Four-time Le Mans 24 Hours class winner Nicolas Lapierre has retired from the cockpit with immediate effect to concentrate on running his Cool Racing team.
The announcement from the Frenchman, 40, on Wednesday means that last month’s Fuji round of the World Endurance Championship, in which he finished third with Alpine, was his final race.
“It is time for me to hang up my helmet and end this chapter of my life,” said Lapierre in a short video post on Instagram. “It was great to finish this journey on the podium and spray the Champagne once more. It was an honour for me to live for my passion, with so many years doing what I love.”
Lapierre said that it was now “time for a new chapter of my life on the other side of the pitwall”. He added: “I love it as much as I loved racing, so I won’t be far away.”
Lapierre will be focusing on the CLX Motorsport operation he founded with Alexandre Coigny in 2020. The team runs under the Cool Racing banner and is based in Annecy in France, just across the border from Geneva. It has competed in LMP2 and LMP3 in the European Le Mans Series, as well as at the Le Mans 24 Hours in P2.
Lapierre took the opportunity in his video statement to thank multiple players from a career in which he was a race winner in GP2 and A1 Grand Prix and in the WEC with both Toyota and Alpine.
Among them were Philippe Sinault, who had a role in some of his biggest successes in both single-seaters and sportscars.
Sinault runs the Signatech team that has masterminded Alpine’s endurance racing campaigns since 2013 and its forerunner, Signature, for which Lapierre won the Macau Formula 3 Grand Prix in 2003.
He also singled out Jean-Paul Driot, the late founder and boss of the DAMS team.
“I am thinking also of Jean-Paul Driot; he left too early,” said Lapierre. “With him and his team I could get my first GP2 win in 2007 - he definitely changed my career.”
Also mentioned were ORECA boss Hugues de Chaunac, who gave Lapierre his first chance in sportscar racing in ’07 and with whom he won the 2011 Sebring 12 Hours aboard a semi-works Peugeot 908 HDi LMP1.
Lapierre’s contract with ORECA smoothed his way into Toyota’s LMP1 line-up on the rebirth of the WEC in 2012 because the French organisation was part of the Japanese manufacturer’s race set-up until the end of 2020.
He would go on to win six WEC races with Toyota before being controversially sacked mid-season in 2014 after crashing at both Le Mans and the Austin round, even though he was on slick tyres in heavy rain both times.
Lapierre paid tribute to former ORECA technical director David Floury, who now fulfils the same role at Toyota Gazoo Racing Europe, for his encouragement at that time.
“He was a very important person in my career and also my life,” he said. “I was probably at the lowest point of my racing career: I was very close to stopping racing and he was the one who brought me back.”
Lapierre’s announcement comes at a time when Cool is known to be one of the candidates to partner with Hyundai Motorsport as it gears up for its entry into the prototype ranks with a new LMDh under the South Korean manufacturer’s premium Genesis brand.
It is expected that Lapierre’s place in the #36 Alpine A424 LMDh alongside Mick Schumacher and Matthieu Vaxiviere for the 2024 WEC finale in Bahrain will be taken by Jules Gounon.
Gounon is Alpine’s official reserve driver and was brought into the line-up for Fuji as part of a plan agreed before the start of the season to increase his experience in the Hypercar division.
He replaced Paul-Loup Chatin and the same agreement called for him to step in for Bahrain in place of Charles Milesi, who has been Alpine’s standout performer during its move towards the front of the Hypercar field since Le Mans.
