JUNE 12, 2000

Prost confirms Gousset

ALAIN PROST has confirmed that his technical director Alan Jenkins has left the French team and that the technical coordination will be looked after by the team's head of design Jean-Paul Gousset.

Gousset worked on the Citroen rally raid program before a brief period with Larrousse and then he joined Team Lotus in 1993 as head of the drawing office. When Lotus closed down at the start of 1995 Gousset moved to Lotus Engineering, working on road car projects, until he was hired by the Arrows team in 1997 to head its drawing office at Leafield. He stayed with Tom Walkinshaw's team until the end of the 1998 season and then moved to Prost.

The Prost team will continue to work with John Barnard's B3 Technologies in Surrey, which Alain Prost says he is going to develop into the team's "English technological arm".

The Prost team is currently looking to recruit a new head of aerodynamics following the departure of Ben Wood to JaguarÊRacing. There has been speculation that this might be Englishman Nigel Cowperthwaite, who is currently employed at Minardi.

Jenkins is unlikely to be out of work for long as he is well regarded by the top management of the Ford Motor Company which was not happy when he was dumped by Stewart Grand Prix prior to joining Prost. Now that Ford has taken over Stewart and transformed it into Jaguar Racing it is not impossible that Jenkins might be brought back. It remains to be seen how he would fit into the organization with Gary Anderson and it must therefore be assumed that it would be probably be a case of either Jenkins or Anderson.