MARCH 1, 2001

Andy Le Fleming joins Prost

PROST GRAND PRIX has continued its building up of its technical staff with the recruitment of Andy Le Fleming, who was previously chief engineer at Jaguar Racing.

The 39-year-old Anglo-Russian engineer has been involved in racing since he graduated from university, initially with the Penske CART team but later as a design engineer with John Barnard's Ferrari GTO operation in Guildford. He followed Barnard to Benetton and then began a career in race engineering which began with Roberto Moreno and was then Michael's Schumacher's first race engineer in F1. After brief interludes with Tyrrell and Arrows he returned to Ferrari in 1993 as a designer in Barnard's new FDD and he worked as a designer and race engineer at Ferrari until he joined Stewart Grand Prix at the start of 1997 as chief engineer.

The takeover of the team by Jaguar at the start of last year and the poor performance of the Jaguar R1 led to a whole group of engineers being dropped by Bobby Rahal and after lengthy negotiations with McLaren, Le Fleming finally decided to join Prost.

The news is very positive for Prost as it marks the first high-profile English engineer to join the team since the middle of last year when most of them left the team after Alain Prost ditched technical director Alan Jenkins.