DECEMBER 5, 2002

More changes at Jaguar Racing

The restructuring of Jaguar Racing continues with Gunther Steiner, who has done sterling work keeping the team moving in the right direction in the last year, standing down as managing-director. He will be replaced in that role by Dave Pitchforth. A Yorkshireman, Pitchforth was trained with the Schwitzer company in Bradford and later in Indianapolis where he was in charge of the company's testing facilities. This led to a job in 1997 at the Reynard-owned Auto Research Center in Indianapolis, where he was general manager and from October 2000 managing-director. He joined Jaguar Racing in March 2002 after working on the construction of the team's windtunnel. He then became project manager for the Jaguar R4, which the team will use in 2003.

Pitchforth will be assisted in his tasks by an Engineering Director who has been signed up by Jaguar Racing but will not be able to join the team for another three months. He will have five engineers reporting to him, four heads of division and a "roving" chief engineer who will haver an input in all areas. The four division heads will be Ben Agathangelou (aerodynamics), Rob Taylor (car design), Dr Mark Gillan (vehicle performance) and a fourth engineer who will be in charge of vehicle science. He too has been signed but his name remains a mystery as he is currently employed with another F1 team. The "floating" chief engineer will be Malcolm Oastler, formerly technical director of BAR.

The emphasis of the shake-up is clearly to move Jaguar towards being a much more technology-driven racing team.

"I have concluded after a lot of soul-searching and extensive studies that this restructuring is necessary to establish a really sustainable platform for the key issue in Formula 1," said Jaguar's ultimate boss Richard Parry-Jones. "That is technical competence and technical systems capability. I am acutely conscious that there have been many false starts at Jaguar Racing. But I am convinced that irrespective of history this is the only way forward. When I examined the previous set-ups as to why they did not deliver the result we were hoping for, and I did that in detail. Clearly the biggest consistent issue was a lack of a robust technical set-up in the company, and that is what we are addressing here. Another feature of this under performance is the perception that you can buy rapid improvement by throwing money at the problem. This is not built as a single platform and is increasingly unaffordable. My approach sets Jaguar Racing up as a more engineering-orientated company with a true systems engineering approach that we believe is increasingly key to success in Formula 1."