Sauber Loses Eeckelaert to Honda
The shake-up of Sauber Team personnel has begun ahead of BMW's acquisition of the team. Jacky Eeckelaert will soon be moving to Honda. Eeckelaert has spent five years at Sauber, heading up their vehicle engineering team, test team and R&D efforts.
Eeckelaert, the Belgian engineer, is believed to be in the designing team of the new BAR Honda for the 2006 season.
Jacky Eeckelaert was born in Antwerp, Belgium. He studied mechnical engineering at the University of Louvain in Belgium before working for 4 years in engine development for the Ford Motor Company before becoming head of the technical center of Champion Europe.
At the same time he was competing for privateer teams in single-seater racing in Formula Ford and even in Formula 3, which developed his interest and expertise in chassis design. In 1985, he decided to dedicate himself a little more to racing and quit Champion to become team manager of the Keerbergs Transport Racing Formula 3 Team. In his spare time he worked as an engineering consultant in the research center of Louvain University and designed components for racing cars.
In 1991, he moved to the DAMS F3000 team and from there to the Danielson team in 1992, running Peugeot 905 sportscars. At the start of 1994 he was offered a job by Peugeot Sport to run the company's French Touring Car Championship operation. It was a great success with Laurent Aiello winning the championship. At the end of 1995 Peugeot Sport boss Jean-Pierre Jabouille asked Eeckelaert to oversee the Peugeot F1 testing program. This led to another role as coordinator between Jordan and Peugeot - dealing both with engine designers at Peugeot and Gary Anderson's chassis design department at Jordan.
When Peugeot began a new alliance with Prost GP in 1998 Eeckelaert joined Prost as Chief Engineering, doing all the races and the tests. In 1999 it was decided that he would do only testing. At the end of that year he was offered the job of Chief Test Engineer with Sauber and moved to the Swiss Team. In 2001 he returned to the circuits to be Race Engineer for Kimi Raikkonen and in 2002 he became Head of Track Engineering for Sauber.
