Christian loriaux biography

  • Christian was interested in of driving but soon realised that becoming a professional driver would be hard if not impossible.
  • The name of Christian Loriaux has been part of the World Rally Championship history since he joined RAS Sport in the late 80s (yet an engineering student).
  • Follow Christian Loriaux and explore their bibliography from 's Christian Loriaux Author Page.

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    Q&A: Christian Loriaux (Ford) - EXCLUSIVE.

    by Rob Wilkins

    TO HEAR THE INTERVIEW IN FULL WITH CHRISTIAN LORIAUX: CLICK HERE

    Christian Loriaux is the technical director at the BP Ford World Rally Team and the man responsible for heading up the team that designs and develops the Focus RS WRC car. We caught up with Christian at the end of October and here he speaks exclusively to Rallycourse and Radio about his role, the challenges it encompasses and more

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    Christian, Ford introduced the new Focus RS WRC 07 this year for the Rally Finland. What were the main changes made to the car in comparison to the 06 model?

    Christian Loriaux:
    There were not tons of changes, because the '06 car was already so evolved and competitive. It was difficult to make it much better. But we refined a fair bit in terms of aerodynamics with a new rear wing. We had a new front bumper too because with the original one we had very little time for testing and it was effectively too low. The front of the front bumper dragged on the ground all the time and so we changed that. There was also constant development on the engine and a lot of weight saving on that and on all of the other components on the car. All-in-all there was probably a weight saving of 20 kilos and more on the car, whic

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    People
      Drivers
      Co-drivers
      Team managers
      Other people
        Engineers
          Carrier, Simon
          Chapelain, Christophe
          Clement, Didier
          Clipson, Nick
          Dunabin, Philip
          Fornaris, Mario
          Lampi, Lasse
          Lindauer, Bernard
          Mestelan-Pinon, Xavier
          Metrich, Dietmar
          Moore, Graham
          Nandan, Michel
          Pfeiffer, Gerd
          Steiner, Gunther
          Vaucard, Jean-Claude
          Williams, Chris
        FIA officials
        Rally officials
        Journalists
    Sitemap
    Engineer, Prodrive ()
    Chief engineer, M-Sport ()
    Senior Applied Adviser, Hyundai Motorsport

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    The name of Christian Loriaux has been part of the World Rally Championship history since he joined RAS Sport in the late 80s (yet an engineering student). Once he graduated, he joined Prodrive, where his work culminated with the design of the iconic Subaru Impreza WRC He then moved to M-Sport, where no less iconic cars were designed and developed under his lead: the Ford Focus WRC03, the Focus WRC06 or the Fiesta RS WRC ().

    Far from being inactive, his recent contribution to the design and development of the Hyundai i20N Rally1 represented such a great opportunity to know how this process evolved that we could not miss. We had the opportunity to talk to him during the recent Central European Rally and here is the result.

    Christian, you joined Hyundai in May , when the Rally1 car was in full development. What was your role when you joined the team?

    CL: I joined at the time as Technical Advisor*. There was already a prototype car built, and the team was in place. They had already built quite a good car. I joined them to try to help a bit on the technical side with my experience. We had six months to optimize a bit, so we worked with the prototype car with the Chief Designer, Stefano Sangiorgi, who was there at that time (Sangiorgi left Hyundai in March to join Sauber). We

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