Have five DTM engineers resigned at HRT? How the Ford team reacts

– What is going on at HRT? As Motorsport-Total.com has learned from a reliable source, the members of the DTM engineering team of the Ford squad reportedly submitted their resignations together a few days ago on July 31. At the center is said to be the experienced chief engineer Laurent Fedacou, who has been working with the Nürburgring-based team since the end of 2021.

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The Frenchman also technically sets the direction for the other GT3 programs of the Ford team. In addition to Fedacou, who worked as a Class-1 race engineer at the former Audi factory team Phoenix until 2019 and then at Venturi in Formula E, four other engineers – all French – are also said to be leaving.

These are the two DTM race engineers Clement Faye and Valentin Planque, who are responsible for Arjun Maini and Finn Wiebelhaus – and the two associated performance engineers. But what is behind this development?

HRT announces restructuring in press release

It is interesting that both Fedacou and Faye were spotted on Sunday at the team’s private DTM test at the Nürburgring. In addition, the HRT team communicated on Tuesday in a mid-season review that despite the upward trend – Wiebelhaus and Maini recently achieved the first three DTM podiums for the car ever – a restructuring is imminent.

The team, which achieved six wins in the DTM and the last driver title for Mercedes-AMG in 2021, has still been chasing its first victory since the Ford brand switch at the beginning of 2025. After analyzing the first half of the 2026 season, it was concluded that responsibilities “need to be more clearly defined in some areas, decisions made faster, and processes made more efficient,” team principal Ulrich Fritz is quoted as saying.

HRT will also “reorganize and strengthen personnel in certain areas. This gives us the opportunity to focus even more on sporting performance. This is not about short-term reactions, but about sustainable structures and a clear perspective,” Fritz clarifies.

Ulrich Fritz: No denial, but restructuring only after the season

But what does this mean concretely? And how does it relate to the circulating information that five key engineers are leaving? “Yes, people will leave us,” confirms Fritz, who is now a shareholder in the HRT team, when asked by Motorsport-Total.com. “However, we will finish the season together.”

This is a possible explanation why the affected engineers were seen at the DTM test last Sunday. Apart from that, there are probably notice periods that must be observed in this case as well.

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Fritz does not want to comment on specific names of who is leaving the team. “I do not want to comment publicly on who is coming and who is going as long as such a structural change is not finalized. Personnel decisions are also confidential matters,” explains Fritz, who does not deny the research either.

“System does not rely on individual people”

The reason for the restructuring at the end of the year, according to the former Mercedes DTM director, is the enormous growth of the team, which fields more than ten Ford Mustang cars in various racing series, in recent years. “We have seen that internally we have a bit too much manpower in one place and a bit too little in another,” he says.

Whether this means losing key people, Fritz questions, because in his opinion, over the past years “we have built a system that does not rely on individual people but on a team. We have always lived by the principle that we can modularly shift and exchange topics and capacities because we did not want to be dependent on individuals.”

Why so many French work at HRT

The cooperation with the French engineering academy ESTACA, which offers a motorsport focus in Laval 300 kilometers west of Paris and supplies the team with young engineers, also plays a major role. “We get the people directly in their practical phase – and thus have at least four additional engineers per year,” Fritz explains why so many French engineers work at HRT.

After this phase, some of them also move to other teams or seek other challenges. “Therefore, it is clear that at the end of the year we sometimes have a change – and this is certainly the case again this year,” says Fritz.

Besides that, HRT lost two top German engineers, Marius Avemarg and Dennis Nägele, at the end of 2024 and 2025 respectively, who returned to the Mercedes-AMG environment with Winward and Landgraf.

Also due to the numerous programs outside the DTM such as GT World Challenge Europe, Intercontinental GT Challenge, Nürburgring Nordschleife or ADAC GT Masters, the team employs numerous engineers.

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