JANUARY 9, 2003

McNish and Renault

Allan McNish is rumored to bee on his way to Renault as a test driver. It will not be the first time that McNish has worked with the former Benetton team having done a lot of testing work with the operation back in the early 1990s. McNish was dropped by Toyota at the end of last year.

It is believed that with Renault's decision to restrict its testing to race weekends (with only 10 other days allowed) convinced the engineers of the need to find a driver with a lot of F1 experience and McNish fits the bill very neatly. The team is still under pressure to have a Frenchman somehow involved and so it is expected that Franck Montagny will be named as a secondary test driver although it remains to be seen how much mileage that will entail. The other man in the running for the Renault test drive was Sebastian Bourdais but it seems he is going off to race in America, probably with Newman Haas in Champ Cars.