News Headlines
Today's news in full
News Summaries
Syndication

11th June 2008

Ove Andersson, the founder and former owner of Toyota Team Europe which, as Toyota Motorsport GmbH, races in the FIA Formula One World Championship has died in an accident during a classic car rally in South Africa.

Swedish born Andersson started his motorsport career as a rally driver and competed for a number of factory teams before establishing his own Andersson Motorsport team which ran Toyotas in international rallying. After retiring from competitive driving Andersson concentrated on developing the team, which renamed as TTE became a major force in the World Rally Championship winning numerous world titles.

In 1993 Toyota bought TTE from Andersson who stayed on when Toyota ended its WRC programme and started a project to design and build a Toyota sportscar for the Le Mans 24 Hours which despite strong performances in 1998 and 1999 never managed to win the race. Andersson was still in charged when the company was renamed Toyota Motorsport GmbH when the team entered Formula One in 2002.

Andersson retired at the end of 2003 but continued in a consultancy role with Toyota Motorsport until January 2006 when, along with F1 team’s former chief designer Gustav Brunner and its former head of aerodynamics Rene Hilhorst, he was charged in relation to the use of technology allegedly stolen from the rival Ferrari F1 team, namely a data analysis programme brought to the Toyota team by a technician who joined from Ferrari in 2002.

In April 2007 former Ferrari team members Mauro Iacconi and Angelo Santini who later worked for the Toyota team were found guilty by a Modena court in a case in which they charged with espionage, including gaining unauthorised access to Ferrari's computers and the misappropriation of files. The cases against Andersson, Brunner and Hilhorst were due to be heard by a court specialising in economic crimes, but the charges were dropped in September 2007.

<< Previous

Whole Day's News

Next >>