29/01/2021
NEWS STORY
An enhanced roll will see veteran engineer, Jock Clear working with members of the Ferrari Driver Academy.
Clear, who began his motorsport career at Lola before joining Benetton in 1989, joined Ferrari at the beginning of 2015.
Previously he had joined Williams from Lotus in late 1994, and over the years that followed worked with the likes of David Coulthard, Jacque Villeneuve and Rubens Barrichello.
When Charles Leclerc joined Ferrari in 2019, Clear, who had previously been part of the Scuderia’s trackside engineering group, was assigned to the youngster as his coach.
From this year however, the Briton's role will be expanded to include the young hopefuls that comprise the Maranello outfit's driver academy.
"Jock Clear is a great person and great professional, and has been in Ferrari for many years," said team boss Mattia Binotto, according to the sport's official website. "His role in 2020 was being driver coach.
"The driver coach is an engineer who is supporting the drivers in order to perform in terms of driving to their best," explained the Italian. "He looks at their lines, looks at the way they are braking through the corner, accelerating, and managing tyres.
"They are there to support the race engineers, performance engineers and drivers, to make sure that the driver is developing well.
"We had some chats with Jock in the past weeks," he continued, "and we would like to develop him even more as a driver coach, not only for Charles but looking ahead at the future to our own young driver line-up we have got at the Ferrari Driver Academy.
"We've got Mick in Haas starting his experience in F1, but we've got still young drivers competing in F2, like for example Robert Shwartzman. And there is Callum Ilott, who will be our test driver, will do simulator, and will do free practices.
"So the role of Jock will be to assist all these drivers to develop themselves as drivers, and try to exploit the most of their potential."