McLaren sign Red Bull's chief designer

The news, which was exclusively predicted by Autosport magazine earlier this month, comes at a time when the Woking-based outfit were surrounded by rumours of a brain-drain following the departure of Adrian Newey and other leading technical staff.

Taylor, who was the chief designer of Red Bull's RB1, will renew his working partnership with friend Mike Coughlan after they were colleagues at John Barnard's B3 Engineering company and then later Arrows. Taylor switched to Jaguar as chief designer following the collapse of Arrows.

Although there has been no official announcement of the deal, a McLaren spokeswoman confirmed to autosport.com that Taylor would be joining them imminently.

"We can confirm that McLaren have further strengthened their technical team by employing Rob Taylor as senior design team leader," said the spokeswoman. "Rob will report to chief designer Mike Coughlan."

It is not clear when Taylor will join McLaren, as he is currently on gardening leave from Red Bull Racing, but it is thought it will be just after the start of the 2006 season.

Taylor's switch from Red Bull Racing comes at a time when McLaren have lost several senior figures.

As well as Newey's defection, McLaren will lose head of aerodynamics Peter Prodromou later this year to Red Bull Racing as well. The team have also lost ex-chief aerodynamics engineer Nicholas Tombazis, who will join Ferrari next month.

McLaren's F1 CEO Martin Whitmarsh told Autosport recently that the team still had plenty of strength in depth with their technical team.

"When an organisation demonstrates its ability to produce competitive cars it will always get some team members approached by competitors," he said. "That's been the case throughout my 17 years at McLaren.

"We still have excellent strength in depth across our engineering structure."