Davidson: I kept pulling a gap, and he kept coming back!
The news of Nicolas Lapierre’s retirement from racing last week was met with universal respect and fondness for a driver who achieved a remarkable amount across several disciplines.
While his statistics and achievements are impressive in name and quantity, Lapierre’s relationships with some of his team-mates are equally as memorable.
Across his stellar career, the two-time world champion teamed up with some modern-day legends and the most decorated of sportscar racing heroes from Olivier Panis to Sébastien Buemi, Alexander Wurz, Stéphane Ortelli and Pipo Derani.
Amongst them, too, were Anthony Davidson and Richard Bradley, who both tasted success with Lapierre – the former partnering him to WEC wins at Silverstone and Spa-Francorchamps in 2014, and the latter triumphing alongside the Haute-Savoie native in the LMP2 category of the 24 Hours of Le Mans a year later in the KCMG Oreca-Gibson.
Each has their own special memories of racing alongside him, and they talked to fiawec.com about the highlights of sharing a cockpit with the unassuming but fiercely competitive Frenchman.
Davidson: ‘A Fantastic Competitor’
“We eventually ended up as team-mates in 2014, but that wasn’t the first time I came across Nico. It was actually in my Peugeot days in 2010 at the Silverstone 1,000km Intercontinental Le Mans Cup (ILMC) race.
“I was sharing a Peugeot 908 HDi FAP with Nicolas Minassian, and ORECA was running its own customer Peugeot in the same race with Nico [Lapierre] in one of the seats along with Stéphane Sarrazin.
“The two driver crews really kept themselves to themselves. I’d obviously heard of Nico Lapierre a lot before that but I was there at Peugeot, doing my thing and I was in love with that car. I really clicked with it.
“We spoke as a unit before the start about not being silly against each other in the race and I remember thinking, ‘this is my car, I’m on pole position and I’ll just stroke it into the distance. What are you all worried about?’
“I pulled a bit of a gap, around four seconds, something like that and then he was in my mirrors. I then got another gap but he kept coming back and was in my mirrors again.
“By this time, I’m taking more and more risks, and I’m pushing and he’s still there right until the end of the first stint. This bloody Lapierre guy was hanging on in the customer car and I couldn’t really pull a gap on him.
“That was a pretty impressive first performance in a car he was unfamiliar with, and then obviously the rest is history as we became team-mates at Toyota and it became very clear that he was always going to keep up with me, and sometimes be quicker, because he was incredibly fast and talented.
“He was also a very nice team-mate to race with and I have some great memories of winning with him at Silverstone and Spa. He was a fantastic competitor but most of all a brilliant professional and just someone nice to spend time with, too.”
Bradley: ‘A Pleasure to Race With’
“In 2015, it was my second Le Mans and Matt Howson’s third. Personally speaking, I was definitely a bit raw going into it, and still had a bit of a single-seater mentality.
“But what Nico showed when he joined us at KCMG was that even though he’d stepped down from LMP1 to LMP2, he wasn’t trying to prove anything and he was simply a pleasure to be around and to race with.
“Nico was just there to do his job, be professional and have a lot of fun. He was obviously stupidly quick and it was good for me, as an aspiring Pro at that time, to have someone who was that fast in the car because it showed where I could improve based on his experience and he was super-generous with imparting his knowledge.
“Nico is a great guy, and in 2015 he did the business and more. There was no big ego with him; he was happy for me to do qualifying or whatever and we were a real well-balanced team that year, which helped massively to get the job done and have a near-perfect race to win LMP2 in a really strong field.”
