JANUARY 28, 2003

Gaillardot to Toyota

Formula 1 engineer Vincent Gaillardot has joined the Toyota Motorsport team in Cologne. The Frenchman previously worked for Jaguar Racing but was one of the victims of the job cuts last autumn.

Formula 1 engineer Vincent Gaillardot has joined the Toyota Motorsport team in Cologne. The Frenchman previously worked for Jaguar Racing but was one of the victims of the job cuts last autumn. Gaillardot is unusual in Formula 1 in that he is trained both as a motor engineer and a chassis engineer and has been working in racing full-time since his college days. After a rapid ascent through the French national scene he was taken on by Renault Sport in 1991 and became the liaison engineer between Renault and the Williams test team and eventually graduated to work on as liaison engineer with Ligier in 1993 before moving on to become Michael Schumacher's motor engineer at Benetton in 1995. In 1997 he was hired by Arrows to work as Damon Hill's race engineer (the two men having worked together when Hill was the Williams test driver). He became chief engineer at Arrows in 1998 and then took up a similar position with Prost GP, moving to Jaguar at the start of last year when Prost went to the wall.