Life for many is considerably different since the COVID-19 pandemic took hold in 2020. That certainly applies to Louis Deletraz, whose career has gone from strength to strength since that much-disrupted season when his sportscar journey truly began.
The Swiss will be a full-time Acura GTP driver in the IMSA SportsCar Championship next season after impressing in a third-driver role with Wayne Taylor Racing this term, and appears odds-on to end three successful years in LMP2 by clinching the class’s final World Endurance Championship title with WRT. Already twice an LMP2 champion in the European Le Mans Series, Deletraz went into the recent Portimao finale with a shot at a third, having begun the season at Barcelona with a buccaneering outright victory aboard his Pro-Am TF Sport-run ORECA.
All told, it’s been a fulfilling period for a second-generation racer whose four-year Formula 2 career was largely frustrating after a stunning maiden season in Formula V8 3.5 in 2016. After coming close to beating the vastly experienced Tom Dillmann to the crown, his move to F2 with Racing Engineering didn’t go to plan. For the 2015 Formula Renault 2.0 Eurocup runner-up and champion of the category’s NEC contest, F2 “was proof of how quickly your reputation in motorsport can turn around,” he remembers. “Racing Engineering was supposed to be a good team but, for whatever reason, something changed in the management and it was a disaster.”
Without any F2 experience, he struggled to turn the situation around and lost confidence. Sebastian Viger, now technical director for WRT’s LMP2 programme, held the same position at Racing Engineering in 2017, and thinks Deletraz suffered from putting expectations on himself that were “too high versus the level of understanding”.
“It was a lot of pressure on his shoulders,” adds the Belgian. “We were second [in the teams’ championship] twice in a row, and when you join a successful team like we were back then you expect it to be plug-and-play. But it was different tyres – back then it was Michelin to Pirelli – it was a different car, different approach. And that year he was missing experience.”
Over his next three F2 campaigns, Deletraz claimed six second places, but never managed to win a race across two spells with Charouz and one year with Carlin. “Because we had such a bad year, it’s hard to find a good team,” he recalls of joining series newcomer Charouz for 2018. “F2 is so competitive, it’s hard to win. I’m very happy with my 10 podiums, I sadly never got a race win but I learned a lot and in the end in tyre management, pace, we were always strong. And if you look at the grid that we were racing in, it’s pretty incredible names. Leclerc, Norris, Russell, they were all here.”
Source: Autosport