People

Nicolo Petrucci

Petrucci studied aeronautical engineering at the Polytechnico di Milano, specialising in aerodynamics and wrote a research paper on the aero-elastic phenomena of a Formula 1 car, which was completed withn help from Dr Harvey Postlethwaite and Giampaolo Dallara. This led to a job in 1989 at Ferrari as a computational fluid dynamics engineer with the F1 team. He moved briefly to the Planair windtunnel (the facility which is now owned by Fondmetal) before being taken on by John Barnard and Mike Coughlan to work at Ferrari Design and Development facility in England. He stayed for four years before moving back to Maranello in 1997 as a senior aerodynamicist. He was later promoted to being a project leader at Ferrari before moving to Arrows at the start of 2001 to become the team's head of aerodynamics. Petrucci's work made the car quite competitive until the team ran out of money in the summer of 2002. He moved to Jordan but the team was struggling for money and Petrucci gave up and joined Toyota at the end of 2004.