People

Rene Hilhorst

Hilhorst studied in Holland before heading off to Toulouse, the aerospace capital of Europe, where he enrolled at the famous Ecole Nationale Superieure de l'Aeronautique et l'Espace. Having graduated he stayed on as an associate professor for three years before he was eventually offered a job in the Minardi F1 team in 1991. He remained with the Faenza team after it merged with Scuderia Italia in 1994 but moved to Sauber at the start of 1995 and worked with English engineer Mark Henning at the Schweizerische Flugzeugwerke windtunnel in Emmen.Hilhorst's reputation spread throughout the F1 engineering community as a result of his work with Sauber and at the end of 1998 he was recruited by Andre de Cortanze to work for Team Toyota Europe in Cologne, Germany. Initially he worked on the Toyota Le Mans project but was soon involved in preparations for the design of Toyota's F1 car.