The incredible tale of Toyota, Lotus…and the Cologne pub turned into a job centre

Kimi Raikkonen’s last race engineer has remembered how his F1 dream came to a swift end after 2009… until a pub encounter with Mike Gascoyne.

Julien Simon-Chautemps, now a broadcaster with Canal+ and F1TV, was Kimi Raikkonen’s last race engineer before the Finn left F1 after 2021. Over an extremely long motorsport career, Simon-Chautemps has worked for the likes of Lotus, Sauber, and Renault – but his F1 career almost ended after a stint with Toyota in 2009.

How Julien Simon-Chautemps’ career teetered after Toyota plug pulled

Having joined the Toyota F1 team in 2007, the Japanese manufacturer abruptly pulling out of F1 after the 2009 season posed a serious threat to the career of Simon-Chautemps and the near-thousand people workforce based at the Cologne factory of the team.

Simon-Chautemps remembered the story of how he found out the plug was being pulled when he was called into the factory as he appeared on the FluidJobs.com podcast .

“I remember I was very depressed, like another 800 people in the factory,” he recounted.

“I remember the whole day – they all brought us to a huge warehouse they had at the back of the factory in Cologne, all the people there, and they start with this awful presentation on, ‘Okay, so we’re going shut down the programme’, and they went straight away into the admin stuff like ‘If you’re 10 years in the company, you will get 20 percent of the salary, blah, blah, blah’.

“So they went straight away to that and it was very, very hard.”

It was advice from his father that inspired him to keep his head up and keep looking for other F1 jobs, as he pondered what to do next.

“I remember calling my dad and saying what had happened and I finally managed to get into F1 and they are shutting down the programme and I’ve no job anymore,” he said.

“I remember him asking if I wanted to stay in F1,  what I want to do for the option and, if I did, I have to look for another option and go for another team – do exactly what you did before F1 but contact the existing teams and see what happens.”

How Mike Gascoyne and a Cologne hotel pub saved the day

However, fortune was to shine on Simon-Chautemps, and quite a few other ex-Toyota staff as they forlornly left the Cologne factory to make their way home and pick up the pieces.

Former Toyota technical director Mike Gascoyne, who had left the squad three years previously due to a “fundamental difference of opinion” over the team’s technical operations, had caught wind of the events unfolding and was ready and waiting to intercept the now-jobless Toyota staff.

Simon-Chautemps remembered how it played out, laughing at the audacious move from Gascoyne as the British engineer scooped staff up for the F1 team he was building up.

“At the same time, there is a bit of luck as well,” he said.

“Mike Gascoyne, who used to be the technical director at Toyota for many years, was about to set up a team in the UK, which would actually, later, be Caterham, but it started off as Lotus Racing in 2010.

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“What he did, and Mike was very clever for that – he basically took the pub at the hotel of Cologne airport as his office, and then he was welcoming all the people from Toyota that got made redundant!

“So I remember this queue of people outside this pub and an interview with a pint of beer! He said, ‘Okay, you have 10 minutes, talk to me!

“For Mike, it was a great opportunity, because he created a Formula 1 team and, at the same time, a team of the size of Toyota made 800 people redundant.

“So what happened is that the entire race team of Toyota went to work with him from the chief engineer, race engineer, the performance engineer, even the drivers as Jarno [Trulli] went from Toyota to Lotus Racing at the time, so we all translated into Norwich and that was my next step in the UK!”

Simon-Chautemps would work with Trulli at Caterham/Lotus Racing for the 2010 season before making the switch to Lotus in 2011 where he would partner up with Vitaly Petrov – it was the following year that his relationship with Kimi Raikkonen would begin for a successful initial two-year stint, before reuniting at Sauber in 2019.

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