Legendary Formula 1 engineer Jock Clear has confirmed his departure from Ferrari. The Englishman, 62, has had a long career in motorsport and had been working for the Scuderia since 2015. In recent years he had been working closely with Charles Leclerc as the Monegasque racer’s driver coach.
Before joining Ferrari, Clear had already been in F1 for more than 20 years. He began at Lola Cars before joining Benetton at the end of the 1980s. His first race engineer role was with Johnny Herbert at Team Lotus in 1994, after which he worked with David Coulthard and Jacques Villeneuve at Williams. He later joined BAR which became Honda, Brawn GP and, eventually, Mercedes, where he worked with Michael Schumacher and then Lewis Hamilton as a performance engineer.
Hamilton and Mercedes won the 2014 title, but that would be Clear’s final year of working with the Silver Arrows, having agreed to join Ferrari where he enjoyed another lengthy spell. But his departure was reported in September last year, although it was never publicly confirmed until now.
Speaking to CasinoHawks, Clear said his departure was due to “just personal reasons, really”. He said: “My kids have left [home and in] the last couple of years priorities have changed slightly. I’ll certainly watch as a fan. I’ll be interested and I’ll follow it all.”
He also credited the bloated modern F1 calendar as a reason, adding: “”Honestly, 24 races a year is a lot. I didn’t envisage a role where I wouldn’t be trackside, and as I say 24 races a year is a lot, so you just have to look at life-work balance.”
Given his vast wealth of F1 experience, Clear would be a useful mentor for any young engineer trying to cut their teeth in high-level motorsport. And that is what the 62-year-old intends to do with his time now that he is no longer working trackside himself, revealing a desire to help more women to win high-level roles for themselves within the paddock.
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Clear explained: “I’ve worked with some really, really clever girls and boys in Ferrari who are in their late 20s, early 30s, cutting their teeth, and I know they’ve got it, they can handle this. There’s things I want to do, in terms of research.
“I’ve been very invested in the women in motorsport, and the racers on track, that’s fascinating, to try to understand that better. I want to help more and more girls at a younger age to get into motorsport, simply to get the statistics up, so that we’ve got a better flow of girls coming into motorsport at a low level, all the way through the formulae. I want to put some more time into that.
“We’re attracting a lot more girls into engineering now, which is brilliant. I’ve got two daughters, one of whom is an engineer, and so I’m acutely aware of how difficult it’s been to open up that field and make it interesting, make it attractive, so that we get the brightest engineers, whether they’re boys or girls. That is a result of how the sport is marketing itself. We’re certainly going in the right direction.”