Swiss engineer Peter Wyss de Araujo has sampled virtually every motorsport discipline from hillclimbing to Formula 1, taking in a successful decade of touring cars and a spell in Formula E along the way. But he’s never stopped learning, and that mantra remains today in his current position race engineering an ORECA-Gibson 07 in the European Le Mans series for the Team Virage outfit set up by a former colleague at Campos Racing, where Wyss de Araujo enjoyed his longest spell at a single team and helped numerous drivers rise through the ranks.
His time in F1 was full of hard knocks, spent with an almost literal A to Z of low-budget teams – having jumped out of the fire at Zakspeed only to land in the flames at AGS via a brief stint at Leyton House. Along the way he counted spells at Coloni, a team to which he would return 15 years later, and the short-lived Lamborghini outfit where he experienced the brilliance and chaos of Mauro Forghieri. All his lessons, Wyss de Araujo says, “I had to find out myself, I didn’t have someone giving me advice”.
