People

Ernst Keller

Ernst Keller began working on competition machinery when he was 16 with a Swiss team in the European 250cc Motorcycle Championship. He spent five years in two-wheel racing before deciding to have a change of scenery and headed off to African rallies as a mechanic with the Mitsubishi works rally-raid team. He then went back to Switzerland and found a job with a local racing organization called Bemani Motorsport, which ran Toyota products in the European Touring Car Championship throughout the 1980s.

The team never really had enough backing to compete against BMW Motorsport, the Volvo works team - which was run by rival Swiss tuning company Eggenberger - and Tom Walkinshaw's Jaguar and Rover teams.

The mid-eighties boom in touring car racing faded away with the cancellation of the European series and so Keller turned his attention to sportscars with another Swiss operation: Brun Motorsport. At the time Walter Brun's team, which was based in Gundelfingen in Germany, was one of the top sportscar teams, winning the Sports-Prototype World Championship in 1986 with Porsche 962s.

In the early 1990s, however, Brun was distracted by Formula 1 - running the unsuccessful EuroBrun F1 team - and sportscar racing went into decline, the World Championship being canceled in 1993. Keller moved to Sauber to join the new F1 operation and became chief mechanic in 1996.