Losing Paddy Lowe to Mercedes will be 'gutting' for McLaren: Damon Hill

The 1996 World Champion, Damon Hill, talks of Paddy Lowe and his skill, having worked with the 50-year-old during his career as the Williams test driver, when the duo developed the active suspension concept for the FW14B.

Hill believes that the amount of skill and experience gained by Lowe, a Cambridge graduate, during his 26 years in Formula 1, will prove to be greatly valuable for the Silver Arrows.

“They wouldn’t have wanted to lose Paddy, they would have wanted to keep their team together. Paddy is an incredibly talented, boffin type of character who I worked with in years gone by at Williams – he was developing the active suspension – and he knows everything you need to know about how to make a competitive car. So he will be a valuable asset for Mercedes and I would have thought that McLaren will be gutted to have lost him.”

While Tim Gross is ready to take over McLaren as Technical Director, Lowe is going to be seeing out his contract with the Woking based team on what is called ‘gardening leave’, to prevent theft of details of their 2014 car to Mercedes.

“A big problem for race teams is the information, this private information that they have spent money gathering and their technical research. When someone goes, they are not allowed to take any documents or any kind of information of that nature with them. However, they still do and they are able transfer that know-how to another team and start again.”

If Paddy joins Mercedes, as foreseen, he will work alongside Ross Brawn, Bob Bell, Aldo Costa and Geoff Wills, who were all Technical Directors of various teams at some point. This has led to a lot of debate about Brawn’s future as Team Principal and Hill expects changes.

“There was a little bit of a rattled cage from Ross Brawn when the news came out that Paddy might be going to Mercedes so I think there is still some manoeuvring around that will be done in the technical department. There has been a lot of change, Nikki Lauda has moved in, Norbert Haug has left and there has to be some sort of change of order at Mercedes to make the assets that they are taking on board work properly and produce a winning combination, which after all is what Mercedes are investing an awful lot of money in doing.”