MARCH 10, 2002

Minardi eyes market for new technical men

The Minardi team, the heroes of Melbourne, have been looking around in recent days to strengthen its engineering team.

THE Minardi team, the heroes of Melbourne, have been looking around in recent days to strengthen its engineering team. There have been a number of recruitments since the end of last season, notably the hiring of Paul Crooks, the head of BAR's composite design and aerodynamicist Ben Wood.

Minardi still needs some more new faces as the team suffered serious staff losses to Toyota Motorsport after the end of the 2001 season when Toyota's Gustav Brunner plucked out most of the department heads at Faenza.

This is bad news for Minardi in Italy as Paul Stoddart was keen to keep hold of the experienced crew at Faenza but as the numbers have been reduced by the poaching there is less need to keep the design operations in Italy and the indications are that eventually the design of the Minardis will be moved to Britain. This is not likely to happen in the immediate future although Stoddart has guaranteed that he will keep a facility operating in Faenza in the long term.