What it is like to have a dad who raced at Le Mans

Jules Gounon

Two-year-old Gounon Jr tries his dad’s McLaren F1 GTR for size in 1997

Gounon made a promise to himself as a 10-year-old at the Le Mans 24 Hours in 2005. He was going to go back one day as a driver. It wasn’t the first time he’d attended the French enduro with his father, Jean-Marc – there’s photographic evidence to prove it.

But it is the first one he remembers. He was blown away by the event, not least because he had a small part to play in proceedings over the course of a race in which his dad drove ORECA’s Audi R8 LMP. 

“I was there from the beginning of the week and was on duty cleaning the helmets,” remembers Gounon Jr, who is making his fourth Le Mans start – his second in Hypercar – with Alpine this year.

“The Audi was an open car, of course, so the visors had tear-offs and my job included changing the visors. At about 3am during the race my dad told me it was time to go to bed, so we went to the Algeco pod in the paddock. I remember looking at my dad in bed and saying to myself that one day I was going to be in his place, that I would be racing at Le Mans. That was where my passion for motorsport started.”

Gounon didn’t begin racing karts until he was nearly 16 and, after a couple of seasons in single-seaters in French Formula 4 and then Formula Renault, he shifted to sportscar racing, a discipline in which his father had excelled. Jean-Marc made 12 Le Mans starts between 1995 and 2008, with a best finish of second in a GTC McLaren F1 GTR in 1997.

“I come from a normal background – dad had a car dealership – so I never pretended I was going to make it to Formula 1,” he says. “But because of what my father had done I knew I could have a professional career in endurance. When I made it to Le Mans for the first time in 2019 driving a Risi Competizione Ferrari, it meant a lot because the road had been so difficult. 

“Last year at Le Mans in the middle of the night I was in my Algeco and thought back to how I’d made that promise 20 years before. So I made another one: I will beat my dad’s second place from 1997.”

Alpine Hypercar driver Gounon will be making his fourth Le Mans start

Photo by: JEP / LAT Images via Getty Images

Sebastien Bourdais

Bourdais Sr made nine starts at Le Mans; this is 1994 in the Alpa LM

Photo by: LAT Images via Getty Images

Cadillac ace Bourdais is a son of Le Mans – he was born in the hospital adjacent to Tertre Rouge corner – and his father, Patrick, was a keen amateur racer. Yet the 24 Hours didn’t become a big part of his life until he was a teenager. It was only when his dad contested the race for the first time in 1993 that he understood what he calls the “magnitude” of his hometown race. 

“My earliest memories of the race are from when I was maybe five or six,” he explains. “I remember one year watching at night from on top of the old pits, but we weren’t super-dedicated fans. We’d check it out for a couple of hours, then go home.”

Bourdais started to understand a bit more about the race when his father competed on the full Circuit de la Sarthe in the Peugeot Cup support race for Peugeot 309s in 1988 and 1990. Three years after his second appearance in the tin-top event, Bourdais Sr made the first of his nine 24 Hours starts in a Sauber-BMW C6 Group C car. “That was when I first experienced the race from the inside,” recalls his son. “I was mesmerised by the whole event and understood straight away what it meant.” 

Bourdais made his Le Mans debut as a 20-year-old in 1999, the year he won the French F3 Championship. “My dad wanted me to have the experience and the plan was for us to do the race together,” he explains of his maiden appearance driving a Porsche 911 GT2 for Larbre Competition.

“He couldn’t find enough money to pull it off, so he basically gave me his seat. Because I’d come through the Elf La Filiere programme, I was asked to drive with Henri Pescarolo’s new team in 2000 because he was a kind of godfather to the scheme. It was the start of a dual adventure doing sportscars alongside my open-wheel career.  

“I always tried to come back to Le Mans each year if there was a good ride, even when I was in Champ Car and IndyCar, as well as F1. But I never ended up doing the race with my father. It became a bit more serious for me very quickly. I’d say he was not really eligible for the seats I was getting.” 

Bourdais, on the Cadillac Hypercar roster this year, was “mesmerised” by the race as a teenager

Photo by: Sjoerd van der Wal/Getty Images

Louis Deletraz

Deletraz Jr’s first 24 Hours memory is his dad’s 2001 LMP675 class win

Photo by: James Bearne / Sutton Images via Getty Images

“We were at all the big races as a family when my dad was racing,” recalls Louis Deletraz of his father Jean-Denis, who twice won his class at Le Mans and also claimed overall victory in the Spa 24 Hours. “My first memory of Le Mans is from 2001, the year he won in LMP675 in the ROC Reynard, so I would have been four. I remember not being much taller than a wheel and tyre!

“It’s not crystal clear, but I remember the green and blue colours of the car and the weather: it rained a lot that year.” The weather played a part in the Volkswagen-engined Reynard 2KQ finishing fifth overall in the hands of Deletraz, Jordi Gene and Pascal Fabre. 

Deletraz Jr returned to the race multiple times as a child and was there for his father’s final appearance in 2012, driving a Nissan-powered Lola B08/80 for the Gulf Racing team. 

“Dad hadn’t driven at Le Mans for a few years and it was a late deal, so I got the sense that it was going to be his last time,” recalls Deletraz Jr. “I remember rushing up to the grandstands and talking my way in because I wanted to see the car start the race. I was quite emotional.

“Those memories are important in my story. My dad always shared his racing with us and one year at Spa he took me up on the podium. I remember thinking, ‘This is awesome, I want to be back here myself.’ The dream was Formula 1, but endurance was always on my radar because I kind of grew up in the sportscar paddock.” 

That goal was achieved in 2020 driving one of Rebellion Racing’s Lola-Gibson R-13 LMP1s, during his final year in GP2/F2. He’s returned every year since and has a trio of podiums in LMP2 to his name, including victory in the pro-am subclass last season. 

This year, he’s back in the top category and racing in Hypercar for the Jota Cadillac team. It gives him the chance to achieve a goal he set himself as a kid. “I love Le Mans and want to win it overall,” he says. “That comes from all those years watching my dad.”

Cadillac driver Deletraz set his target for outright Le Mans victory as a child

Photo by: Sjoerd van der Wal/Getty Images

Kevin Magnussen

Magnussen loved the experience of watching his dad in the Team Goh Audi R8 in 2003

Photo by: Clive Rose / Getty Images

Magnussen was a regular in the paddock from the earliest age. He has it on good authority that he was present for one of Ayrton Senna’s greatest victories at Donington Park in the 1993 European Grand Prix before his first birthday with his father Jan, then competing in Formula Vauxhall Lotus with Foundation Racing. “I was told I was there in the stroller,” he says. He’s also confident that he’d been to Le Mans prior to his first memories of the race from 2003. 

“I was nine and dad was driving the Team Goh Audi R8,” says Magnussen, who is back at the 24 Hours with the WRT BMW Hypercar squad for a third participation. “I remember loving it, staying up the whole night, watching the cars from the grandstands, going up in the big wheel in the fairground. I was with my cousin, Dennis Lind [fellow sportscar driver and 2021 British GT Championship title winner].

“I’d been karting for a while and I just presumed that one day I’d race at Le Mans. It seemed natural: my dad was doing it, so I was going to do it. I guess it was all just racing to me at that time, but I knew I wanted to be a professional racing driver.”

Magnussen made it to Le Mans as a driver in 2021. Sharing the High Class Racing ORECA-Gibson 07 LMP2 with him that weekend was his father. 

“Doing Le Mans together was something we’d talked about so much,” says Magnussen of his father, who made 15 of his 23 Le Mans starts with Corvette Racing. “It could have happened when I was in F1. We were trying to make it work a couple of times when he was with Chevrolet, with me as the third driver for the endurance races. It always fell over because the team wanted me to do Daytona and Sebring as well, but my schedule never allowed that.

“To finally do Le Mans with dad was special. We’d dreamed about it for so long, but knew we were running out of time because dad wasn’t getting any younger. The whole experience was cool.” 

The WRT BMW Hypercar driver naturally “presumed” that he would race at Le Mans

Photo by: James Moy Photography via Getty Images

Sebastian Priaulx

The trip to Le Mans became a regular Priaulx family outing

“I was definitely at Le Mans in 2011 when dad was driving the BMW, so I would have been 10,” says Seb Priaulx of his first memory of Le Mans when his father, Andy, was making the second of two appearances at the 24 Hours driving a Schnitzer BMW M3 GT2. “But my recollections are much stronger from the days after he went back in 2016 to drive the Ford GT. 

“Watching your dad go through the Dunlop Chicane was amazing,” continues Priaulx, who is back for his second Le Mans four years on from his debut, now as a factory Ford driver racing one of its Mustang GT3s for the Proton Competition team in LMGT3. “There’s so much history at Le Mans; I felt that even as a kid. My thought was, like, one day I want to do this.”

Priaulx Jr’s career moved in the direction of sportscar racing after a year in British F4 in 2018. “It was my dad who pushed me in that direction,” says Priaulx of his famous father, who took two GTE Pro podiums from his six Le Mans starts.

“He knows how racing works. Sportscar racing was the way to go in terms of earning a living. I was lucky enough to get picked up by Multimatic Motorsport [builder of both the Ford GT and the Mustang] at 18. That gave me the chance to do Le Mans when I was 21 in 2022. I remember coming out of Tertre Rouge onto the Mulsanne Straight for the first time, and the hairs on the back of my neck were standing up.”

Four years on, the links Priaulx forged with Ford via Multimatic explain why he is shortly to begin testing the Blue Oval’s new LMDh prototype with which it will join the Hypercar ranks next year.

“I don’t regret any decision I’ve made,” he says. “I’ve got to Hypercar because I put my name down early for sportscar racing.”

And he has his father to thank for that.

The factory Ford driver is where he is now thanks to his dad’s guidance

Photo by: Sjoerd van der Wal/Getty Images

Maxime Martin

Martin Sr’s Spa 24 Hours victory in 1992 sticks in his son’s memory chiefly for the party afterwards

Photo by: Sutton Images / Getty Images

Maxime Martin had only just been born when his father, Jean-Michel, made the last of his seven Le Mans 24 Hours starts. He has no reason to believe that he was present at three months’ old when his dad drove a works Spice-Cosworth Group C2 in 1986.

But from his earliest years he was a regular at the Spa 24 Hours, a race with which his family is inextricably linked. With Maxime’s victory in the Belgian classic in 2016, the family tally was extended to seven. That’s one for him, four for his dad and two for his uncle, Philippe. 

“Spa was always a big thing and I know I went when I was very young,” says Martin, who races at Le Mans this year with the Iron Lynx Mercedes team as a factory driver with the German manufacturer.

“The first one I remember is 1992 when my dad won in a Bigazzi BMW M3, not really for the race but for the party afterwards. Some of my friends gave my dad four pigs. They were all wearing T-shirts in the colours of one of his winning cars.

“So we had two pigs in Belga T-shirts, one in Leaseplan colours and one saying Bastos. That was my first memory of 24-hour racing.”

This article is one of many in the monthly Autosport magazine. For more premium content, take a look at the July 2026 issue and subscribe today. 

Martin Jr shares the #61 Iron Lynx Mercedes-AMG LMGT3 with Berry and Andrade

Photo by: Rainier Ehrhardt