Race Engineer
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When a driver switches teams, do they take their race engineer with them or are they assigned a race engineer at the team they are going to?
Generally speaking, both are employees of the same team. If the driver leaves the engineer stays with the team. But there are times when because a driver is so attached to the driver, they will resign and follow their driver.
Some teams also make an effort to hire said race engineer if he has stayed with his old team. An example would be Mark Slade. He was Mika Hakkinen and Kimi Raikkonen’s engineer in McLaren – and Lotus hired him off Mercedes to work with Kimi.
That explains a lot. I thought Lotus taking Slade was an odd move to begin with, because before he was with Mercedes, he was Vitaly Petrov’s engineer at Renault. Renault deliberately chose him because Petrov didn’t (and still doesn’t) speak the greatest English in the world, and they thought Slade’s approach would be good for him. I get the distinct impression that they didn’t get along, though – Petrov said he often felt like he was back in school when Slade was his engineer and that Slade was making all the decisions without asking Petrov for any input.
Obviously either Lotus or Raikkonen thought they liked the old Raikkonen-Slade partnership and decided to revive it then. I also remember him being a Renault race engineer, then moving to Mercedes with Schumacher I think, before making his way back.
Kimi Raikkonen went to Mark Slade to ask him personally to be his race engineer again. I can’t find the link now.
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