Insight: How Lotterer Beat The Odds to Become a Le Mans Great

Andre Lotterer's path to sports car racing stardom may not yet be over despite his departure from Porsche...

Last week’s reveal of Porsche Penske Motorsport’s lineups for the 2025 FIA World Endurance Championship and IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship seasons confirmed something that many observers had been predicting for some time - that Andre Lotterer will not be at the wheel of a works Porsche 963 in 2025.

Lotterer so far has been tight-lipped on any future plans, and it appears that he is not ready to call time on a glittering career just yet, but there’s certainly a possibility that this weekend’s 8 Hours of Bahrain will mark the 42-year-old’s final outing at the wheel of a top-class prototype.

As such, it feels like a good time to go on a trip down memory lane and take a more detailed look at Lotterer’s journey from discarded Formula 1 hopeful to three-time 24 Hours of Le Mans winner and undisputed modern sports car racing great.

There was a point when it looked like Lotterer was on the fast-track to F1. Signed by Jaguar to race in British Formula 3 in 2001, he became the team’s full-time test driver the following year. But he fell out of favour amid constant management changes at the Ford-owned squad, and was passed over by new team boss Niki Lauda when it came to deciding upon the team’s 2003 race drivers.

After an end-of-year CART drive with Dale Coyne Racing proved to be a blind alley, Lotterer looked as if he might be on the sidelines again until a last-minute opportunity came up to audition for a drive in Formula Nippon (now Super Formula) in Japan.

“I became friends with [then-Jaguar F1 racer] Eddie Irvine and his manager, Enrico Zanarini,” recalls Lotterer in a recent interview with Sportscar365. “Enrico still had some connections from Eddie’s days [racing in what was then known as All-Japan Formula 3000] and he was able to get me a test with Nakajima Racing. It was already February, so it was quite late, but they needed a driver because [original signing] Robbie Kerr dropped out. So they auditioned me together with Romain Dumas and Sebastien Philippe at Fuji.

“Before I went, they told me to pack my things for half a year, because if they take me, I have to stay and it starts immediately! So I called my girlfriend, who I was living with in Switzerland back then, and told her, ‘Good news, I have a job, bad news…’  I ended up racing in Japan on one-year deals, just handshake deals, for 15 years.”