2021 goodbye: Ant Davidson | dailysportscar.com

Anthony Davidson put his professional racing bow at the 2021 FIA WEC season finale in Bahrain, a second WEC World Champion retiring the same weekend (with Kazuki Nakajima) and a third for the year (with Marcel Fässler, who retired earlier this year announced) year).

Davidson’s departure at the age of 42 brought some raw emotion with it, while ‘Ant’ will be very involved with both his F1 simulator work (he’s been part of the Mercedes F1 effort for over a year) in the decade ) and through his much admired role in F1 analysis at SKY, the decision was made to stop racing in order to spend more time with his young family.

Davidson’s early career was dominated by single-seaters, valued highly as a young driver, and won titles in both the F Ford and F3. He made it into F1 with test driving duties for BAR and later for Honda, which resulted in a handful of starts (2 for Minardi in 2002 and one time for BAR in 2005) before he was picked up by Honda customer team Super Aguri in 2007, where he completed a full season followed by the first four races of the following year before the team retired.

This turned out to be the starting signal for a second racing life, coupled with his F1 test commitments, first with Brawn and then with Mercedes.

Ant drove once in a Honda Civic Touring Car in Macau in 2002 (the car is still in the JAS Engineering factory museum in Milan) and in 2003 had three drives in a Prodrive Ferrari 550 (Le Mans and second in class at Sebring and Petit Le Mans ).

But the racing focus was to shift permanently to sports cars with Le Mans in 2009 with Aston Martin in the glorious Lola Aston Martin LMP1), and then to a full works contract with Peugeot for 2010 and 2011.

There was yet another once-in-a-lifetime opportunity when Nissan ran a parts program on its new GT-R GT1 ahead of its debut in the FIA ​​GT1 World Championship the following season. Davidson joined regular drivers Darren Turner and Michael Krumm in the Spa 24 Hours 2009 – they came home 10th in the overall standings, but made it onto the GT1 podium!

There were five race wins with Peugeot, the first at Sebring 2010 in the mighty 908 HDI FAP (below)

In 2011 it was the new 90X and there were four wins, at Silverstone in the Le Mans Series plus Spa, Imola and Zhuhai (below) in the ILMC, that helped secure the title for Peugeot.

Its shape there made Toyota interested, and since the Peugeot program was unexpectedly preserved, that was great timing for Davidson!

He was immediately one of the pace men for the new team and, after recovering from a cruciate ligament rupture in a serious accident at Le Mans in 2012 (below), clinched 10 race victories in his six seasons with the team.

Davidson’s victories came in the TS030, TS040 and TS050 – he took three overall podiums in Le Mans (again in all three iterations of the Toyota LM1 Hybrid) and won the 2014 Drivers’ Championship together with Sebastien Buemi.

After leaving Toyota at the end of the 2017 season, he found a new calling in LMP2. Strong performances brought him and his teammates into competition in three championship seasons.

The trio won each of the three races they shared with DragonSpeed ​​(2018/19) and then Jota for the following two seasons, and with a total of nine other podiums in their class in a high-quality field.

In this edition of the Inside the Sportscar paddock podcast, you can hear Ant’s own thoughts on his multifaceted career – He’s missing in the WEC paddock.