De Ferran back in F1 as McLaren 'informal consultant'

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The McLaren team has turned to two-time IndyCar champion and former Indy 500 winner Gil de Ferran to help shake things up at Woking

As well as his successful career as a driver, de Ferran was also previously briefly sporting boss at BAR-Honda.

"Gil is a good friend of McLaren," explained CEO Zak Brown. "We have brought him on as an advisor to help with our young drivers.

"He's a great racer who knows his way around the garage," he added. "[He has] so much expertise that can help us improve, and we're open-minded to that."

Although the team is currently in fifth place in the constructors standings - a marked improvement on their dismal 2017 campaign - there remains a sense that McLaren is underperforming and should be doing much better.

Last month the team parted company with chief technical officer Tim Goss as part of a general reshuffle of its technical team.

"Gil has so much experience," driver Stoffel Vandoorne said in Monaco. "He's new to the team but it's always positive when someone new joins us.

"I started working with him in Barcelona, so Monaco will be his second weekend. Let's see how we develop the cooperation."

Fernando Alonso was equally happy about de Ferran's arrival, while admitting that the news had taken him somewhat by surprise.

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"I wasn't involved at all, I was just informed about his presence here," said the two-time world champion.

"Zak called me a couple of weeks ago to inform me," he continued. "Of helping the team to maximise the performance and the resources and everything that he could tell us from an outside point of view.

"It's good to have him here with maybe a fresh approach or different point of view of some of the things that we are doing here. He's a great guy.

"At the moment he's just listening, more than talking," Alonso said. "[He's] trying to understand how the team does everything, and how the philosophy of the McLaren F1 team is at the moment.

"His contribution is maybe later on, or in a couple of months' time."

However there's speculation that de Ferran's appointment as an informal consultant might be less to do with F1 than with the team's possible move into the US open wheel championship.

"We are looking at some other forms of motorsport," admitted Brown. "Most notably IndyCar is under review, and he obviously has great history there.

"You'll be seeing him in Detroit for the IndyCar race and around our Formula 1 garage often," he added.

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Andrew Lewin

Andrew first became a fan of Formula 1 during the time when Michael Schumacher and Damon Hill were stepping into the limelight after the era of Alain Prost, Nigel Mansell and Aryton Senna. He's been addicted ever since, and has been writing about the sport now for nearly a quarter of a century for a number of online news sites. He's also written professionally about GP2 (now Formula 2), GP3, IndyCar, World Rally Championship, MotoGP and NASCAR. In his other professional life, Andrew is a freelance writer, social media consultant, web developer/programmer, and digital specialist in the fields of accessibility, usability, IA, online communities and public sector procurement. He worked for many years in magazine production at Bauer Media, and for over a decade he was part of the digital media team at the UK government's communications department. Born and raised in Essex, Andrew currently lives and works in south-west London.