Porsche's former head of factory motorsport Pascal Zurlinden has joined Multimatic as director of performance engineering for its special vehicle operations division.
The Thetford-based engineering firm, most famous for its work with Ford Performance, said Zurlinden’s “knowledge, expertise and experience will be an important asset” to the expanding division which specialises in high-performance vehicle development and runs Multimatic’s motorsport programmes. He will report to Multimatic vice president and industry stalwart Larry Holt.
Having joined Audi Sport in 2008, Zurlinden moved to Porsche in 2014, working as an engineer on its world-beating LMP1 programme, before taking the reins of the factory GT programme where he took Porsche to success in all of the blue riband GT races globally. He assumed responsibility for all of Porsche’s factory racing from 2019.
Zurlinden has previously worked with Multimatic in the development of both Porsche and Audi’s LMDh race cars, in which Multimatic is the chosen chassis constructor partner. As a result, his knowledge in that area will remain “exclusively available to Porsche and Audi and so there should be no loss of momentum with the programmes,” said the firm.
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Holt commented: “We have worked with, and competed against, Pascal over the years and he has proven to be an outstanding technical partner as well as a tough adversary when we ran the Ford GT head to head against the Porsche 911 RSR.
“He is a highly skilled motorsport engineer with an extremely strong intuitive feel for race craft and a great approach to leading a team when subjected to the high pressure of competition. We are extremely fortunate to be able to have him join the MSVO team. As partners with Porsche on a number of motorsports programs it can only enhance both companies to keep Pascal in the fold.”
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