Chris Dyer has been replaced as Head of Race Track Engineering at Ferrari, the Australian appearing to be the fall guy for the Italian team's failure to win the 2010 title with Fernando Alonso.

At the end of the season, company president Luca di Montezemolo admitted that changes would be paid following the team's disastrous performance in Abu Dhabi, with team boss Stefan Domenicali repeating the claim yesterday. Today, Dyer appeared to be the first to pay the price.

Dyer, who joined Ferrari in 2001 as engineer to Michael Schumacher, following four years with Arrows, is replaced by Pat Fry who joined the Maranello outfit from McLaren in June.

Fry, who began his F1 career with Benetton in 1987 joined McLaren in 1991 taking charge of work on the Woking outfit's active suspension programme. Between 2005 and 2010 he was Chief Engineer on the MP4-20, MP4-22, MP4-24 and MP4-26 programmes.

The Italian outfit has also confirmed the appointment of Neil Martin, who will take on the role of heading up the new Operations Research Department reporting directly to Technical Director, Aldo Costa.

Martin's F1 career began with McLaren, where he was Systems Engineer, in 1996, before joining Red Bull as Head of Strategic Operations in 2007.