F1 News: Williams Score Huge New Technical Director In More Bad News For Alpine
Alpine has lost its chief technical officer, Pat Fry, to Williams as their new technical director.
Williams' former technical director Francois-Xavier Demaison left last December and the new team principal James Vowles has been looking for the right person to fill the role since he joined at the start of the year.
The report states that Fry will continue to work at Alpine until a replacement is found so it is currently unclear when he might join his new team.
Fry has a long-standing career within F1 starting back in 1987 with the Benetton team within the research and development team. Interestingly, Fry was race engineer for former racing driver and current Sky Sports F1 reporter Martin Brundle in 1992.Fry moved to McLaren in 1993 where he stayed for an incredible 17 years. During his time with the Woking-based squad, Fry worked on the active suspension systems, was Mika Hakkinen's race engineer in 1995 and David Coulthard's in 1997, and was promoted to chief engineer of race development in 2002.
After leaving McLaren in 2010, Fry joined the Ferrari team as the assistant technical director before being promoted to head of race track engineering in 2011.
Fry moved to Manor Racing from 2016 - 2017, returned to McLaren in 2018 where he stayed until 2019, before moving to Alpine in 2020 as their chief technical officer.
Williams are currently seventh in the constructors' championship with eleven points ahead of Haas who also has eleven points. There is a 36-point gap ahead of Williams to Alpine who has recently suffered two double DNF weekends in a row.