How Derani's roll of the dice brought his career full circle

It was by any standards a bold decision and a significant risk. Those are the terms used by Pipo Derani when he describes his determination in the summer to refuse a new contract with the Action Express Racing IMSA SportsCar Championship squad. It was, after all, the team with which he had notched up a pair of titles in North America and two of his four Sebring 12 Hours victories.

But the Brazilian had a new goal: he wanted to chase glory in the World Endurance Championship and its blue riband event, the Le Mans 24 Hours. It looks like the gamble has paid off, because from 2026 he’ll be doing just that as part of the Hyundai Genesis brand’s exciting new LMDh programme.

Derani points out that success in the WEC is “the one thing missing” from a bulging sportscar CV that also includes victories at the Daytona 24 Hours and the Petit Le Mans enduro at Road Atlanta.

“There wasn’t much more I could do in America,” says the Brazilian, who was announced earlier this month as one of the first drivers for the Genesis GMR-001 Hypercar along with Andre Lotterer. “I had got to the point in my career where I wanted to race in the WEC rather than fight for more wins and another championship in IMSA.

“Before I won my first championship [in 2021], it was tunnel vision - win a championship, win a championship. It was not the same for the second one [in 2023]. After that, I asked myself what else is there? I wanted a new challenge, I didn’t want to get complacent.

“That’s why I decided to take charge of my own destiny. I said to myself, if I don’t leave now, I will never leave. The contract on offer wasn’t a short one. If I had signed for how long the team wanted, the opportunity to move to the WEC was going to get slimmer and slimmer. I had to roll my sleeves up and make a decision for my future. I didn’t want to have regrets in a few years.”

Derani has been an Action Express stalwart since 2019, but recognised his window to land a top WEC drive was closing

Photo by: Michael L. Levitt / Motorsport Images

Racing for outright honours in the WEC’s top class is where Derani, who has always raced under his nickname Pipo rather than his birth name Luis Felipe, had imagined he’d be in the years to come when he was taking his first steps in sportscar racing 10 years ago. That was the vision he mapped out after taking part in a couple of European Le Mans Series rounds in 2014 with the Murphy Prototypes squad in LMP2 aboard an ORECA-Gibson 03R and getting picked up by Russian entrant G-Drive Racing, then running in partnership with OAK Racing, to contest a full WEC season the following year.

“My expectation was that I would do maybe one or two more years in P2 to set myself up for the move to LMP1,” explains the 31-year-old. “But it didn’t work out that way; sometimes in life things take a turn.”

That turn was a move to Extreme Speed Motorsports for the WEC in 2016. The US team was also contesting the IMSA enduros with the Ligier-Honda JSP2, and before the WEC campaign kicked off, Derani became a winner of both the Daytona and Sebring endurance classics.

"That has more value for me than putting myself in a car that someone else has already developed. It is going to be very rewarding putting my stamp on the car"
Pipo Derani

“Within a blink of an eye I had created a name for myself in America,” he recalls. “I didn’t expect that to happen, but you can say my career took a positive turn.”

After a couple more years with ESM racing its Nissan-Onroak DPi, which included Sebring victory number two in 2018, Derani moved to the Action Express Cadillac team. Two more wins at Sebring, in the 2019 12 Hours and a 160-minute enduro in 2020 with the Caddy DPi-V.R Daytona Prototype international, quickly followed before his two championship years.

But he never stopped racing in the WEC. There were three races driving for Ford in GTE Pro, a couple of one-offs with Rebellion and then two part seasons with Glickenhaus, as well as a couple of appearances in ’23 and ’24 at Le Mans in the Action Express V-Series.R.

“That played a part in fuelling my desire to race full-time in the WEC,” he explains. “My racing background is in Europe, so I felt at home in WEC.”

Derani had planned to stay in the WEC after 2016, but his triumphs for ESM at Daytona and Sebring directed his career towards IMSA

Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images

But he didn’t have a home for 2025 when he told Action Express that he would be waving the team goodbye at the end of this season. It was a decision that really was a roll of the dice. The contact with Hyundai Motorsport, the organisation masterminding Genesis’s entry into the sportscar racing’s big time, didn’t come until later. But when it did, he felt it was the right move for him. And there were other offers, he explains.

PLUS: Why Hyundai won't be an invisible touch with new Genesis Le Mans project

“There was another quite good option, but it was contingent on my staying in IMSA before moving to WEC and that wasn’t what I wanted,” says Derani. “The other opportunity was in WEC but perhaps a little less attractive than the one that had IMSA involved.”

The Genesis deal appealed straight away: “Everything with Hyundai and Genesis happened quite quickly. I was in the middle of negotiations with other manufacturers, but I thought, this is it.

“What an opportunity, because I will be helping to develop a car from scratch as well as being part of a new team being built from the ground up. That has more value for me than putting myself in a car that someone else has already developed. It is going to be very rewarding putting my stamp on the car.”

Derani is clearly a driver in love with his sport and, in particular, endurance racing. Ironically, he rebuffed the first attempt to lure him into the discipline. He first was approached by Murphy, the team that launched Brendon Hartley on the road to sportscar stardom, at the back end of his campaign in the 2013 Formula 3 European Championship, which followed on from two years in British F3.

Derani was still focussed on single-seaters and wasn’t convinced that sportscar racing was for him. He admits now that he wasn’t actually sure what it was all about. His aspirations instead turned Stateside, but the budget fell through for a move to Indy Lights (now Indy NXT).

There were a handful of races in 2014 in the Pro Mazda one-make series in the US before he happened across the Truth in 24 documentaries made by Audi about its respective 2008 and 2011 Le Mans campaigns, coincidentally the marque’s greatest victories at Circuit de la Sarthe.

Derani's passion for sportscar racing began by watching the Truth In 24 II documentary of the 2011 Le Mans race, won by new Genesis team-mate Lotterer

Photo by: Eric Gilbert

“Watching the movies changed my perspective on endurance racing, so I thought to myself that maybe I should call Greg [Murphy, team boss],” explains Derani, who admits to watching Truth in 24 II: Every Second Counts before the original. That means the crescendo of his first exposure to Le Mans involved watching Lotterer claim victory in what remains closest timed finish in the history of the race.

“It’s funny how things work out,” says Derani of the happy coincidence that he now has Lotterer as a team-mate. But then Derani’s career has kind of come full circle with his signing for Genesis.

“It has taken me almost 10 years to come back to where I believed I was going to be in 2016 or ’17,” he says. “I’m very thankful for what I was able to achieve in America, but it feels like I have been working all these years for this opportunity.”

After four Sebring 12 Hours victories, Derani is ready for his next chapter

Photo by: Jake Galstad / Motorsport Images