So, with Toyota pulling out of F1, changes were to be expected. I was called by Pascal Vasselon, technical director at the time, who told me very directly that Toyota had to reduce personnel and that in the new organisation there was no room for two people of our profile and that he was going to stay. That meant that I had to look for something new. Luckily for me – and quite a few others – this was the moment with three new teams coming into F1. Mike Gascoyne was CTO at Lotus racing, so I called him to see, if he needed a Chief Engineer, only for him to tell me, that he already had one. While disappointment started to raise inside me, he added, that he needed a Deputy Technical Director and if I would be up for that. Honestly this was a big step for me, especially since I had never worked in design, only trackside, but I took on the challenge. With him being still there as CTO, offering support, I was more or less comfortable to start. When I hit ground in Norfolk, funnily the very same building I had been in, when working for Audi on the R8C, he asked me to take on the Sporting Director role on top of the Deputy Technical Director, since he wanted me to handle drivers and FIA relations, so I ended up doing all races on top, participating in all Technical and Sporting Working Groups with FIA as well as FOTA (Formula One Teams Association at the time). Very exciting for me and during that time I particularly enjoyed working with Charlie Whiting who was really on top of everything, an extremely competent person and very enjoyable to deal with. His passing a few years ago really hit me and I still cannot believe it in a way.
The first season, we races a car, which had been designed by a small group of people in Cologne, mainly ex-Toyota, while I built up the design office at Norfolk to design the car for 2011. Starting to employ people with a limited availability of budget, only in the first quarter of 2010, to have a car ready for the 2011 season, was very much a suicide mission. We were massively late for the 2011 season and somewhat lucky that the first race in Bahrain was cancelled, but by the second race we were ready to race.
The highlight of the 2010 season was obviously the fight between Tony Fernandes – the Lotus funder and Team Principal and Sir Richard Branson, in a similar role at Virgin. Those two made a bet, that whoever finished the Championship behind the other had to go on the other’s airline and serve him as a flight attendant. Since we finished best of the three new teams, Sir Richard Branson served his duty losing the bet and went on one of Tony’s flights. Unfortunately, at the first opportunity he lost control of the tray he was handing to Tony and everything ended up on Tony’s lap…
Effectively, the 2011 season, now racing under the famous Team Lotus name, was similar to 2010, we weren’t really able to close the gap to the other teams. Since racing for third last place was not my aspiration and Dr. Wolfgang Ullrich was calling from Ingolstadt, I moved back to Audi Sport at the end of 2011.