Johnny Herbert was born on 25 June 1964 in Essex. His Formula 1 career is often told through the wins, especially Silverstone 1995 and the wild Nürburgring race in 1999, but the starting point is less comfortable: Herbert reached Formula 1 after a major Formula 3000 accident that left him with serious foot and ankle injuries and permanently altered the career many expected him to have.
Before the crash at Brands Hatch in 1988, Herbert was considered one of Britain’s brightest single-seater prospects. He had speed, racecraft and the momentum that usually attracts Formula 1 teams before the driver has had time to become complicated. The accident threatened far more than his immediate programme. It left him fighting to walk properly, never mind operate a racing car at Grand Prix level.
He made his Formula 1 debut for Benetton at the 1989 Brazilian Grand Prix and finished fourth. It was a remarkable result, partly because of the pain and physical limitation behind it. Herbert was not healed into a perfect racing machine. He was improvising around damage, and Formula 1 was about to discover that talent and a damaged body could coexist awkwardly for years.
Wins that arrived by different routes
Herbert’s career moved through Benetton, Tyrrell, Lotus, Ligier, Sauber, Stewart and Jaguar. There were seasons of promise, seasons of thin machinery and seasons in which he appeared to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. The first win came with Benetton at the 1995 British Grand Prix, after Damon Hill and Michael Schumacher collided. Herbert took the opportunity at home, and the result gave him the victory that had long seemed plausible but never guaranteed.
He won again later that year at Monza, also for Benetton. His third and final Grand Prix victory came in the 1999 European Grand Prix for Stewart, one of the most chaotic races of the decade. Rain, errors, retirements and changing conditions created an opening, and Herbert converted it into the only Formula 1 win for the Stewart team. It was a dryly appropriate Herbert result: not the obvious script, but a deserved reward for being there when others made a mess of it.
Herbert finished his Formula 1 career with three wins and seven podiums. He also became part of the sport’s broadcasting furniture, bringing a driver’s eye to television after his time in the cockpit. His reputation rests partly on what he achieved and partly on what might have been possible without the injuries of 1988.
That unresolved question never quite leaves his story. Herbert did not become the dominant British star some had predicted, but he did become a Grand Prix winner, a Le Mans winner outside Formula 1 and one of the more durable personalities of the 1990s grid. Born on 25 June, he turned a career that could have ended before Formula 1 into one that lasted more than a decade.
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