The Alpine Formula 1 team has announced its revamped technical leadership structure following the departure of former executive director Marcin Budkowski last month.
Pat Fry, who joined Renault as technical director (chassis) in February 2020, has been promoted to chief technical officer, with Matt Harman appointed technical director.
This is the latest in a series of changes made by Alpine Cars CEO Laurent Rossi, which has also included the departure of non-executive director Alain Prost.
According to an Alpine press release, this reorganisation was initiated in November 2021 and is “designed to maximise the team’s performance”.
It is being implemented to achieve the objective set by Rossi last year of being capable of fighting for the championship within 100 races of the team being rebranded as Alpine at the start of last year.
Fry will oversee technical activities at the team’s Enstone base with responsibility for setting performance targets, defining technical capabilities and competencies needed and identifying future technologies and disruptors.
He will be in charge of the big-picture technical approach, which Alpine says includes arbitrating on “major performance trade-offs and risks” as well as setting the team’s long-term development strategy”.
Fry, 57, has a huge amount of experience in Formula 1 having first joined the team when it was in its Benetton guise in 1987 as an electronics design engineer. He spent almost five years at Benetton, where he became Martin Brundle’s race engineer in 1992.
He then moved to McLaren, where he spent 17 years during which he had stints as race engineer to both Mika Hakkinen and David Coulthard. In 2000 he was appointed chief engineer race development before becoming chief engineer five years later, a position he held until he left the team in 2010
Fry joined Ferrari as deputy technical director in the middle of 2010, subsequently becoming chassis technical director and then engineering director in almost five years at the team.
After a brief stint working with Manor, he later returned to McLaren on a short-term troubleshooting basis as engineering director prior to joining Renault.
As technical director, Harman has responsibility for “delivering performance and experiments to the track, structuring the technical organisation and process, plus growing talents and teams”, according to Alpine’s statement.
He will also oversee the chassis technical direction, with Alpine referencing the importance of his experience in chassis/engine integration. This is an area that Rossi has targeted for significant improvement.
This is because Harman worked at Mercedes AMG HPP for 18 years from 2000-2018, latterly as head of powertrain integration and transmission design.
He then joined what was then called Renault as chief designer in late 2018 before being appointed engineering director in May 2019.
Rossi described the change in the technical structure as considerably strengthening the team as it bids to kick on having proved unable to climb out of F1’s midfield since Renault bought the ailing Lotus team at the end of 2015.
“We are considerably strengthening Alpine F1 Team by having Pat and Matt at the helm of engineering in Enstone,” said Rossi.
“Pat is one of the most experienced engineers in Formula 1, while Matt’s drive and expertise will prove critical in extracting the full potential of our race cars, thanks in particular to his unique expertise combining chassis and engine development.”
