Google News James Allison is back as Mercedes' Technical Director: He explains the reasons
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Mercedes has announced the return of James Allison as its Technical Director. Mike Elliott will now take on the role of Chief Technical Officer at the company. In an interview with the F1 Nation Podcast, James Allison shared the story of how the swap came to be.
There is no doubt that both of them are great at what they do. It was, however, decided that this kind of deal was the best for the team in the long run. This is their way of enabling the team to be more effective with this move, from their point of view.
“We just had a bit of an examining of our own naval here at Brackley and between Mike and I, concluded that the pair of us can cover the ground reasonably well but that perhaps I was better suited to the short-term fighting of a championship of a car and that he was the much better chess player of the pair of us and he would be better suited to doing the job I was doing as CTO previously.
So we jiggled it about and came up with something we think is a better fighting machine overall”. - Allison said, as quoted by crash.net
Mercedes and its ambitions
Mercedes is a company with serious ambitions at the moment and every single detail is important to them at this particular time.
In fact, they have a very clear focus on their next challenge because they are aware they have to raise their level in order to succeed. “I don’t think that this decision is particularly dependent on the fortune of the car at a given race weekend.
It was based on a sober assessment of what the pair of us are best suited to. And we think that the overall fighting strength of this team is maximised by this role swap. Let’s hope that Melbourne is the first step in the pick up of a general recovery that allows us to get more competitive by the weekend."- he concluded
