Three-time Le Mans winner André Lotterer switches to F1 with Caterham

Filed under: Motorsports, Hirings/Firings/Layoffs



While we've seen professional racing drivers bounce back and forth between disciplines, generally speaking, a racer has to choose at some point in his career what he's going to focus on: stock cars, single-seaters, rally, touring cars, endurance prototypes...But we've been seeing a lot of exceptions to that rule in recent years, and the latest exception is André Lotterer.

If you recognize the name that's probably because he's won the 24 Hours of Le Mans outright three times now, one of only about a dozen to have done so. As part of the Audi factory team, he was a member of the winning trio in 2011, 2012 and this year. But he's also driven in a number of single-seater series, including Champ Cars, Formula Three, Formula Nippon and A1 Grand Prix. And now he's moving up to Formula One.

The Caterham F1 team has announced that Lotterer has signed on to drive for the recently emancipated team starting with this weekend's Belgian Grand Prix. Which strikes us as a good place to start, considering he already won the 6 Hours of Spa endurance race on the same circuit just last year, though we might have expected a proven winner like Lotterer might catapult straight into a stronger team for his F1 debut.

This won't be the first time Lotterer will be driving an F1 car, having served back in 2002 as official test driver for the Jaguar team that eventually became Red Bull Racing. He was passed over for the race seat when Eddie Irvine and Pedro de la Rossa left the team, but with three Le Mans titles (not to mention an FIA World Endurance Championship) to his name, this time he's supplanting Kamui Kobayasi for the hot seat at Caterham.Three-time Le Mans winner André Lotterer switches to F1 with Caterham originally appeared on Autoblog on Wed, 20 Aug 2014 17:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.



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