Héctor Alonso Rebaque was born on 5 February 1956 in Mexico City. He arrived in Formula One in 1977, racing a privately entered Hesketh, and became the first Mexican driver to compete in the World Championship since the death of Pedro Rodríguez at the Interserie race at Norisring in 1971. Rebaque was a well-funded privateer who combined his driving commitments with organisational ambitions.
In 1978, Rebaque founded his eponymous team, initially running a customer Lotus 78. Operating as a privateer with a front-running chassis gave Rebaque a platform to develop his F1 career while establishing the infrastructure for a more independent operation. He competed in 58 Formula One World Championship Grands Prix across his career, accumulating 13 championship points.
For 1979, Rebaque took the more ambitious step of constructing his own car. The Rebaque HR100 was developed in collaboration with Penske, the American racing organisation with experience across various categories of motorsport. Rather than commissioning a conventional customer car, Rebaque worked with Penske to produce a bespoke chassis intended to be competitive in the contemporary Formula One environment.
The HR100 made its race debut at the final three Grands Prix of the 1979 season. The project demonstrated that Rebaque's ambitions extended well beyond simply funding a drive in someone else's car, but the short competitive window available to the HR100 meant meaningful assessment of its potential was limited.
After 1979, Rebaque's team activities ended and he joined the Brabham team as a full works driver. He substituted for Ricardo Zunino mid-season in 1980 as Nelson Piquet's teammate and remained at Brabham throughout 1981, achieving his best individual Formula One results and finishing tenth in the Drivers' Championship.
Rebaque then transitioned to CART racing in 1982 with Forsythe Racing. He finished thirteenth at the Indianapolis 500 after a pit fire on lap 151. He won the Road America 200, his final CART race, but sustained serious injuries in a testing crash at Michigan International Speedway a week later. Feeling oval racing was too dangerous, he returned to road racing briefly before retiring from competition. His final race was the 1983 Race of Champions at Brands Hatch, a non-points Formula One event, where he drove for Brabham.
After leaving motorsport, Rebaque moved into architecture-related businesses in Mexico.
The Rebaque team occupies a small but distinctive place in late-1970s Formula One history as an example of a driver-operated privateer outfit that moved beyond simply purchasing and running established machinery to actually constructing its own chassis. The HR100 was the most tangible expression of that ambition. Though the car's competitive record was limited, the project reflected the era's greater accessibility to independent constructors and the spirit of self-sufficiency that characterised several teams of the period.