DECEMBER 1, 2003

Robinson joins Jordan

James Robinson has joined Jordan Grand Prix as head of race and test engineering, taking on some of the role which was previously done by Gary Anderson. The team announced that Robinson will work alongside John McQuilliam (Chief Designer), Nicolo Petrucci (Head of Aerodynamics), Mike Wroe (Head of Electronics) and David Williams (Head of Operations) in the team's Technical Management Group. There was no mention of technical director Henri Durand, who departed the team at the end of November.

Robinson has been involved in F1 since he joined Williams as a design engineer in 1984, to replace Neil Oatley and Ross Brawn, who had left to join Carl Haas's FORCE team. Robinson was quickly promoted to the job of being a race engineer and in 1987 he engineered Nelson Piquet in the battle to the World Championship against team mate Nigel Mansell. When Piquet moved to Lotus in 1988 Robinson became Riccardo Patrese's engineer at Williams but then moved to become chief engineer at Arrows. He led the design team which revised the Arrows A11 but money was short and when the team appointed Alan Jenkins in his place Robinson moved to Mclaren where he worked as race engineer to Ayrton Senna for 1991 before switching to the McLaren sportscar programme. He returned to Williams in 1996 as senior operations engineer and remained in that role until the summer of 2000 when he departed to take on a similar role at British American Racing. He left BAR at the start of last season.

Robinson will oversee the team's winter testing which begins this week at Jerez with Nick Heidfeld and Jaroslav Janis.