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.”
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