Pierre Laporte

Background

About Pierre Laporte

A lifetime passion for Formula 1. I was born in a modest family in the center of France, but with the best engine possible: the passion my father has for motorsports. Between Formula 1 on Sundays and my father's diecast models, I was in one way immersed in this world which quickly became my major center of interest. At this time, my heroes were Schumacher, Alonso, Räikkönen, and I was hoping to become a Formula 1 driver like them, but a clear lack of money and driving skills pushed me to chose another way to enter the world of my dreams. While trying to get this chance, I've been accumulating data, facts about the history of the sport, from drivers and teams to tracks since the creation of the Championship in 1950. I read lots of stuff in books and on the Internet and also watched lots of videos on YouTube (onboards, complete races), without obviously missing one race, including the Australian GP held at 6 am some years! My chance to become a Formula 1 journalist finally became real in December 2018, thanks to Angélique Belokopytov who runs F1nal Lap for a few years now. She gave me my first chance to show all my knowledge of the sport by writing articles about its history, recent or not and I'm still doing it now. I've been exploring multiple fields such as tobacco brands, forgotten teams and drivers, crazy races and championship endings, as well as the history of Grand Prix for the 2019 season. I think the best part of this collaboration was the internship I realized between June and August 2019. Of course, the amount of work was increased, but there were great opportunities coming with it. I wrote articles about the actuality of the sport and also two big briefs (about Formula E and the history of tobacco partnerships in Formula 1). However, I also got a great chance to go twice on the Spa-Francorchamps track (including once for the Spa 24 Hours), where I was able to perform interviews and meet people who are actually in the motorsports field. I covered each event on the F1nal Lap Instagram page. I also got the chance to visit the Spa-Francorchamps museum and performed an interview there.