Anthony Davidson took his professional racing bow at the 2021 FIA WEC season finale in Bahrain, a second WEC World Champion to step away on the same weekend (with Kazuki Nakajima) and a third for the year (with Marcel Fässler announcing his retirement earlier in the year).
Davidson’s sign-off at the age of 42 came with some raw emotion on display, whilst ‘Ant’ will still be very involved in the sport both with his F1 simulator work (he has been a backroom part of the Mercedes F1 effort for over a decade) and through his much admired F1 analysis role with SKY, the decision to stop racing was taken in order to spend more time with his young family.
Davidson’s early career was dominated by single seaters, highly rated as a young driver and with titles to his name in both Formula Ford and F3, he made it to F1 with Test Driver duties for BAR and later for Honda, leading to a handful of starts (2 for Minardi in 2002 and a one-off for BAR in 2005) before being picked up by Honda customer squad Super Aguri in 2007 where he had a full season, followed by the first four races of the following year before the team folded.
That proved to be the starting gun for a second racing life, coupled with his F1 testing commitments initially with Brawn and then Mercedes.
Ant had raced as a one-off in a Honda Civic Touring Car at Macau in 2002 (the car is still in the factory museum at JAS Engineering in Milan) and had three drives in a Prodrive Ferrari 550 in 2003 (Le Mans and second in class at both Sebring and Petit Le Mans).
But the racing focus was about to shift permanently to sportscars with Le Mans in 2009 with Aston Martin in the glorious Lola Aston Martin LMP1), and then a full factory deal with Peugeot for 2010 and 2011.
There was another one-off too, as Nissan ran a part programme with their new GT-R GT1 ahead of the following season’s debut in the FIA GT1 World Championship, Davidson joined regular drivers Darren Turner and Michael Krumm at the 2009 Spa 24 Hours – They came home a distant 10th overall but made the GT1 podium!
With Peugeot, there were five race wins, the first at Sebring in 2010 in the mighty 908 HDI FAP (below).
Then 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 helping to secure the title for Peugeot.
His form there saw Toyota taking an interest, and with the Peugeot programme canned unexpectedly that was great timing for Davidson!
He was immediately one of the pace men for the new outfit and, after recovery from a broken back suffered in a huge accident at Le Mans in 2012 (below) took 10 race wins across his six seasons with the team.
Davidson’s wins came in the TS030, TS040 and TS050 – taking three overall podiums at Le Mans (again in all three iterations of the Toyota LM1 Hybrid) and taking the World Drivers Championship in 2014 together with Sebastien Buemi.
After leaving Toyota at the end of the 2017 season he found a new calling in LMP2, strong performances saw he and his team-mates in contention across three Championship seasons.
The trio won a race in each of the three they shared together with DragonSpeed (2018/19) and then Jota for the following two seasons and with a total of nine additional class podium appearances in a field that was high in quality.
You can hear Ant’s own thoughts on his multi-faceted career on this edition of the Inside the Sportscar paddock podcast. He’s going to be missed in the WEC paddock.
