Robin Herd (born 23 March 1939) is an English engineer, designer and businessman.
Herd graduated from St Peter's College, Oxford with a double first in physics and engineering, before joining the Royal Aircraft Establishment in 1961 as a design engineer on the Concorde supersonic aircraft project. He worked on the Concorde project for four years and was eventually promoted to Senior Scientific Officer at the unprecedentedly young age of 24.
He was recruited by McLaren in 1965 and worked on cars, such as the Mallite-bodied M2A test car for the Firestone tire company. The M2A subsequently evolved into the Formula One M2B car. Herd stayed with McLaren until 1968 — during which time he designed their M4B, M5A and M7 Formula One cars — before moving to Cosworth to design a four-wheel drive F1 car. He co-founded March Engineering with Max Mosley, Alan Rees and Graham Coaker in 1969. The team completed 207 Formula One Grand Prix races between 1970 and 1992, winning three with four pole positions.
He sold March Racing to the Japanese property company Leyton House in 1989 and created Robin Herd Ltd., a design office in Bicester. He quit racing in 1995 and bought Oxford United Football Club, becoming Chairman, and also established a company investigating natural ways of producing energy. He resigned from his duty as Chairman in 1998, and formed an Indy Racing League team called March Indy International in the following year.
Famous quotes containing the words robin and/or herd:
“It is now many years that men have resorted to the forest for fuel and the materials of the arts: the New Englander and the New Hollander, the Parisian and the Celt, the farmer and Robin Hood, Goody Blake and Harry Gill; in most parts of the world, the prince and the peasant, the scholar and the savage, equally require still a few sticks from the forest to warm them and cook their food. Neither could I do without them.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The herd of mankind can hardly be said to think; their notions are almost all adoptive; and, in general, I believe it is better that it should be so; as such common prejudices contribute more to order and quiet, than their own separate reasonings would do, uncultivated and unimproved as they are.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)