People

Mark Herd

The son of Robin Herd, Mark was born in the wealthy London suburb of Farnham in November 1965 as his father was finishing the design of the very first McLaren F1 car. The family moved to the Oxford area later and in 1970 Robin Herd, Max Mosley, Alan Rees and Graham Coaker founded March Engineering.

As a result Mark grew up surrounded by racing cars and racing people. It was perhaps inevitable that he would decide that he wanted to be an F1 engineer. He studied mechanical engineering at the University College of the University of London.

On the same course was a youngster with F1 dreams called Nick Wirth. Mark introduced Wirth to his father and thus launched Nick's career in Grand Prix racing. Ironically, a couple of years later, Wirth launched Mark's motor racing career when he hired his old classmate to be a research and development engineer in his Simtek Research company. Mark and Nick worked on a variety of projects including a secret F1 car for BMW.

At the end of 1991 BMW stopped the project and Simtek became involved in work in touring car development. Herd was not interested and landed a new job as a data acquisition engineer with Venturi Larrousse UK Ltd. This was his father's design company - which had originally been called Fomet 1 - but at the start of 1992 began building F1 cars for Gerard Larrousse. It later became Larrousse UK Ltd. and in February 1995 - after Larrousse ran out of money - transformed into GenTech, which agreed a deal to consult and provide on-track engineering services for the Forsythe Racing Indycar team, which was running Teo Fabi in a Reynard-Ford XB 95I.

The following year Mark became a race engineer with PacWest, working with Mauricio Gugelmin but the lure of F1 remained strong and when Wirth offered him a job at Benetton in 1997 he jumped at the chance and began engineering Giancarlo Fisichella. He remains at Renault Sport.