‘Up to my neck in it’ and delighted – Allison sounds revitalised

James Allison’s first interview since returning to the technical director role at the Mercedes Formula 1 team made clear both how much of a change of focus and pace his job swap with Mike Elliott will be, but also how determined he is to get Mercedes back to title-challenging status.

Allison moved to the chief technical officer role in mid-2021, describing it at the time as “not in the front line, not part of the day to day, not part of the current car, or indeed, next year’s car”.

Though F1 has been part of his remit within a position team boss Toto Wolff described as being his “technical twin”, Allison’s focus on the F1 front was preparations for the new rules in 2026 and his tasks have gone into far different territory including as technical lead on the America’s Cup yacht collaboration with INEOS. The CTO role has also only been a three-days-per-week position.

Now he finds himself firmly back at the day-to-day technical helm of the F1 team, and at a time when it has abruptly fallen from the might of its run of consecutive championships to a position where it declared after just one qualifying session of the 2023 season that it had been wrong to stick with its flawed 2022 design concept and needed a complete rethink.

The simultaneously jaunty, idiosyncratic and fiercely determined tone of Allison’s interview on F1’s own F1 Nation podcast on Monday quickly dispels any thought that Mercedes had to coerce him back onto the frontline in desperation.

He is also extremely candid about the personal circumstances that made him seek a step back in 2021 and why returning now is viable.

Allison’s wife Rebecca died suddenly from bacterial meningitis in 2016, when he was working at Ferrari. He left and took the job at Mercedes so he could be UK based and closer to his family following that tragedy.

In a segment of the interview for which Allison – needlessly – apologises more than once, he reveals that wanting to prioritise a new relationship motivated his change of role two years ago.

“A lot of that goes back to the long and very tragic shadow cast by my wife dying,” said Allison.

“And being lucky enough a few years later to meet somebody else, who at the time was living in France and working in France and had all her life in France and had done for 20 years or so.

“When she kindly, some would say foolishly, agreed to come and cast her lot in with me so that we could live together, she was giving up an awful lot. It seemed a little unfair from my point of view to cast her adrift and say ‘thanks for coming over to England, I’ll see you five minutes a week’.

“Stepping back from the frontline role of technical director allowed some space for our relationship to flourish that would’ve been tough otherwise.

“But that was over two years ago now that Chloe moved over. And she has some roots in this country now doing her own thing that doesn’t depend on my face, so it’s much more believable, much…