that had still had Ferrari logo’s on them. What happened to Toyota? A large fine? Points deductions? Race bans? Their name dragged through the press? No – they fired two employee scape goats, and got off scott free.
This was not a case of only two people knowing what was going on, this was a case of plans with ferrari logo’s on them being passed around the company from designers all the way down to the fabricators.
Yet we know what happened to Mclaren, in a case that while dodgy was not nearly as bad as the Toyota or Renault (who obviously have subsequently been found to be cheaters) cases.
Ryan,
Two Toyota employees who had worked for Ferrari were jailed in Germany for stealling Ferrari data. An open and shut case for the FIA but they decided to take no action.
There are numerous other cases including in one case Colin Kolles approaching an FIA official in the paddock and handing him a Toro Rosso drawing whick ‘proved’ that Toro Rosso were getting information from Red Bull. Strangely no FIA official asked how he had come by another team’s intellectual property.
There are other cases as well but no need to labour the point.