Pat Symonds will be a consultant for Marussia

Last April, Pat Symonds reached an agreement with the FIA: he was once again free to work in Formula 1 as a part-time consultant within his company, Neutrino Dynamics. Today, this materializes through an agreement with Marussia, the new principal shareholder of Virgin Racing.

It must be said that Pat Symonds has known Nick Wirth for a long time, when the latter was the technical director of Benetton in the late 1990s. Wirth Research is the company chosen for the development of Virgin Racing’s single-seaters using computational fluid dynamics. He has also already collaborated with Mark Herd, who is the liaison between the trackside team and Wirth Research.

His engagement was thus confirmed by Graeme Lowdon, the team’s CEO, to Autosport: «Pat has been retained by one of our shareholders as an advisor and is thus advising the team. He has the right to conduct consulting through his company. Some team members have already worked with him in the past, and all the engineers are really, really excited. I can only see positives.»

If his reputation was seriously tarnished by the 2008 Singapore Crashgate, Pat Symonds remains one of the most experienced men in his field. He was at the head of the Renault F1 Team when the French team won its four world championship titles in 2005 and 2006. Such expertise couldn’t stay on the market for long.

On the other hand, to be employed full-time by a team again, he will still have to wait until 2013, when his ban by the FIA will have been lifted.

With the participation of RacingBusiness.fr