STEPPING OUT OF THE SHADOWS

Toro Rosso’s new technical director has flown below the radar for many years and boasts a more eclectic background in motor racing than many of his peers

There’s little wonder Jody Egginton’s recent appointment as technical director of Toro Rosso was greeted with a chorus of “Great guy!” from F1 insiders on social media. For while his may not be a face that regularly graces TV broadcasts, his career has touched many of the great and the good of motor racing over the past two decades. And his background in practical engineering and hands-on management made him a shoo-in for a technical role that’s changing in line with the broader trends in F1.

Egginton joined Tyrrell as a junior designer after graduating in 1996, though it would prove to be a brief stint in the venerable Ockham wood yard.

“My strength, if you could call it that, was that I could use 3D CAD software in an era when it was becoming more popular,” he says, “so that was my ‘in’, and I was designing the pit equipment and all the kind of stuff that the other people were less interested in doing. It was a small group of people, and going through a lot of changes with the sale to BAR [British American Racing].”

But Egginton isn’t your typical F1 ‘lifer’. BAR’S acquisition of Tyrrell was chiefly a means of securing an F1 entry at a time when barriers were being erected against new teams. Egginton took his leave and went to the transmissions specialist Xtrac as a gearbox designer. A project to design the transmissions for the reborn DTM series in 2000 led to a job offer from Opel.

“Before I knew it, I was engineering a race car,” he says. “I worked with Opel’s test team for a couple of years, then back to a race team with Holzer, working in the DTM as an engineer while concurrently being a designer in the background… and doing some freelance race engineering. So I was doing a bit of everything – even the practical aero testing and research on the DTM car.”

Egginton returned to the UK in 2004 to work as a designer/engineer on Prodrive’s Aston Martin DBR9 GT1 project, and then answered F1’s call again – with another team that’s gone through many incarnations. When he joined at the beginning of 2005 its new owner, a Russian steel magnate, was renaming it Midland F1. Over the course of five years Egginton would work through two further name changes as it became Spyker and then Force India, race-engineering Christijan Albers, Giancarlo Fisichella and Vitantonio Liuzzi.

“There were a lot of changes in team kit, shall we say…” He’d also be working with Mike Gascoyne, the man who’d interviewed him for that Tyrrell job. Gascoyne departed in the Force India era but resurfaced in 2010 as a key figure behind one of the new teams to join the grid that year: Lotus, later renamed Caterham after a protracted spat with others claiming ownership of the Lotus name. This entity wasn’t a great success but it did imbue Egginton with a greater breadth of knowledge.

“I did three seasons there as chief engineer and then got offered the opportunity to be operations director,” he says. “That was interesting – the team was relocating from Hingham to Leafield, and the former Arrows and Super Aguri factory, where it was spending a lot of money on refurbishment. So getting involved with that, organising and budgeting and trying to make a seamless transition, was a really useful experience.”

Egginton had already been in talks with Toro Rosso “on and off” as Caterham withered during its final season, and at the end of 2014 moved to Faenza as head of vehicle performance, later to become deputy technical director to James Key. He’s now assumed control of a tech team that’s in transition: Toro Rosso has spent much of the past decade as an independent arm of the Red Bull empire but now the junior team will be drawing much closer design-wise to the senior outfit. Arguably the right kind of person for this job is someone who’s been a fixer and resource-juggler as well as a hands-on engineer.

“We’ve made the decision to take certain parts from Red Bull, the rear end being the most obvious,” Jody says. “It’s something a lot of other teams are doing. For us, there’s a chunk we’re no longer doing, but it’s enabled us to do more work in other areas to a higher level, and it’s enabled designers to expand their horizons and explore different areas. It’s no less work, I can tell you…”

“WE’VE MADE THE DECISION TO TAKE CERTAIN PARTS FROM RED BULL, THE REAR END BEING THE MOST OBVIOUS”