People

Christian Silk

From the London suburb of Kingston - an area famous in motor racing circles for the Cooper Car Company in Surbiton and Brabham in Chessington - Silk grew up in a family surrounded by engineering and motor racing. His father was a mechanical engineer and his brother was mad about racing. At the time Team Lotus was the dominant force in F1 and Silk became a big Lotus fan. He decided he wanted to work in Formula 1 and was working towards an engineering degree long before his fellow schoolboys knew what they wanted to do in life.

He attended Kingston's College of Further Education and gained the necessary qualifications to win a place at Loughborough University, which has a strong reputation for automotive engineering - McLaren's chief designer Neil Oatley was an earlier graduate of the same course. Towards the end of his four years at college, Silk wrote to the major F1 teams, asking for work and received three offers of employment, the best of which was from Benetton. He worked on software projects in the research & development department but when the technical team was taken over by John Barnard in the autumn of 1989, Silk found himself joining the race team to assist race engineer Giorgio Ascanelli with data analysis. He learned the art of race engineering from the Italian - who was later in charge of all race engineering at Ferrari - and worked with Nelson Piquet and later with Michael Schumacher, Riccardo Patrese, JJ Lehto, Jos Verstappen and Johnny Herbert (winning two races). In 1996 and 1997 he worked with Gerhard Berger and then with Alexander Wurz.