As a result, Hamilton's former race engineer Phil Prew will become the team’s principal race engineer from 2010 onwards, while the 2008 Formula One champion will from now on be guided through race action by Andy Latham. Also, Jenson Button's race engineer for the 2010 season will be Jakob Andreason.
Until promoted to race engineer for Hamilton, Latham has spent no less than 6 years trackside within the Woking organization, including stints as assistant test engineer and race engineer for Kimi Raikkonen and Fernando Alonso. As for Andreason, the 39-year old Dane also worked as an assistant race engineer through the last 5 seasons at Woking.
“Both our current race engineers, Phil Prew (Lewis Hamilton) and Mark Slade (Heikki Kovalainen), have been the team’s race engineers for more than 15 years. We’ve now got a number of very good people who are trained and ready to go – and we want to give them the platform from which they can make their experience and expertise really count,” argued Jonathan Neale, managing director of McLaren Mercedes, the team's desire to reshuffle the engineering crew.
“We also want to build an engineering team around Jenson, in exactly the same way we did with Lewis back in 2007. We want to create a strong group of individuals who can bring out the best in Jenson’s naturally smooth style.”
“Additionally, we’re very keen to keep on developing our organization. We’ve seen huge developments in aerodynamics, engineering and manufacturing throughout the team, and we are taking the reduction in trackside staff as an opportunity to strengthen race engineering.”
“With the resource restriction agreement affecting the number of personnel we’ll bring to the races this year, we also saw this as an ideal opportunity to look at how the process works and to make some changes accordingly,” added Neale.
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