Loic Serra

Loic Serra is Performance Director of the Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One Team.

Loic’s love for racing goes back to his teenager years, when he became interested in go-karting. At the age of 18, he embarked on his first major racing project in his parents’ garage: designing and manufacturing his very own go-kart chassis.

After school, Loic studied at Arts et Métiers ParisTech in Aix-en-Provence and Paris, focusing on Mechanical Engineering. His university gave him permission to work on a completely new go-kart concept together with a classmate. They were granted unrestricted access to the university’s machine shop for the project and ended up building virtually every part of the kart from scratch, even casting their own brake discs.

After graduating from university, Loic took a job with Michelin, working as a quality engineer in Bad Kreuznach, Germany, before transferring to the company’s main R&D hub in Clermont-Ferrand, France. His department worked on new tyres and suspension concepts and he built a deep understanding of vehicle dynamics in those years, in particular the complex interactions between the tyres, the suspension and the car.

In 2002, Loic was given the opportunity to develop a new suspension system for racing cars and high-performance vehicles. The suspension concept was proposed to the Michelin customer teams in Formula One and formed Loic’s first touchpoint with the series. Loic joined the F1 R&D department at Michelin afterwards and remained there until the tyre manufacturer withdrew from the series in 2006.

However, Loic wanted to stay in Formula One, so he joined the BMW Sauber F1 Team as a suspension engineer in Hinwil, Switzerland. For the 2010 Formula One season, Loic had the opportunity to join the new Mercedes works team and has been in Brackley ever since. He was intrigued by working for the manufacturer, thinking that “Mercedes won’t join the sport for the sake of it, they’ll come to win”.

In 2019, Loic was promoted to Performance Director of the Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One Team. He works with tyre, suspension, aerodynamic and Power Unit experts from Brackley and Brixworth to make sure the various characteristics work towards an overall fast package. His job is to try and find the answer to the complex question: “How do you mix all the ingredients to make the fastest car, which also making a car that suits our drivers?”Loic loves the complexity of his work and how much we’re still learning about the interaction of various components on the car.