Guy Ligier
Former butcher’s boy who built a Formula One team with the support of friends in high places
GUY LIGIER, who has died aged 85, was a former French rugby international and sometime Grand Prix driver who in 1976 founded his own, eponymous, Formula One team. In 17 years in F1, during which Ligier saw his cars score nine wins in 326 races in the hands of such drivers as Jacques Laffite, Patrick Depailler and Didier Pironi, he encountered criticism from some quarters for obtaining backing from state-owned firms, thanks to his long friendship with the Socialist President François Mitterrand.
Ligier’s first employment had been as a butcher’s assistant in his home town, Vichy, but he saved up to buy a second-hand bulldozer and entered the construction industry. He made the first of several fortunes in the postwar period helping to build France’s booming motorway network, making important friends in Mitterrand and Pierre Bérégovoy, both then local politicians.
In the 1980s, when Ligier ran into financial trouble, Mitterrand, by now at the Elysée Palace, ordered that state-owned companies such as Elf, Gitanes and Loto should supply it with sponsorship. Ligier also had preferential treatment when it came to engines, political pressure being applied to Renault to force the company to supply the team “on reasonable terms” when Ligier needed them.
Guy Ligier had a long association with the circuit at Magny Cours, a small village near Nevers in the Nievre department of central France, where Mitterrand had served as a senator and a deputy before his election to the presidency in 1981. Ligier established his headquarters there and was largely responsible, with Mitterrand’s assistance, for arranging for the French Grand Prix to move there from the Paul Ricard Circuit, near Marseille, in 1991. There were rumours that Ligier was involved in illegal funding programmes for the French Socialists involving sponsorship money, but nothing was ever proved.
On two or three occasions Ligier was a serious championship contender. In 1980 the team finished second in the constructors’ championship to Williams, whose driver Alan Jones won the title, while Ligier teammates Jacques Laffite and Didier Pironi were placed fourth and fifth. Laffite, Ligier’s favourite driver, scored six of the team’s nine victories, the first in 1977 in the Swedish Grand Prix and the last in 1981 in the Canadian Grand Prix.
But despite the indulgence of friends in high places, the team’s performances faltered during the 1980s, a fact which some attributed to Ligier’s irascible, autocratic manner which undoubtedly drove the team forward, but also had negative effects. It was observed that the team was not sufficiently well-organised to achieve consistency and its drivers tended to expend too much energy racing each other rather than working together.
In 1992, with the fortunes of both team and Socialist Party declining, Ligier sold his racing business to the French businessman Cyril de Rouvre; its final victory would come with Olivier Panis in the Monaco Grand Prix in 1996, its last year in Formula One under the Ligier name. The team was eventually take over by Alain Prost but collapsed at the end of the 2001 season.
The son of a farmer, Camille Guy Ligier was born in Vichy, central France, on July 12 1930. Orphaned at the age of seven, he left school aged 14 to work as a butcher’s apprentice. In his late teens his passion was rugby and he was good enough to play for the French Army during National Service and earn a place in the French national B team.
He then turned his attention to motorcycle racing and with the money that he won was able to set about building his construction business.
In the late 1960s Ligier started racing Porsche sports cars and even raced in Formula One, taking part, in 1966, in five Grands Prix with a privately entered Cooper-Maserati, before injuring his knee in an accident. The following year he switched to a more nimble BrabhamRepco, earning a single championship point with sixth place in the German Grand Prix at the Nürburgring.
In 1968 Ligier decided to form a partnership with Jo Schlesser and the two bought a pair of McLaren Formula Two cars. When Schlesser was killed that year on his Formula One debut at the French Grand Prix, Ligier decided to retire from the circuit and build sports-racing cars instead.
Ligier cars all carried the letters JS in memory of Schlesser and the first, the JS1-Cosworth, made its international and Le Mans 24 Hours debut in 1970; at the circuit’s Three Hours race the following year Ligier would finish second with its JS3Cosworth. After the marque reverted to its JS2-Maserati for 1974, Guy Chasseuil then won the Le Mans Four Hours before, in 1975, a Ligier JS2Cosworth, driven by Jean-Louis Lafosse and Guy Chasseuil, finished second overall in the premier round of the World Sportscar Championship.
At the end of 1974 Ligier had bought the assets of Matra Sports and embarked on creating a Formula One team. The most memorable of Ligier’s 24 F1 cars incorporated the Matra V12 engine – and the most remarkable of all was Ligier’s first Grand Prix car, the JS5, which, driven by Jacques Laffite, made its debut in the 1976 Brazilian Grand Prix where it was nicknamed “the teapot’’ because of the towering rear bodywork that incorporated an enormous air-box.
After bowing out of F1 in 1992, Ligier went into business selling natural fertilisers, making another fortune; he built a range of micro-cars and later, with his son Philippe, set himself up as a constructor of Formula Three cars. The Ligier name, now owned by a specialist manufacturer, re-emerged in June as a sports-racing car for a new Le Mans-type category, with Ligier himself performing its unveiling.
Ligier is survived by his wife and their son and daughter.