Jordan's newbies

[Craig]

Following the exodus of key personnel from the Jordan team throughout the latter part of the season, life is getting back to normal at the Silverstone headquarters with the replacement of some of the more important people in preparation for the coming season which begins in less than four weeks.

Amongst those hired is former Williams engineer, David Brown, who worked with Mansell during the latter's championship season in 1992, as well as Damon Hill also at Williams and David Coulthard at McLaren. His most recent appointment saw him run the McLaren F3000 team but he is now enjoying being in the front line again after an absence of three years.

"It's nice to be back," he said. "I'm getting involved more deeply in the engineering and it's good to have a complex car to engineer rather than a F3000 car, which is much more limited in scope. I'm in charge of the race engineers, data engineers and junior engineers.

"I was doing much the same sort of thing at Williams even though I didn't have an official title; I had more or less grown into the role because there was no one else to do it! But now I have a much broader scope than before."

His work with Hill, Coulthard, Alain Prost and Nigel Mansell has given him the experience equalled by few currently employed engineers in Formula1, and also means has observed first hand how many teams are run. He was mostly impressed with the lack of political pressures and the open atmosphere at Jordan something which all new employees seem to comment on when they first arrive.

"Everyone is very keen to succeed, which I think is refreshing and also a great advantage. What you see is what you get - which is good. The approach of the entire team is very professional. But the important thing is that everyone wants to become even better because we know that's what you need to compete at the highest level. That said, technically there is already a very, very high level of expertise. It's a very satisfying place to be," he continued.

Having arrived in the middle of Jordan's 2001 development programme, he is not, for the time being, concentrating on how fast the car is capable of going. Instead, reliability, set-up and the assessment of aerodynamic packages has been their main focus at recent testing sessions in Spain. He explained:

"We have been addressing the sort of new car reliability issues which you need to find during testing, rather than during a race weekend. We're not running up against insurmountable set-up problems or anything like that. The car seems to be generally better balanced than last year's, which everybody sees as an advantage - particularly the drivers.

"So far, we have done very little performance running but we are increasing the ratio of performance testing against reliability testing as we get the reliability sorted out - which is entirely normal. The basic design of the car seems to fulfil expectations. What we don't know yet is just where we stand relative to the other teams. But we are on the right path."

Another valuable addition to the Jordan family is Gabriele Delli Colli, who started at the beginning of the year after a three-year stint in Switzerland as race engineer to Sauber's Jean Alesi and Pedro Diniz. Moving from Europe hasn't been that much of an upheaval for the 34 year old Italian but a change of culture was inevitable.

"It's quite different,' he said. "but that's to be expected because I have previously been with a Swiss team and now with one based in England, but one which is, I believe, quite different from all the rest anyway! I've been finding it easy to settle in. Obviously, you have to get to know the people first of all, but the general impression I've got is that everybody wants to do a really good job. The whole team is pushing very hard to get good performance out of the car and achieve a good result. "Sometimes, if you come from a different environment, people don't want to listen to what you have to say. But that's not been the case here. You have a clear impression that everyone at Jordan is really working hard to get the most out of the car."

Delli Colli will be concentrating on fellow countryman, Jarno Trulli's car and both have promised to resist the temptation to converse, when working, in their native language to propagate the open atmosphere that already exists in the Jordan garage.

"Jarno and I may both be Italian but it is important that we speak English." He added. "When you have people from different countries working for one team, you should always be able to let the others understand what you both are talking about. I don't want to have any secrets - or have people think we have secrets. That's very important. I don't want to spoil the very good atmosphere which we have here already. It's working very well and I'm really enjoying being with Jordan."

What do you think ? Will it all mesh together and be alright on the night ? Or will they be this year's BAR or Jaguar ?