JULY 19, 2005

BMW strengthening Sauber aerodynamic department

BMW has moved quickly to strengthen Sauber's underfunded windtunnel programme and hopes to have the facility in Hinwil running much more than is currently possible as soon as there are engineers to run it.

The windtunnel is being used for development work on the current Sauber and to design next year's car, which will use the new BMW V8 engine, which ran for the first time in the back of a Williams last week.

The technical team is headed by former BMW engineer Willy Rampf and his position is unlikely to be under threat as he is well-connected in BMW circles. The aerodynamics department is headed by Britain's Seamus Mullarkey, a graduate of Imperial College, London, who worked at Robin Herd's design bureau in the early 1990s, on the Fomet 1 and Larrousse F1 cars before doing development work for the Forsythe CART team. In 1996 he moved to Galmer Engineering and a year later joined Jordan. In 1998 he became chief aerodynamicist at Sauber and has been there ever since.