JUNE 25, 2009

Zander to leave Brawn

Brawn GP's chief designer Jorg Zander is leaving the team. This has led to speculation that he may be bound for another team but it would be unusual for a designer to be allowed to leave with immediate effect if he is off to join a rival outfit. Normally designers are held to six months of "gardening leave" before they are allowed to work elsewhere. The only way around this problem is for the team that is losing the engineer to be paid handsomely to release him.

Brawn GP has no immediate need for money and would be better served by forcing Zander not to work elsewhere.

The team said that Zander "contributed significantly to our success" and thanked him for his work which would suggest that his release is not as a result of the other obvious explanation that the team does not care if the engineer joins another team or not, which suggests that it is happy enough to see him go.

Zander has moved around quite a lot during his F1 career, which began at Toyota in 2002. He moved to BAR in 2003 and then to Williams in 2005 but spent only a year there before moving to BMW Sauber and then switched to Honda in 2007.