Revealed: Max Verstappen's stand-in race engineer at F1 Austrian Grand Prix
With 'GP' not available, a prominent figure will return to the pitwall at Red Bull as Max Verstappen's race engineer.
Max Verstappen will work with a different race engineer for this weekend’s Formula 1 Austrian Grand Prix, with long-time Red Bull employee Simon Rennie stepping in for Gianpiero Lambiase.
Lambiase, better known in the paddock as ‘GP’, has been an instrumental figure in Verstappen’s success, helping the Dutchman win four world championships and 65 grand prix wins with Red Bull.
But ahead of the first practice of the weekend, Red Bull confirmed to Crash.net that Lambiase will miss the Spielberg race due to personal circumstances.
This is the first time the Italian-British engineer has been absent from an F1 race since becoming Verstappen’s engineer following the latter’s mid-season promotion from Toro Rosso in 2016.
Lambiase will return to his regular duties at Silverstone for next weekend’s British Grand Prix.
Who is Simon Rennie?
For the Austrian round, Lambiase’s place on the pit wall will be occupied by long-time Red Bull employee Rennie.
The 45-year-old has worked with several leading names in F1 during the last two decades, although he has spent the last few seasons away from the limelight in a different role at Milton Keynes.
Rennie started his F1 career at Renault in 2004 and helped Fernando Alonso win back-to-back titles as his data engineer.
He remained at the Enstone squad through its turbulent years in 2008-09, rising through the ranks to become Alonso’s race engineer.
After the Spaniard left for Ferrari in 2010, Rennie worked with the likes of Robert Kubica and Nick Heidfeld, while also spending a year with Kimi Raikkonen in 2012 after Renault was taken over by Lotus.
He joined Red Bull in 2013, initially engineering Mark Webber, before forming a strong partnership with Daniel Ricciardo during the Australian’s most successful spell in F1.
In 2019, Rennie stepped away from the pit wall to take a behind-the-scenes role at Milton Keynes, citing the need to cut back on travel. Ricciardo later pointed to his departure as race engineer as one of the factors behind his decision to leave the team.
Since 2019, Rennie has largely been based at Milton Keynes as the head of Red Bull’s simulator programme, although he did briefly return trackside in 2020 to help Alex Albon in his graduation to the senior team.
More recently, he helped Ricciardo rediscover his form at AlphaTauri when the Australian returned to the Red Bull family after two less-than-successful stints at Renault and McLaren.
