JANUARY 25, 2006

Red Bull takes McLaren's top aero man!

According to our spies, Red Bull Racing has hired McLaren's head of aerodynamics Peter Prodromou. If the news is confirmed this would be a second big hit for McLaren following the departure of Adrian Newey. There are also rumours that Nicolas Tombazis may also be leaving the team to go back to Ferrari, although there have been denied by McLaren. Having said that, it is only two days since McLaren's Martin Whitmarsh said he was not aware that the team was losing anyone other than Newey.

Prodromou has been a McLaren man since he graduated from Imperial College, London in 1991 with a degree in aeronautical engineering. His Master's degree was in Computational Fluid Dynamics and his first job at Woking was to introduce CFD to the team and then develop the systems. He later moved on to work on the windtunnel programme and in 2000 he became the team's head of aerodynamics, running the operations and then becoming more and more involved in the actual design process. In May 2005 he was named head of aerodynamic development when the team was restructured.