Jock Clear starts work for Ferrari

Jock Clear has finally started work at Ferrari, after serving a full year of so-called ’gardening leave’.

In late 2014, Mercedes announced that Lewis Hamilton’s highly regarded and experienced performance engineer is leaving the dominant German team.

A full year later, Ferrari boss Maurizio Arrivabene said just before Christmas: "The only new arrival (at Ferrari in 2016) will be Jock Clear and no one else."

Indeed, Briton Clear, who also worked with Michael Schumacher at Mercedes, was on duty in red uniform on Monday as Pirelli’s wet tyre test at Paul Ricard began.

His role will be overseeing the race engineering operations of the Maranello based team.

On Monday, it was Raikkonen at the wheel of last year’s Ferrari, which was running alongside McLaren-Honda and Red Bull.

On Tuesday, Sebastian Vettel will take his turn for Ferrari.

At the French circuit on Monday, Raikkonen said: "The aim is to win, but the new car is yet to do a single lap, so let’s see how the testing goes next month."

Pirelli chief Paul Hembery on Monday seemed happy that F1’s official tyre supplier will be able to do more testing this year.

"We will do about 30,000 kilometres," he is quoted by Brazil’s UOL, "bearing in mind that the tyre suppliers before us did 100,000kms of testing in a season with only one team."