FORMULA ONE:McLAREN HAVE moved to level the playing field between team-mates Lewis Hamilton and Jenson Button by announcing new race engineers for both of the Formula One champions.

The Mercedes-powered team said in a statement that Hamilton, champion with them in 2008 and a part of the McLaren “family” for more than a decade, had been assigned Andy Latham.

Fellow-Briton Button, who has joined from Brawn (now Mercedes) after winning last year’s title, will have Danish-born Jakob Andreason working on his car.

Phil Prew, who worked with Hamilton (25), last year, will take on a new role overseeing both crews as principal race engineer.

“When Jenson visited (the factory), one of the questions he asked was, ‘Is this Lewis’s team?’,” said McLaren managing director Jonathan Neale.

“The answer was ‘Yes, of course it’s Lewis’s team . . . as it was Heikki Kovalainen’s team, Fernando Alonso’s team, Juan Pablo Montoya’s and Kimi Raikkonen’s. And it will be your team as well’.”

Neale said McLaren felt the time was right for a change of race engineers after the previous pair had been in the job for more than 15 years. With all teams agreeing to reduce the number of staff attending races, it was a good time for an organisational rethink.

“We also want to build an engineering team around Jenson, in exactly the same way we did with Lewis back in 2007,” added Neale.

“Now that we have Jenson confirmed to drive alongside Lewis, we want to make absolutely sure we can do an equal job for both drivers,” he added.

Button and Hamilton are McLaren’s first champion team-mates since the late Brazilian Ayrton Senna and Frenchman Alain Prost lined up together in 1989, and that was a notoriously explosive pairing.

Meanwhile, Michael Schumacher will test a GP2 car at Jerez in Spain this week as part of the seven-time world champion’s preparations for a Formula One comeback with Mercedes.

The team and GP2 organisers said the 41-year-old German will be at the wheel of a development car for the Formula One support series from today to Thursday.

Formula One’s governing body will appeal a French court’s decision to overturn a life ban on former Renault team boss Flavio Briatore, the International Automobile Federation (FIA) have said.

“The president of the FIA has consulted the FIA senate and the FIA’s lawyers about the decision of the tribunal de grande instance de Paris of January 5th,” a statement said. “It was unanimously agreed an appeal would be prepared.”

The decison means the ban is reimposed until the appeal is heard.