Ove Andersson, may he rest in peace, played a very important role for my career in formula 1. Firstly, by being the driving force behind bringing Toyota into formula 1 and secondly by giving me the chance to be part of it, laying out the target to employ mainly people without F1 experience, which was obviously key for me to have a possibility to be considered. I am really so thankful to him and do remember him as a pure racer and a very friendly and nice person! He left us way too early!
But, there was this one phone call, from what I remember, the only time he called me directly – no secretary, no warning. We are talking about 2002. Times, when there was still plenty of testing in F1 and the traditional Monza test, 10 days prior to the race. After the test, I went to see my former girlfriend and now wife, Monica, who was living in Modena. Rather than returning to Cologne I used the fact of being in Italy and avoided going backwards and forward in very few days. She was working at the time, so I was having a lie-in and stayed in bed for some time, recovering after an ever so stressful test. Suddenly, my phone goes off: Ove Andersson himself. I was awake immediately and obviously did not lose a second to reply, trying to give the impression I had been awake. As said, it didn’t happen very often to receive a phone call from the big boss and founder of Toyota Team Europe, as it had been called in the beginning during Rallye times, before it became Toyota Motorsport. I remember very well Ove not wasting time and going to the point straight away: “Dieter, we have made a decision to move our current chief race engineer to a different role within our R & D department, to improve and speed up development. With your experience from Audi, we believe that you are the right person to take over. Are you up for it?” How could I possibly say no? That was a once in a lifetime phone call and opportunity, so I immediately said “Yes”, but I did say, that I didn’t think that with the workload of the Chief Race Engineer, I would be able to continue as Allan McNish’s race engineer and that we needed somebody to take over. Ove agreed and this is how Ossi Oikarinen, who was the test engineer at the time, became Allan’s race engineer for the final part of the season. So, I went back to Monza race weekend in a new role, with not really a lot of time to prepare.