John Wickham, who was team manager at Lotus Renault GP, has decided to leave the team.
Wickham, who helped found the Spirit F1 team in the mid-1980s and was more recently technical and operations manager of A1 GP, was signed up by Lotus Renault at this year's European GP. The plan had been to share his responsibilities with newly promoted track operations director Alan Permane, who moved up from his old role as chief race engineer last month.
However, Wickham has elected to hand his notice in and has not traveled to this weekend's Indian GP with the team. He has reportedly already left the team to take up a new, unspecified role in sports car racing.
Team principal Eric Boullier said recently that he had expected a recent staff reshuffle, which included the departure of sporting director Steve Nielsen, to be a positive for the team.