© Williams

Every motor racing paddock is littered with people who once dreamed about a driving career, before circumstance obliged them to find an alternative route into their sport of choice. But Jon Tomlinson is not one of them. Formula 1 hooked him at an early age and he always had a very singular goal: to be an aerodynamicist.

“I first started watching grands prix in the mid 1980s,” he says, “at about the time Nigel Mansell began winning races with Williams. I was about 12 or 13 and his success really got me into the sport. I didn’t want to be a driver, though. It was always the aerodynamic side that fascinated me – I always loved the work of Italian technical illustrator Giorgio Piola, whose drawings appeared in Autosport. I used to cut them out and collect them in a shoebox. I had hundreds. Aero was very much in its infancy compared with what we know now, but it was something I really wanted to do.”

His school tutors persuaded him, however, that a design degree would be the most suitable preparation for adult life and he completed an industrial design course at Brunel University in London. This involved plenty of engineering, but no aerodynamics.

“Fortunately,” he says, “I landed a job with renowned aerodynamicist Mark Hanford almost as soon as I left university. Mark was working for clients in the US-based Champ Car series and we had a very small team – just him, me and John Iley (future head of aerodynamics at Renault, Ferrari and McLaren). I probably got the job through enthusiasm rather than knowledge, but soon began doing design, wind tunnel testing and so on.”

Tomlinson’s work initially involved evolving aero upgrades for Newman Haas Racing, with its customer Lola chassis, but the team had ambitious plans to develop a car for its own use in conjunction with American manufacturer Swift. Hanford was summoned to California to assist – and he went with him. “Within a year of leaving university I was suddenly helping to design a whole car aerodynamically,” he says. “It was reasonably successful and won a few races, but it was a huge learning curve for me. Mark had a vast amount of knowledge, though. He was very patient and a tremendous teacher with a lot of experience under his belt. It was a massive project for a small group of people.”

After two years Tomlinson branched out on his own, working as a freelance for Arciero Wells Racing, before returning to Europe in 2000 and moving into F1 as a senior aerodynamicist at Jordan. In late 2003 he reunited with former ally Iley at Renault – and he was deputy head of the aero department when the team won back-to-back world championships in 2005 and 2006. He moved to Williams, as head of aerodynamics, in the slipstream of that second title success.