Soheil Ayari

Soheil Ayari 2009 in Le Mans

Soheil Ayari (born May 5, 1970 in Aix-les-Bains ) is a French racing driver .

Career

Soheil Ayari celebrated his first successes in motorsport in Formula 3 . In 1996 he won the French Formula 3 championship and a year later the prestigious Formula 3 race in Macau . After switching to Formula 3000, it seemed possible for Ayari to move up to the highest class of single-seater racing cars, Formula 1. Despite two race wins in the following three years, the young Frenchman's single-posto career stalled.

In 2001 Ayari therefore switched to the French touring car championship, where he secured the driver's title in 2002. Since 1997 Ayari has competed twelve times in the 24 Hours of Le Mans ; his best finish was fourth overall for Henri Pescarolo's team in 2004.

Ayari has been driving for ORECA in the Le Mans Series since 2006 and is driving a Saleen S7 -R there. While he only took part in four of the five races in 2006, he finished the 2007 season together with Stéphane Ortelli as champions of the GT1 class. The driver duo won four of the six championship races. With the merger of Courage and ORECA at the end of the year, Ayari switched to the Le Mans prototypes in the 2008 season and now drove a Courage-ORECA LC70 . However, he and his teammate Ortelli were only able to finish two of the five races in the points. At the beginning of 2009, Ayari took part in Le Mans Series test drives on the Circuit Paul Ricard , but did not drive a championship run in the series. However, he, Olivier Panis and Nicolas Lapierre finished the 24 Hours of Le Mans in the ORECA 01 in fifth place overall.

In the 2010s he remained active in the various Le Mans series and switched to the French GT championship in 2018 .

statistics

Le Mans results

year	team	vehicle	Teammate	Teammate	placement	Failure reason
1997	Sociéte Viper Team ORECA	Chrysler Viper GTS-R	Tommy Archer	Marc Duez	failure	accident
1999	Viper Team ORECA	Chrysler Viper GTS-R	David Donohue	Jean-Philippe Belloc	failure	Engine failure
2003	Pescarolo sport	Courage C60	Eric Helary	Nicolas Minassian	Rank 9
2004	Pescarolo sport	Pescarolo C60	Érik Comas	Benoît Tréluyer	Rank 4
2005	Pescarolo sport	Pescarolo C60 Hybrid	Eric Helary	Sébastien Loeb	failure	Engine failure
2007	Team ORECA	Saleen S7-R	Stéphane Ortelli	Nicolas Lapierre	Rank 16
2008	Team ORECA Matmut	Courage-ORECA LC70	Loïc Duval	Laurent Groppi	Rank 8
2009	Team ORECA Matmut AIM	ORECA 01	Olivier Panis	Nicolas Lapierre	Rank 5
2010	AIM Team Oreca	ORECA 01	Andrew Meyrick	Didier André	Rank 4
2011	Signatech Nissan	Oreca 03	Franck Mailleux	Lucas Ordoñez	Rank 9
2012	PeCom Racing	Oreca 03	Luís Pérez Companc	Pierre Kaffer	Rank 9
2014	Team Sofrev ASP	Ferrari 458 Italia GT2	Anthony Pons	Fabien Barthez	Rank 27

Sebring results

year	team	vehicle	Teammate	Teammate	placement	Failure reason
2011	Signatech Nissan	Oreca 03	Franck Mailleux	Lucas Ordoñez	Rank 30
2012	PeCom Racing	Oreca 03	Luís Pérez Companc	Pierre Kaffer	Rank 7