Why Bird at Jaguar will help the team fly in Formula E

By:

Matt Kew

Jul 14, 2020, 3:26 PM

Sam Bird will fly the Virgin Racing nest at the end of the current Formula E campaign to Jaguar, taking his considerable talent to bolster a line-up that threatens to pounce on next season's title

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In deference to Lewis Hamilton's staggering Styrian Grand Prix pole lap that put him 1.2 seconds clear of Max Verstappen, former Formula 1 driver Mark Webber tweeted: "There's a[n] F1 category, and then there's a[n] F1 PLUS category".

If - for simplicity's sake - you consider the 20 drivers in F1 to be the 20 best in the world, even within that pool there's still an upper echelon of talent, a 'PLUS' tier reserved for the likes of Hamilton, Verstappen and Charles Leclerc.

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Matt Kew

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Matt Kew is Autosport’s F1 Editor, a role he has held since March 2022 following stints covering Formula E, Extreme E and the British Touring Car Championship.

Matt joined Autosport in 2018 to work predominantly on the magazine, but his relentless quoting of Alan Partridge meant office colleagues soon thought he would be better-suited to increased field work.

Needless to say, Matt had the last laugh when he won the Motorsport UK Young Journalist of the Year Award in 2019.

His interest in motorsport was sparked by regular trips to watch ASCAR crash around Rockingham’s banked oval.

Matt read politics and philosophy at the University of Sheffield - receiving first-class honours for his dissertation assessing the lack of female participation in top-tier motor racing.

He covered a wide variety of national race and rally meetings for Autosport as a freelancer before joining full-time. His best efforts to argue the merits of historic racing are undone by a questionable taste in music and James Bond actors.