Leclerc’s former race engineer becomes Cadillac’s LMDh technical director

Ferrari driver Charles Leclerc’s former race engineer Xavier Marcos Padros has been recruited by Cadillac as technical director of its LMDh sportscar project.

Ferrari announced ahead of last year’s Imola F1 race that Charles Leclerc would work with a new race engineer. His previous engineer Xavier Marcos stayed with the Scuderia, but moved into another position outside the team’s F1 department.

Marcos Padros started his career in motorsport as a race engineer for the BNC Racing Team. He got his first taste of Formula One while working for the fledging HRT team as performance engineer from 2010 to 2012. After the team folded, he joined Williams Racing as a performance engineer for Felipe Massa.

Seeking a new challenge, Marcos Padros decided to move to the United States to become chief race engineer for the NASCAR team Richard Childress Racing in 2015. The Spaniard then returned to Formula One with Scuderia Ferrari, first as a factory based race engineer for 2018 and then became the race engineer for Charles Leclerc when he joined the team in 2019, and he has remained with the five-time F1 race winner ever since.

After Ferrari had announced that Marcos would leave its F1 department, his former performance engineer Bryan Bozzi started to support Leclerc as race engineer.

It has now emerged that Marcos Padros will take up the new position within the Cadillac V-Series.R programme, which straddles the World Endurance Championship and the IMSA SportsCar Championship.

In his new role, the Spaniard will join Cadillac as its new technical director and will oversee “all aspects of car engineering, performance and development.”