With the end of the month of March quickly approaching, we are almost of the cusp of the 2024 Australian Grand Prix kicking off out at the Melbourne Grand Prix Circuit, and the race calendar has so far pretty much followed the formula 1 predictions with Red Bull duo Max Verstappen and Sergio Perez picking up one two finishes following the Bahrain and Saudi Arabia races.
The 2024 calendar has very much been one of change though, and it seems those twists are not yet over as with most eyes on preparations for Australia, Mercedes have recently confirmed that they have struck an agreement with Simone Resta for him to join them as their new strategic development director in 2025.
The 53 year old former Ferrari designer will become a key part of Mercedes’ restructuring process as they look to fully return to a far more competitive grounding in the race calendars to come after a good few years of falling well down the grid order with Red Bull’s improvement and resurgence.
Italian Resta has previously worked with the team’s technical director, James Allison, when the Briton himself was at Ferrari for the 2013 to 2016 race calendars, but no date has been given for his official arrival and start date at the eight time constructors’ champions team just yet. He left his role as technical director of the American based Haas team back in January of this year.
Following the confirmation of his deal, it has also been revealed that as part of Mercedes’ over all changes to their structure, Enrico Sampo will also make the switch from Ferrari to the Silver Arrows to take up the position of head of performance software applications. The team have also moved to replace performance director Loic Serra (who himself was poached by Ferrari last year), and David Nelson has secured an internal appointment to that position.
Resta’s background with Ferrari is impressive and will give Mercedes hope for the future. Having joined them as chief designer back in 2014 under Allison (serving as the Italian team’s technical director at the point), it was an inspired move by then chairman Sergio Marchionne, as he was in that position when they created their 2017 and 2018 race cars which were undoubtedly the most competitive F1 designs to have come our of Maranello for easily the last decade.
Both designs started the season as the fastest car in F1, and Sebastian Vettel led both championships for large parts of the season, before Ferrari’s charge in both years ultimately suffered a late collapse as a consequence of issues with reliability, and problems with errors coming from both the team and Vettel
Resta then moved to Sauber in May 2018, before a quick return to Ferrari in August 2019 and then he made the switch to Ferrari affiliated Haas in 2021, and he only left following the departure of team principal Guenther Steiner last winter.
With Mercedes struggling for competitiveness following the introduction of the new technical rules back in 2022, team principal Toto Wolff will be hoping that Resta can play a big part in helping them to finally catch up and close the gap that has grown, particularly with further technical regulations coming into