F1: Allison reveals why he returned to F1 team

–by Mark Cipolloni–

With the Mercedes F1 team getting their lunch eaten week in and week out by the Red Bull team, the Mercedes brass was likely up in arms that a caffeine company was out-engineering the mighty German company.

It was and destroying their image and something had to be done.

Aldo Costa was gone, and Toto Wolff said it was impossible to replace someone like him.

James Allison had moved on to other projects within Mercedes and Mike Elliott was made Technical Director, but the results were not there.

The Red Bull Car was just too quick and something had to be done.

So, James Allison was called back up to the F1 team.

Returning Mercedes technical director, James Allison, explained why he has come back to the F1 fold team on the latest edition of the F1 Nation podcast.

“I’m missing it!” Allison said. Well, that was the ‘party line.’

“No, it’s we just had a bit of a examining of our own navels here in Brackley, and between Mike and I, we concluded that the pair of us can cover the ground reasonably well.

“But perhaps I was better suited to the short-term fighting of a championship with a car and that he was the much better chess player of the pair of us, and he would be better suited to doing the job I was doing as a CTO previously.

“We jiggled it about and came up with something that we think is a better fighting machine overall.”

“A lot of that goes back to the very, very long and tragic shadow cast by my wife dying and, and being lucky enough a few years later to meet somebody else, who, at the time was living in France, and working in France and had all her life in France and had done for 20 years or so.

“And when she kindly, some would say foolishly, agreed for us to live together, she was giving up an awful lot.

“It was a little unfair from my point of view to cast her drift and ‘say thanks for coming over to England, I’ll see you five minutes a week!’

“The stepping back from the frontline role of technical director allowed some space for our relationship to flourish in a way that would have been tough otherwise, but that was over two years ago since Clemmie moved over and, and she has roots in this country now doing her own thing that doesn’t depend on my face!

“So it’s much more believable, much more possible now to do this than it would have been two and a bit years ago.”

“I was more maneuvering around the 2026 space than in the here and now of the current car. It certainly is a fair old chunk of effort to get up to speed with everything, not merely the regulations but the full engine of the factory and the race team and all the things that are currently in play in the championship fight, but it is exciting and fun and interesting and a pleasure to be back up to my neck in it.”