When France’s ‘other’ team brought colour to F1

It’s 30 years since the plucky Larrousse team fell off the Formula 1 grid. Should it be viewed in a different light by history?

“We weren’t challenging to win races,” says Tino Belli of his three years as Larrousse’s chief designer in Formula 1, “but a small, low budget team is a challenge in its own right. The camaraderie is probably higher, everybody has to pull together.”

As one of several teams fighting to escape from the F1 midfield in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Larrousse went under the radar during its eight seasons, often standing out more for its garish liveries than its results. In its vying for sponsorship with Ligier, France’s national team, it regularly struggled for money and never started from the front two rows of the grid, before bowing out at the end of 1994.

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Author James Newbold

James Newbold is Autosport's Plus Editor, responsible for coordinating website feature content.

In a sign of things to come, having completed his Politics and International Relations degree at the University of East Anglia in 2015, he left his graduation ceremony early to catch the last train to Brussels for the following day's Spa 24 Hours.

After a period as a freelancer, he joined the Autosport staff in 2018 and won the Motorsport UK young journalist of the year award. He initially edited Autosport magazine's Performance and Engineering supplements before joining the website team in his current role in 2020.

A keen enthusiast of anything that can be categorised unusual or niche, he enjoys unearthing little-known stories across all branches of motorsport, but has spent most of his career covering sportscars and is a regular part of the Le Mans 24 Hours reporting team.

He lives with his wife and children in Plymouth, England.