He jetted into Adelaide from his native Italy on Wednesday morning with plans for him to get straight to work as a head start for next year.
However his debut has been delayed by illness with Corte not at the circuit on Thursday.
“Riccardo was meant to be working this weekend, and he’s here, but he has somehow got extremely unwell on the flight from Italy,” explained team CEO Brenton Grove.
“He landed at 1am [Wednesday] morning and now he’s in a hotel room very unwell.
“So his debut is not starting out the way he wanted, but he is here this weekend, he is on our performance list and he is working to learn for next year.
“That was a decision we made pretty early, to give him as much of a head start as we could. But unfortunately it has quite panned out how we wanted.”
Corte arrives at the team right as current team principal David Cauchi is set to depart.
That has prompted Allen’s current race engineer Alistair McVean to be promoted to a newly-created head of performance role.
According to Brenton Grove there won’t be a direct replacement for Cauchi, with the team principal role to effectively be dumped from the organisational structure.
“We’re in the process of re-organising the team,” he explained.
“I probably will step up a little bit more [but] I don’t really want to fill that role because my time needs to be spent elsewhere in our businesses and not sucked into the race team full time.
“But I’ve already been heavily involved in the team for the last four years and have day-to-day communication with everyone there.
“So I don’t think there is a massive shift in terms of strategy, vision and direction. It’s more just how we implement that day-to-day.
“We have re-organised the business behind the scenes and have a different approach moving forward, so we probably won’t have a direct team principal filling Cauchi’s role.
“We’ll have a different approach to what we’ve had for the last four years.”













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