The 48 year-old rally car designer Michel Nandan has joined the Suzuki World Rally Team as Technical Manager, with a view to working on the forthcoming SX4 World Rally Car, due to make its debut in the FIA World Rally Championship in 2007. This comes soon after the decision was made to base the new team in France, rather than in Hungary as previously announced.
This will be the third team for which Nandan has been involved at WRC level. He joined Toyota Team Europe when the Celica ST185 was first being developed and stayed for work on the ST205; cars which between them won 17 world rallies. He was also involved in the early concept stages of the Corolla WRC before moving to Peugeot for work first on the 206 WRC and then the 307WRC, cars which between them won another 27 rallies.
Nandan was not able to begin his engineering work until he had finished his military service, and first moved to a company specialising in metallic composite work in the aerospace industry. His first contact with rallying was when he served as a mechanic for the legendary Monegasque gentleman driver 'Tchine', before working for Peugeot Italia in rallying and Supertourisme racing. He also spent two seasons working with Zakspeed on ITC cars.
The team also announced that Italian Nino Frison joins as Chief Designer.
-FIA WRC
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