Alan Jenkins

This article is about racing car designer Alan Jenkins. For the actor see Allen Jenkins .

Alan Jenkins (born April 24, 1947 in Wirral ) is a former English racing car designer in Formula 1 .

Career

Automobile sport

Jenkins studied industrial design and came to racing in 1978 via a detour. He first worked on old Lotus racing cars for Héctor Rebaque . In 1979 Ron Dennis hired him for the Formula 2 activities of his Project 4 . A year later took over Project 4 , the McLaren team, and Jenkins was the right hand of chief designer John Barnard long in F1 for several years was Jenkins race engineer of John Watson , with whom he won some races. In 1984 he looked after Alain Prost's car , who lost the world championship half a point behind Niki Lauda .

At the end of 1984, Jenkins received an offer from Roger Penske to build Indycar cars, which he accepted so that he could step out of Barnard's shadow. Jenkins' car that Penske - March with Danny Sullivan at the wheel, won in 1985 at the first attempt the 500-mile Indianapolis . The following cars, the Penske PC15 and the PC16, were technically sophisticated but unsuccessful and Jenkins had to leave Penske in mid-1987.

Jenkins switched to the new Formula 1 team Onyx , which started in 1989 with Stefan Johansson and Bertrand Gachot . At the Portuguese Grand Prix , Johansson took the first and only podium. After a change in the management of the team, Jenkins moved to Footwork at the end of the year , where he designed the FA12 for the new Porsche V12 developed by Hans Mezger . Jenkins was with Footwork until February 1996, when he joined the new Stewart team as Technical Director , where he stayed until late 1998. There he designed the Stewart SF01, among other things . After several months of negotiations with potential employers such as Benetton , Sauber and Ford , Jenkins decided on the Prost team, where he designed the Prost Peugeot AP03 for the 2000 season . However, he was fired again in the middle of the year and then turned his back on Formula 1.

Motorcycling

Jenkins now works for the Italian motorcycle manufacturer Ducati . There he was responsible for the aerodynamics and the color design of the Ducati Desmosedici RR and is involved in the development of the MotoGP machine Desmosedici . In December 2007 Alan Jenkins for his successful work at Ducati with the British Racing Drivers' Club awarded Sir Jackie Stewart Award excellent.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Award for Alan Jenkins ( Memento of the original from December 15, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , desmodromik.de on December 12, 2007 

Web links

• Statistics of Formula 1 cars designed by Jenkins