French rugby star Guy Ligier teamed with racer Jo Schlesser in the Sixties to form Team Inter Sport, and their experiences running Formula 2 McLarens prompted Schlesser to suggest they build their own cars. Before they could launch this effort, Schlesser suffered a fatal accident in the French Grand Prix in July 1968, driving the Honda RA302, a car Honda driver and '64 F1 Champion John Surtees declined to drive on the grounds of its unpredictable handling. One result of this fiery disaster was that the French GP would never return to the Rouen-Les-Essarts track. Another was that Honda abandoned its RA302 project. The most significant result for our story, though, was that after absorbing this personal loss, Ligier decided to proceed with his plan to build better cars...
Ligier focused his attention first on sports cars for endurance racing. He hired Michel Tétu, an engineer who'd worked on the CD* endurance racers for Charles Deutsch*. Tétu designed a chassis based upon novel aluminum sandwich panels with polyurethane cores, with the engine mounted behind the cabin and ahead of the 5-speed Hewland transaxle. Owing to the shortage of available racing engines from French sources, Ligier first used a 1.6 liter Cosworth FVA twin-cam four, then fitted a 1.8 liter FVC. Body design was by Pietro Frua, and echoed the glassy cabins and low beltlines of his work on Maserati chassis. The new car appeared at the Paris Auto Salon in autumn of 1969, and Ligier christened it "JS1", after Jo Schlesser, whose idea it had been to build a new car...
Three of the new road racers were built, and they soon appeared on road courses around France, including at Le Mans. Ligier and Tétu steadily improved the car, and tested and raced versions with 2.4 and 2.6 liter Ford / Weslake V6 engines, eventually adapting the 5-speed transmission from the new Citroen SM. The JS1 first raced in the Tour de France Auto in 1969; its first outright victory was at Albi in 1970; the 2nd and final win in 8 races was in the 1970 Coupes de Vitesses...
Ligier Automobiles showed a new JS2 powered by a Ford V6 at the Paris Salon in fall of 1970.
I happened to be there, attending architecture school in Versailles, and having decided that it would be a good way to spend a rainy October day. My fellow architecture student Ron Budde snapped this photo of the new car...
Ligier's plan to offer this improved road-going GT version of the JS ran into a roadblock when Ford refused to sell him enough engines to make real production possible. Luckily, Citroen had absorbed Maserati and offered that firm's new 4-cam V6 in its new SM. Ligier was able to obtain a steady supply of this engine, at first in 2.7 liter form and then the 3 liter version that also appeared in Maserati's mid-engine Merak. Even with its new steel sandwich panel chassis, the production JS2 that appeared at the 1971 Paris Salon weighed only 2,161 pounds. Wheelbase was 92.5 inches, up 2" from the JS1, and Frua's body design had been lightly restyled by Pichon et Parat, with revised nose profile. When the road racing versions appeared, they retained the aluminum sandwich chassis, saving about 400 pounds.
The JS2 racers that appeared at Le Mans in 1973 featured dry-sump versions of the Maserati 3 liter V6 making around 330 hp; one of the cars was co-piloted by Guy Ligier. The best finish that year was 19th place, but the next year a JS2 finished 8th, and in 1975 a JS2, now powered by a Cosworth V8, finished 2nd, sandwiched between two Gulf-Mirages. And in 1974 Ligier JS2s had finished 1st and 2nd in the Tour de France Auto...
The Ligier plant at Abrest near Vichy turned out road cars to meet moderate demand until the oil crisis hit in 1974. Overall, just under 250 were produced...
The final version of the JS2 appeared for 1975, and can be identified by its retractable headlights. The 3 liter Maserati V6 was now standard, but supplies were threatened when Maserati went into receivership in May of that year. Citroen was forced to merge with Peugeot, and then discontinued the SM. When Maserati's new owner discontinued the V6, Ligier was left without an engine supplier. Only 7 of this Series 2 were built...
But Ligier's racing efforts continued. The first Ligier Formula 1 car hit the track in 1976, powered by the well-proven (and gloriously sonorous) Matra V12. At the 1977 Swedish Grand Prix, Jacques Laffite piloted a Ligier first across the finish line, the first F1 victory by a French car with a French engine and driver. Ligier cars would go on to score 8 more victories and a total 50 podium finishes over a Formula 1 career spanning 2 decades; the last win was in 1996.
Long before his death at 85 in 2015, Guy Ligier expanded the business to include activities as diverse as building urban microcars, and taking over much of the market for natural fertilizers in central France. Today, Ligier Automotive has participated in the design and testing of a self-driving bus in response to a European Union design brief. This is pretty remote from building Formula 3 cars, but Ligier offers those too, like the Honda-powered example below...
They're also offering a road racer called the JS2R...
So, despite lack of commercial success in selling road cars, the Ligier saga doesn't end like so many others in our "Forgotten Classic" series. Due to Guy Ligier's business savvy, and also his interest in the world outside sports cars (there was all that organic fertilizer, after all, and those microcars), and his luck in having heirs interested in the frontiers of technology (like that autonomous bus), Ligier Automotive somehow never managed to go out of business. You can still buy a race car from them, and they've announced a plan to issue a JS2R road car in honor of the 50th anniversary of their original JS2.
*Footnote: More details on the CD, Deutsch Bonnet and DB cars designed by Charles Deutsch can be found in our post for February 29, 2020 entitled "Deutsch Bonnet, DB and CD:The Path of Least Resistance."
Photo Credits:
Top: classiccarcatalogue.com
2nd: Historia des Automovilismo
3rd: www.motor24.pt
4th: Ronald Budde
5th & 6th: wikimedia
7th thru 9th: lesAnciennes.com
10th: pinterest.com
11th & Bottom: Ligier Automotive
You'd mentioned the fertilizer, microcars, and automated busses, but not the bit about Liger playing rugby. Just looked up old photos—-quel mec!
ReplyDeleteWell, it's there in the text, but not knowing much abt. rugby I equated representing France in international competition as "rugby star." Left out the part about Ligier's construction business altogether, because his later digressions seemed even more interesting and offbeat. The point is, if you're going into the car business, it's wise to have a Plan B. In the case of Matra, Ligier's F1 engine builder, cars were Plan B and rocket engines were Plan A. Similar to the way SpaceX preceded Tesla in Elon Musk's plans...
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