Otmar Szafnauer
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Otmar Szafnauer (born 13 August 1964 in Romania) is the Chief Operating Officer of Force India F1 team.
He was the the Vice President of Honda Racing Developments. He was also a member of the Management Board of the Honda F1 team.
He was born in Romania, but moved to Detroit when he was seven years old.
He received a Masters Degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Detroit, and joined the Ford Motor Company in 1986.While working for Ford he attended the Jim Russell Racing School and started racing in Formula Ford in 1991.
In spite of being too old for a professional career as a driver, in 1993 he was appointed Programmes Manager for Ford in the U.S.
Here he met Adrian Reynard who asked him to become Operations Director at British American Racing in Formula 1 in 1998.
After three years at BAR, he was recruited by Bobby Rahal in 2001 to be Chief Operating Officer at Jaguar Racing, but a week before he was supposed to start Rahal was fired and Szafnauer was not needed any more.
After several months of unemployment he was hired by Honda, who had made a comeback to Formula 1, to help its engineers.
After leaving Honda, he founded Soft Pauer, which released the Official F1 Timing Application [1] on the iPhone in June 2009, before joining Force India in October.
