McLaren team principal Andrea Stella has explained why the side have taken on a new rotational system for their engineers, which has seen Lando Norris not have the same race engineer for every race.
Norris’ race engineer since he joined McLaren in 2019 had been Will Joseph; however, Jose Manuel Lopez has been heard on the radio to the British driver in recent rounds.
Changing race engineers’ mid-season is rare, given the relationship and trust which is built between a driver and their race engineer.
However, Stella has explained that a rotational system has been implemented at the British team to cope with the increasing calendar and travel demands.
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“The reason why you see there’s a group of engineers supporting each driver rather than the classic two or three engineers is because we want to attack a couple of objectives,” Stella told Motorsport.com.
“The first one is that we have 24 races and it starts to become a challenge, even at a personal level, to make sure you can cover all the races.
“This is in terms of planning but this is also in terms of what happens if we have an emergency and we need to substitute one of the race engineers, so we want to create kind of a long bench or a long group of people that can support the driver.
“I’m very pleased without going into the specifics of one engineer or the other, I’m very pleased with how this process is leading to a very competent group of engineers that can interact with the drivers.”
Stella also revealed that engineers are also being swapped to expose them all to the demands of the role and get them used to communicating with other members of the team.
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“It’s not all interacting with the drivers. It’s also for a race engineer, for instance, you need to interact with a strategist,” explained Stella.
“And you need to do it with the minimum amount of words, to communicate what you need to communicate, you need to understand each other in terms of terminology.
“So, there’s quite a lot that you need to get used to as part of race engineering, and that’s why you see so much rotation because we need to expose all the engineers to as much experience as possible. So, that’s the reason why we do it and I’m very pleased with what I see happening.”