Five drivers are on their way to Okayama International Circuit to race in the Autobacs SUPER GT Series for the very first time this weekend. Some of them are home-grown teenage talents touted as future stars of the sport. Others are proven commodities from other series coming in from abroad with big-time victories and championships to their names.
But only one of them is Lilou Wadoux-Ducellier, the second-generation driver from the city of Amiens – who’s already known as a history maker in the world of sports car racing, even though she just turned 23 today.
Two years ago, hardly a soul outside the French national racing scene had heard of Wadoux when she was picked to join a star-studded Richard Mille Racing Team in the FIA World Endurance Championship’s LMP2 class. Her father was a journeyman rally driver and she spent her formative, post-karting years primarily in one-make racing – and here she was, getting the nod over no less than Jamie Chadwick and Alice Powell – two higher-profile drivers known to many for their worldwide single-seater successes.
It can’t be understated what a gigantic leap it was for Wadoux to go from driving near-stock Peugeot 208s, Renault Clios, and Alpine A110s to the ultra high-downforce, 550-ish horsepower Oreca 07 prototype. But by the end of 2022, she had finished sixth in class on her first attempt at the 24 Hours of Le Mans and had shown reliable, competent pace versus more experienced drivers in the category throughout the WEC season.
Wadoux continued to swim up the stream with another surprising career move. In 2023, she became the first woman to sign a full factory racing contract with Ferrari in the company’s 75-plus-year history.
And on 29 April, just three races into her tenure as a Competizioni GT pilot, the Richard Mille AF Corse team of Wadoux, Luis Pérez Companc, and Alessio Rovera won the GTE Am class at the 6 Hours of Spa-Francorchamps – meaning that Wadoux entered the record books as the first woman to win an FIA World Endurance Championship round, a landmark moment for the series.
After that season, many wondered where Wadoux would race next. Could she move to the new LMGT3 class? Could she make the move back to LMP2 in European Le Mans? Could there even be a spot for her in a new, privately-registered Ferrari 499P prototype Hypercar?
So imagine the surprise when PONOS, the mobile video game company best known for its profitable and addictive tower defence game The Battle Cats, announced on 30 November that they were starting a new team in SUPER GT, that they would be entering the new Ferrari 296 GT3 – and that they had signed Lilou Wadoux to drive it full-time in 2024.
I sat down with Wadoux at Sebring International Raceway, on the week of the 12 Hours of Sebring, to talk about it – and it’s appropriate that our conversation happened at Sebring because it ties the threads of her early journey with Ferrari together.
Back in the winter of 2022, I wrote a story about driver/coach Paulo Carcasci – a man who’d spent the peak of his racing career driving and winning in Japan – as he mentored his friend and pupil Custodio Toledo in an AF Corse private test at Sebring. There, amongst a crowd of “late starting professionals” and their coaches, was Wadoux – and everyone was in awe of her speed those days. I’d discovered that this would be one of the first tests she would do before she officially signed with Ferrari and AF Corse in 2023.
And of course, her GT racing debut came just a few months later at the same circuit, driving in the 1000 Miles of Sebring to kick off the 2023 WEC season. (Though, her debut ended before she could get in the car – Pérez Companc had a spectacular rollover just a few short minutes into the eight-hour race.)
The first thing I wanted to know was – of all the places she could have raced, why did she choose SUPER GT?
Wadoux told me that the idea first came up in a conversation with Kei Francesco Cozzolino, who’d joined AF Corse at the WEC 6 Hours of Fuji last September – and the man who will be Wadoux’s co-driver for the 2024 season in SUPER GT.
“We spoke about racing in WEC, in other series, and then we spoke about racing in SUPER GT,” she said. She wasn’t so sure about it at first – but was at least willing to entertain the proposal.
“After the Fuji WEC race, I went on my own and checked out some SUPER GT. I was only familiar with the name, but not the racing – so there were a lot of new things to learn. And I said to my manager, ‘it might be good to do this, so let’s see.'” Evidently, her first impressions of watching the series were good.
“It’s the idea of Kei and my manager. They know each other very well, so they spoke – and it came together like that.”
Wadoux speaks highly of Cozzolino, as I and the other people who follow sports car racing often do if they’re familiar with his work. The 36-year-old, Japanese-Italian driver has won multiple championships in Ferrari GT3 cars – in the Asian Le Mans Series and in GT World Challenge Asia. He spent last season racing primarily in Michelin Le Mans Cup, driving the new Ferrari 296 GT3 in its debut year of competition.
“He’s an amazing team-mate for sure, because he has a lot of experience, and he’s a really hard worker,” Wadoux says of her co-driver. “And it’s good to be with him because he knows the PONOS Racing team very well, and he knows the Ferrari really well.
“Honestly, it’s nice to share the car with him. It’s special. With him, it’s always good. We’re always smiling and have a super spirit.”
And as impressed as she is with Cozzolino, Wadoux was every bit as impressed with the standard of her brand new team, PONOS Racing. That satisfaction began from the first test she had with them at Mobility Resort Motegi.
“The first test with them was at the end of last year at Motegi – and yeah, I was impressed, because PONOS is a very new team. It’s very new, with a lot of people coming in from other countries, et cetera. But they’re a team. Everything was super professional – and the car was super fast!” she smiled.
And why wouldn’t Wadoux have been impressed? Though it was only established last May by PONOS Corporation CEO/avid motorhead/fourth-year amateur racing driver Yorikatsu Tsujiko, PONOS Racing has already set a high standard for itself – and not just because Tsujiko-san had the cash to splash. He has strategically built this team up through alliances with some of Japan’s top racing teams.
In the case of this endeavour, PONOS Racing has partnered with Gainer – an experienced team from Kyoto that got its start racing Ferraris and was practically synonymous with Ferrari’s efforts in SUPER GT/JGTC from 1999 to 2011. Gainer has won two GT300 Teams’ Championships and the 2015 GT300 Drivers’ title with André Couto, and has more wins than any active GT300 team.
“Honestly, I’m very happy – everything was good,” Wadoux recalls of her first test from last year. She then did two more tests at Okayama International Speedway and Fuji Speedway before jetting off to Sebring, which is why she missed the first official pre-season test at Okayama that same weekend.
And whether it was Wadoux or Cozzolino in the PONOS Ferrari, or whether it was Team LeMans’ new 296 GT3 that tested in parallel, the new platform got a lot of attention from other teams in the SUPER GT paddock and fans who’d caught a glimpse of the cars at the track days at Okayama and Fuji – it appears to be very, very fast. (And Cozzolino backed that up in the official test at Okayama that weekend.)
Wadoux is optimistic, but cautiously so, about the prospects of the 296 GT3 winning races early on. “We’ll see,” adds Wadoux. “There’s always things to improve. We are working hard on our side with Michelin to develop the tyres for this car.”
Michelin has pulled out of GT500 citing what can best be described as “philosophical differences” between the direction of SUPER GT’s top class and Michelin’s other racing endeavours, but it is still happy to compete in GT300 against Yokohama, Bridgestone, and Dunlop with confidential tyres suited to the 296 GT3 – something Wadoux hadn’t experienced until her testing programme with PONOS Racing began.
“There’s a lot of new things for me to learn. I know only the BoP and the confidential tyres, those things I know very well,” she continues. “For example, with the confidential tyres it’s super difficult to find a really good compromise between endurance and lap times.
“Ever since my first test, I’ve been happy to go to Japan to discover new things, new tyres, everything.
“And yes, it’s so different from what I know because here, and in all the other races I do, there’s only normal tyres, there’s only the car and the BoP. Over there, you have a lot of other things to think about.”
Those things could be adapting to the way drivers carefully and slowly build up tyre and brake temperature during a qualifying session, then saving their real push laps for the final two to three minutes. Or racing against the less powerful but lighter GTA-GT300 cars. Or adapting to the heavy amounts of Success Ballast over the season. It could also be as simple as being careful not to use the very Western tactic of exceeding track limits at certain areas of some circuits – which is shown zero tolerance by Japanese stewards.
And she’ll have to do it all within a very busy year – as Wadoux is still committed to running select events in IMSA with AF Corse, and plans to race in Europe at certain events this year. Wadoux will continue to live in Europe – so she’ll be commuting to and from Japan instead of setting up permanent residence.
“It’s like that all the year,” Wadoux says of her globe-trotting 2024 plans, “but I like this. It’s my job, and I love to do that, to go everywhere to discover new cars, or new tracks, new teams, and all these things.
“And in Japan, all of the circuits are nice. I was happy to discover Motegi and Okayama – and I’m looking forward to Suzuka and Sugo.” Having already raced at Fuji Speedway twice through her WEC career, Wadoux is eager to race around the other five big tracks that Japan has to offer.
Which one is she looking forward to the most? “Suzuka, I think! But honestly, all the tracks look good,” she says.
“I drove at Okayama two weeks (before I came to Sebring) and I was like a kid from the first lap – it’s super nice, and it’s different from what you find in Europe or America.”
From the moment the project was announced, many believed that PONOS Racing could be a contender from year one. And with that comes the opportunity for some important milestones.
Ferrari hasn’t won a race in SUPER GT since Team Daishin drove its Ferrari F430 GT2 to victory in the 2009 finale at Motegi – a car from a defunct class of racing, and a time when Wadoux was still a child and when Cozzolino was still a prospect of the Toyota Young Driver Programme.
Cozzolino, whose driving career had to be resuscitated more than once after being dropped from Toyota over a decade ago, hasn’t scored a podium in 25 previous SUPER GT races despite his reputation behind the wheel of a GT3 car.
And as for Wadoux? Well, when she races at Okayama this weekend, she’ll be only the seventh woman to start a SUPER GT race – but she will have the opportunity in a few races to share the grid with Miki Koyama – the Toyota-backed driver who made her own SUPER GT debut last year, though, she’s only driven one official race stint in her rookie season.
Before them, Cyndie Allemann, Keiko Ihara, Kumi Sato, and Junko Mihara never got to stand on a SUPER GT podium during their careers. You have to go back to 1995, when June Okanoya finished second in class in the first of her two career starts, to find the last time a woman finished on the podium in this series. And it comes with the important caveat that GT300 is a far more competitive category than it was back in ’95 – with way more cars, professional teams, and drivers. Even the name of the category was different.
Lilou Wadoux has not just a chance, but a great chance to be the first woman in 29 years to reach the GT300 podium – and to make even more history if she becomes the first woman in SUPER GT’s history to win a race.
Yet, these are the last things on her mind as she prepares for the season to come. “Honestly, for me, that’s not the target,” she explains. “I want to win races and be compared to all the other drivers. It would be good if I’m the first woman to win there, but the target is to do good with this team and with Kei, and to show the strength of the Ferrari in SUPER GT – because it will be the first time they’ll have two cars there.”
“The target is to get good results this year, and we’ll work very hard to do that – with Kei, and all the team, in order to be fast and to be the best.” In other words, she wants to do as well as possible, not just to be the best woman in the series. Still, it’ll be impossible not to mark those historic milestones as they happen – that’s just the nature of seeing someone like her have the opportunity to succeed in a male-dominated sport.
As for what comes next? She wants to race in a Ferrari 499P Hypercar within the next two years – she sampled one in Bahrain during last year’s WEC Rookie Test. “My target for next year or the year after that is to be in Hypercar – I’ve worked very hard for that,” she confirms.
“And we’ll see at the end of the year if I can come back to drive the 499P – and maybe do a full season in the car, why not?”
We went our separate ways after the weekend – I returned home, and Wadoux went to Fuji Speedway to resume testing. The first day of that test couldn’t have gone worse: Wadoux lost control of her car after hitting a patch of standing water at the exit of turns one and two, went off course and smashed head-on into the tyre barriers.
In a stroke of good fortune, PONOS Racing just had a new 296 GT3 chassis arrive from Italy that week. They brought it to the track that night to take part in the second day of the test – where Wadoux completed her required 12-lap rookie test with ease, certifying her to race in GT300.
In February, a major Japanese publication interviewed Wadoux after testing during a series of track days at Fuji. The writer asked her, “SUPER GT is a very high-level series in which almost all drivers are professionals. Are you nervous about competing in such a series?” It was a question that read as patronising and ill-informed to a few of the local “motorsport otaku”, to suggest that somehow a factory Ferrari GT driver would be overmatched in an all-Pro category just because she’s spent most of her racing career in Pro-Am racing.
She graciously replied, “Of course, I know how high the standard is. But I’m looking forward to putting myself in that environment and competing with my rivals, and my confidence is really high.”
Because the truth is that the GT300 class of SUPER GT is at a world class level in GT racing today – and that is even more true now because Ferrari’s Lilou Wadoux is a part of it.
Feature image © Jack Webster / Racingpilots.com / Dailysportscar
Additional images © PONOS Racing, Ferrari, & GTA
