Zak Brown says that there is no current plan in place with the Red Bull Toro Rosso Honda team with regards to James Key, with the announcement earlier this week that the McLaren F1 Team has hired him as their new technical director.
Brown, the boss of McLaren, is confident Key, rated as one of the best technical directors in the Formula 1 pit lane, will join the Woking-based team sooner rather than later, and is excited to have him join the team, whenever than will be.
“We have hired James Key, he will become our technical director,” Brown is quoted as saying by Motorsport.com. “We do not have a start date.
“He does have a current agreement with Toro Rosso, [and] of course we respect contractual situations. I think Toro Rosso and Red Bull are understandably upset that they’re losing a great talent like James Key.
“I think he’s recognised as one of the best technical directors up and down pitlane, so we’re very excited to have him join us in due course.”
Brown says there is a plan in place to get a deal done with Toro Rosso to bring Key in, and he is comfortable working around the current situation of him being the technical director for their rivals.
“There’s always in the world of F1 ways and opportunities to change situations,” said Brown. “That was something that we could potentially consider.
“We have a plan. We obviously knew his current employment situation, and we’re completely comfortable working around that situation.
“As we’ve stated before, we’ve done some restructuring, we’re doing some hiring, we’re not done yet, so we’re just head down, operating according to the internal plan that we have.”
Brown insists there are still more names to bring in as McLaren continue to restructure their management team in an attempt to address the decline in performance across the last few years, with no podium finish since the 2014 Australian Grand Prix and no race win since the 2012 Brazilian Grand Prix, a run stretching back 110 races.
“We’re not done yet, both with bringing in talent, and our final structure,” said Brown. “We have a good sense of what we’re going to do, but that’s not something that we want to make public.
“We just want to put our head down, and get on with the job.”
