Supercars Townsville

Engineering restructure for BRT

Single-car Supercars squad Blanchard Racing Team is restructuring its engineering department for the remainder of the season.

Andrew van Leeuwen

Published: Jul 13, 2023, 7:13 AM

Copy link

Share on Viber

Add as a preferred source

003-Hazelwood-EV-06-23-MH2_0767

The Ford team will be without Mirko De Rosa, regular race engineer on Todd Hazelwood's car, for at least the next handful of Supercars rounds.

However, despite a report elsewhere, De Rosa hasn't split with the squad entirely according to team owner Tim Blanchard.

Instead his role is being steadily shifted into a workshop-based role to allow him to spend more time at home with his family.

De Rosa has immediate family arriving from Italy soon and also has a baby on the way.

Blanchard says this is a long-held plan, with an at-track replacement in for the Sydney SuperNight onwards in the works.

De Rosa, meanwhile, is still very much part of the team with his focus shifting to the build of a second Mustang that will be used as a wildcard entry for the Sandown and Bathurst races later in the year.

As for the long-term engineering structure, that will depend on whether the expected expansion to two main game cars goes ahead for 2024.

Supercars is understood to be in discussions with Tickford Racing about acquiring two of its Teams Racing Charters, shelving one and then selling the other to BRT to facilitate its expansion.

"The long term structure of the engineering department really depends on the team structure for next year, and that's a little but up in the air at the moment," Blanchard told Motorsport.com.

"Mirko will be workshop-based for the time being and that's due to personal reasons that he wants to focus on. He also wants to be involved in building the wildcard car, he's very passionate about designing and building cars. That was demonstrated by the fact we got our Gen3 car our first on the track. That's what he enjoys doing, and that's what he'll be doing for us in the short term.

"None of this is a complete surprise to us. We've got someone lined up as race engineer who we're just finalising. We should be able to confirm that in the coming days."

We want your opinion!

What would you like to see on Motorsport.com?

Take our 5 minute survey.

- The Motorsport.com Team

Read and post comments

Share Or Save This Story

Copy link

Share on Viber

Previous article You can buy John Bowe's Torana

Next article Supercars driver Dale Brede dies aged 48

Top Comments

There are no comments at the moment. Would you like to write one?

View More & Comment

Latest news

Laurent Mekies extends contract as Red Bull's F1 team boss

Formula 1

F1 Formula 1

Singapore GP

47 min

Laurent Mekies extends contract as Red Bull's F1 team boss

Alex Palou to drive Indy NXT machinery in Chris Griffis Memorial Test at IMS

IndyCar

Indy IndyCar 1 h

Alex Palou to drive Indy NXT machinery in Chris Griffis Memorial Test at IMS

The six drivers doing double duty in Portimao GTWCE and Barcelona WEC this weekend

WEC

WEC WEC

Barcelona

1 h

The six drivers doing double duty in Portimao GTWCE and Barcelona WEC this weekend

Into the unknown: What to expect from WEC's Barcelona debut

WEC

WEC WEC

Barcelona

3 h

Into the unknown: What to expect from WEC's Barcelona debut

Subscribe and access Motorsport.com with your ad-blocker.

From Formula 1 to MotoGP we report straight from the paddock because we love our sport, just like you. In order to keep delivering our expert journalism, our website uses advertising. Still, we want to give you the opportunity to enjoy an ad-free and tracker-free website and to continue using your adblocker.

You have 2 options:

Become a subscriber.
Disable your adblocker.

Subscribe now Already subscribed? Sign in here

Already disabled your adblocker?
Reload page

Manage Alerts