Ferrari senior performance engineer Jock Clear has revealed he will have a key role on Charles Leclerc's side of the garage in 2019, with speculation he could become his race engineer.
The Briton has worked with a number of drivers early in their careers including David Coulthard and Jacques Villeneuve when they stepped in at Williams before joining Mercedes and then heading to Maranello in 2014.
With Leclerc set to be Ferrari's youngest driver in over half a century Clear's experience would be vital and the Scuderia is now set to exploit it.
"It's not all finalised but at the moment, yes, I will have a strong influence on his side of the garage," he confirmed on Friday. "Whether that [race engineer] is the job title or not, we'll finally decide upon but certainly I will taking closer attention to him than maybe I would have done on Kimi [Raikkonen] or Sebastian [Vettel] up until now.
Also Read:
- Sauber: Don't compare Leclerc's rise to Hamilton
- Vettel wants himself & Leclerc to work 'in the interests' of Ferrari in 2019
"I’ve recently made a long-term commitment to the team, and as such, I will use my skillset wherever we feel that’s best,” Clear continued. “I have a lot of experience with young drivers and a lot of experience with experienced drivers as well.
“With Charles coming in, I will help in any way I can to make his life easier, to ease some of the pressure and to make sure that we get the best out of Charles and out of the team as a whole over the next few years.”
In the teams' press conference, Clear also spoke about Ferrari's recent development issues which saw the upgrades introduced in Singapore have a negative impact on performance.
"Those couple of races where we did have a slump, we came back in Austin, we were brave enough to go back on some of the development and that’s the kind of culture that we want to have now," he explained.
“People are brave enough to say “OK, I think we’ve made a mistake. We go back, we relearn what we thought we understood, and we come back in Austin and we win the race, and we were competitive again in Mexico.
“So that’s the positive to it. The championship position we all know.”
