People

Trevor Foster

From Leicester in England, Foster became an apprentice mechanic in a local garage and by the time he was 20 was working for Bob Gerard's Formula 2 team. The following year he switched to another local team, being run by Tom Wheatcroft and worked as a mechanic with the rising young star Roger Williamson in F2. Williamson was killed that year at the wheel of a Formula 1 March at Zandvoort and in 1974 Foster left Wheatcroft and joined the Shadow F1 team at Weedon in Northamptonshire. From there he went briefly to Tyrrell and then joined the March factory Formula 2 team. In 1980 he quit racing for two years and worked at a local Ferrari dealership but he returned to the sport in 1983, establishing Pegasus Motorsport in Quorn, Leicestershire, with backing from the De Zille Family, which was running the Lesley Dee fashion company, selling the successful First Edition and Harvest Moon brands.The team ran Andrew Gilbert-Scott as its lead driver in Formula Ford 1600 with Graham de Zille as the second driver in the works-assisted Lola outfit. The team enjoyed immediate success with Gilbert-Scott winning the RAC and Townsend Thoresen Championships and de Zille the BP Superfind junior FF1600 title. Gilbert-Scott rounded off the year by winning the important Formula Ford Festival. The team moved to Formula Ford 2000 and then to Formula 3 in 1985, giving Johnny Herbert his first Formula 3 tests that year. In 1986, however, Foster fell out with the De Zilles, the team was closed down and Foster went to work for a rival Formula 3 operation called Swallow Racing which won the title that year with Andy Wallace.Swallow then tried to build its own F3 chassis but this was not a great success and in 1989 Foster joined the Eddie Jordan Racing Formula 3000 team as team manager and engineer, overseeing Martin Donnelly and Jean Alesi. The Frenchman won the European Formula 3000 title that year and when Eddie Jordan began to make plans to enter F1 with his own team in 1991 Foster was named team manager. He also race engineered Andrea de Cesaris that year in the 7 Up Jordan and in 1992 looked after Stefano Modena. He left the team at the start of 1993 to become director of racing at Team Lotus but he quit in mid-1994 when it became obvious that there was not enough money to do the job properly and, after being unable to find the backing to start his own Formula 3000 team, Foster joined Richard Dutton's Fortec team in Formula 3 in 1995.The following year Jordan offered him the role of General Manager in the F1 team and Foster took it. In September 1998 he was appointed Joint Managing Director of Jordan, looking after all aspects of the team's operations, leaving Jordan to look after the commercial and financial side of the business. The result was that in 1998 the team began winning races. After a less successful year in 2000 Jordan decided to appoint John Putt as chief operating officer of the team and in April 2002 Foster decided to leave the team. He has since done some consultancy work for BAR.