Diane Holl was born on 6 May 1964 and is a British engineer who has worked in Formula One, Championship Auto Racing Teams, and NASCAR.
26 Facts About Diane Holl
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Diane Holl is employed at the Hendrick Motorsports NASCAR team as director of vehicle engineering.
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Diane Holl was employed by McLaren from 2001 and later Michael Waltrip Racing from 2008 to 2015.
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Diane Holl's father and brother worked as aeroplane engineers, and her mother was a nurse.
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Diane Holl was raised in Guildford in the English county of Surrey.
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At the age of nine, Diane Holl's father took the family to watch Formula One racing for the first time.
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Diane Holl found motor racing to be boring, and thought of a career in ballet.
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When Diane Holl was 16, she changed her view on motorsport and told her parents she wanted to pursue a career as a race engineer.
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Diane Holl was told by her secondary school teachers a course in engineering was impractical because of her gender.
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Nevertheless, Diane Holl enrolled at the University of South West in Plymouth in 1983.
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Out of a class of 65 students studying mechanical engineering, Diane Holl was the only woman.
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Diane Holl worked on its British-based design team and was supervised by John Barnard.
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Diane Holl decided to resign from Ferrari due to its demands for better engineering though Barnard persuaded her to stay and he let her work autonomously for four months.
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Diane Holl moved to the Benetton Formula constructor and later to Barnard's design consultant company.
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Diane Holl was part of a team that designed a carbon fibre gearbox, which was used by Ferrari.
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Diane Holl however wanted to be more involved with on-track engineering instead of working in a design office, and sought to move away from Formula One's increasingly serious and politically based reputation.
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In 1994, Diane Holl moved to the United States to become Reynard Motorsport's lead research-and-development engineer for its Championship Auto Racing Teams programme.
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Diane Holl then liaised with the Walker Racing CART team and went to race meetings.
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Diane Holl was later assigned to work with Tony Kanaan, a driver whom she had been acquainted with in Indy Lights.
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Under Diane Holl, Kanaan won the Rookie of the Year accolade in 1998, and said she helped in the development of his driving ability.
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Diane Holl returned to the United Kingdom for personal reasons soon after and contacted John Barnard to enquire about a job.
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Diane Holl asked her to telephone Adrian Newey and the McLaren Formula One team employed her as assistant engineer.
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Diane Holl led a team of designers on its front suspension system and occasionally worked with its race and test drivers in the company's simulator.
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Diane Holl agreed and returned to the country to raise her child and took the job of MWR's director of vehicle design.
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Diane Holl left MWR in November 2015 and joined Hendrick Motorsports as manager of aerodynamics that month.
26.
Diane Holl led Hendrick Motorsports' vehicle engineering group to integrate the design-and-build processes put into the development and production of its racing cars.