The French expression mon brave – literally ‘my brave’ – more accurately equates to the English phrase ‘my good fellow’. However, both the literal meaning and the common usage apply to Éric René Boullier, who was born in Laval, near Le Mans, France, in November 1973, for he is both a nice chap and a man of remarkable audacity, as you will find out if you read on.

“I was born into a normal, decent, middle-class family,” he says, speaking via Teams from his holiday home in Marrakech, which ancient fortified city he loves, for his wife Tamara is from Morocco. “Laval was and is a nice town – not big, not small – and its medieval centre was and is very pretty. My parents weren’t into racing at all. Then, one Sunday, when I was nine years old, we were invited to lunch at the house of some family friends – lovely people with whom I’m still in contact now –and in the middle of their living room was a remote-control racing car that they’d built themselves. I was captivated, and what fascinated me most was the engineering more than the driving actually.

“So I begged my dad to buy me a remote-control racing car and I started competing. I finished second in my first race, with a car that I’d prepared myself, then I began to win occasionally, first in local contests then in regional tournaments. At that time I had no idea that I might one day work in motor sport – that would have seemed like a crazy fantasy to me back then – but, as I went on in school, it became clear that I was good at science and maths. So, after I’d passed my bac [baccalauréat, a national exam taken by French pupils at the end of their secondary education], I studied physics at university [the Institut Polytechnique des Sciences Avancées, in the Parisian suburb of Ivry-sur-Seine]. I’d like to have been able to study automotive or motor sport engineering, as you could then and still can in the UK, but that wasn’t available in France at that time, so I focused on aviation technology and space science, which I realised were relatively similar to automotive and motor sport engineering.

“By this time I’d worked out what I wanted to do with my professional life and motor sport was going to be at the centre of it. So I did whatever I could to get relevant internships. I managed to get myself a chance to be a gofer for the Porsche team at Le Mans, when I was still in my teens, which was awesome, then I started to do a bit of data engineering work with them, and that was followed by my first proper job, even though I was still a student, with Peugeot Sport, who were successful in sports car racing back then.

“After that I sorted out an internship with DAMS [Driot Arnoux Motor Sport], for which role I was interviewed by Jean-Paul Driot himself – in English. Driot seemed to like me, but he said my English was rubbish, which it was in those days, so, to help me improve my language skills, he put me in charge of foreign suppliers. But in fact it was DAMS’ British design-engineer Rob Arnott, a great guy, who taught me English. He and I used to have a few beers in the evenings, because he was living in the UK but staying at a hotel near the DAMS factory in France during the week, and, hanging out with him, something suddenly began to click and, well, I gradually became more and more confident in English. So I owe Rob a lot actually.”

Boullier did well at DAMS and his progress, despite his having no one and nothing other than his own ambition to propel him, was impressive. Something about the young man – his chummy yet dogged determination perhaps – made influential people like him. Most twentysomething French lads with a love of motor sport would have been well satisfied to have landed the opportunity to develop a career with DAMS – and Boullier looks back fondly on those days – but he wanted more. So it was that, in 1998, when he saw an ad for a Renault Sport position he applied for it, even though the job was ‘Formula 1 race engineer’ and he was still at university.

“I applied for this job because it’s my dream but I didn’t expect to get it”

“Renault Sport was supplying engines to Williams and Benetton in Formula 1 at that time [via Mecachrome and Playlife],” he remembers, chuckling. “I applied for the job on a whim. I certainly didn’t expect to get it. But, to my surprise, they asked me to go for an interview, then a second, then a third. And now I began to worry because I was being serially interviewed for an important F1 job even though I was still a student. Then they asked me to attend a fourth and final interview, which would be conducted by Denis Chevrier, a legend of French motor sport, and, to my astonishment, it went well. In fact he said, ‘I want to hire you, so I’m going to introduce you to the Benetton race engineers, and, if they like you too, you’ve got the job.’

“I didn’t know what to say, to be honest. I panicked. It was overwhelming. But I had to be honest with Denis. ‘I applied for this job because it’s my dream,’ I told him, ‘but I absolutely didn’t expect to get it. I don’t yet have a diploma – I’m still studying for it.’ So Denis checked with Renault’s HR people and they said, ‘No, if he doesn’t have a diploma, we can’t appoint him to that position.’ And that was that.

“So I carried on at DAMS, and I finished my internship there in July 1999. After that Driot gave me a full-time job as a data engineer – performance engineer in today’s terminology – in DAMS’ sports car racing operation. The car was a Lola-Judd, and our drivers were Éric Bernard, Emmanuel Collard, Christophe Tinseau and Jean-Marc Gounon. I also worked in Formula 3000 with Derek Hill, the son of the 1961 F1 world champion Phil Hill, and they were both great guys: real gentlemen in fact.

“Then, in 2000, DAMS got the contract to run the Cadillac Le Mans team. I was a race engineer on the second car. We weren’t mega-successful but it was an awesome experience. The following year, 2001, we continued with Cadillac, but by this time Audi was dominating the Le Mans scene. Also, Driot was maybe beginning to lose interest, just a little, and he moved to the UK to focus on oil trading. As a result he began to delegate more and more at DAMS. Anyway, one day, while I was driving to work, I heard on the radio that Luc Besson [the famous French film-maker] was planning to make a movie about the popular French cartoon racing driver Michel Vaillant. I mentioned it to Driot, and he replied, ‘Let’s help them make it! Go to Paris and meet them!’

“So I did. I was still in my twenties and I had no experience of business or even of life outside motor racing. I was shaking inside when I sat down for that first meeting. It took me three or four months to convince those tough film executives to choose DAMS as a partner with whom they should make their movie, but in the end that’s what happened. We proposed that our 1999 Lola-Judd would be the model for the hero car and that the baddie car would be based on a Panoz, that aggressive-looking front-engined Le Mans racer, and Besson’s people loved it.

“We had to build the cars ourselves, of course. I modelled the Lola-themed car on an older Lola, and I built the Panoz-themed car on an old Caterham 7 chassis. The two cars had to be capable of being filmed racing each other at more than 160kph [100mph], and they had to look super-cool, but, even so, we built them both on a total budget of $500,000 [£335,000 at that time], which was pretty tricky to do. It was a complex cinematic operation, too. The Lola-Judd sequences were shot in the UK and the Panoz bits were done in the US. We also filmed at Le Mans in 2002. The film came out in 2003. I learned a hell of a lot – about business and life. The whole thing was an amazing experience for me.

“DAMS didn’t compete in any racing in 2002, but because of the movie we still made a small profit. That year I also worked for Racing Engineering, the Spanish team that had been founded by Alfonso de Orléans-Borbón in 1999. I ran a Dallara-Nissan for them in World Series by Nissan – and we won the 2002 team championship with Franck Montagny and Justin Wilson. So that was a busy year – and a good year – for me.

“Driot was impressed and he asked me to return to DAMS for 2003. Better still, he asked me to be the team principal of his new Formula Renault V6 Eurocup team. Our driver was José Maria López. We were a small and young group – just 11 of us – and José Maria was 19 and I was still only 29. But we gelled well and we won the championship straight away. The next year, 2004, we ran Neel Jani, who was 20, and he finished fourth in the championship, but it was a tough year for us because we lacked sponsors and we were short of money therefore.

“For 2005 I was running DAMS’ new Formula Renault 3.5 Series programme, with Pastor Maldonado, Alx Danielsson and occasionally a few others, including Nicolas Prost. That was comparatively big-time, because the races were on the WTCC [World Touring Car Championship] programme and they were televised on Eurosport. I realised we needed sponsors and I began to work hard on getting them, which I’d never done before. We also ran A1 Grand Prix teams for not only France but also Switzerland and Mexico. Best of all, we entered GP2 that year, 2005, with López, whom I’d won with two years before, and Fairuz Fauzy. We won one GP2 race, in Barcelona, with López, then in 2007 we won two GP2 races, in Bahrain and at Spa, with Nicolas Lapierre. The following season, 2008, we won again, in Barcelona, with Kamui Kobayashi, and by 2009 we’d built up a successful and solvent operation. When Driot had asked me to return to DAMS for 2003, we had 11 staff. By 2009 there were 75, and we were running in four championships. We were doing more than 33 race weekends every year by 2005. It was very busy – but very good.”

Boullier was now in his mid-thirties and he had worked well with a lot of drivers, particularly young drivers, over the previous 15 years. Inevitably, some of them began to ask him to help them with their careers and so it was that he formalised that arrangement by joining forces with Gravity Sports Management, which was owned by Gérard López, the Luxembourgish-Spanish businessman who had co-founded the financial services firm Genii Capital with Eric Lux in 2008. It was a significant association for Boullier because it would pave the way for his entry to F1, for López and Lux were heavily involved with the Renault F1 team.

“Would you like to be team principal of the Renault F1 team?”

“In December 2009 Lux called me and asked me to go to the Enstone factory in the UK, where the Renault F1 team was based. ‘Come on December 27,’ he said. So I did. The 2009 season had been mega-difficult for the team because a big scandal about its fixing the 2008 Singapore Grand Prix had come out over the course of the 2009 Belgian Grand Prix weekend. I walked into Flavio Briatore’s old office, and there were López and Lux. ‘Would you like to be team principal of the Renault F1 team?’ López asked me.

“I was astonished. Here I was, still only 36, having never worked a single day in F1 in my entire life, and I was being invited to become the team principal of one of the biggest and most famous teams in F1. I hesitated. I was speechless in fact. To be honest I didn’t know what to say.

“‘Yes or yes?’ said López, then he stared at me in silence. I looked at him, then at Lux, then back at López. Neither said a word.

“‘Can I say no?’ I finally replied.

“‘No,’ they both said, together.

“And that was that. ‘Come with us,’ they said – and they led me downstairs, where 600 people were standing waiting for me, and there and then they announced me to them all as their new boss.”

Not surprisingly, Boullier was as nervous as he was excited. Who wouldn’t be, having been sprung into such a big and challenging job so abruptly and, it has to be said, so bizarrely? He flew home to Paris for a few days, but he was back at Enstone, as Renault’s new and somewhat wet-behind-the-ears team principal, on January 2. “They booked me a room at the Feathers Hotel in nearby Woodstock [Oxfordshire],” he recalls. “When I got there, on the evening of New Year’s Day, I thought it looked like something out of Harry Potter. The next morning I woke up, I looked out of the window, and I saw 30cm of snow. My PA was supposed to be picking me up but she called me to say that she’d be late because of the terrible weather. Eventually she arrived, in a company Clio. She asked me to drive it to the factory, because of the snow, so I got into the driver’s seat and she sat beside me. At one point on the journey there was a long downhill descent. At the bottom of the hill I could see four cars that had crashed into one another. The four drivers were all waving at me, trying to get me to stop. But there was no grip so I had to put the Clio into the ditch so as to avoid a shunt. When we got out, we found that the four drivers were all Renault F1 employees. So that was a dramatic start.

“Petrov was a decent driver, but he wasn’t on the same level as Kubica”

“Our drivers were Robert Kubica and Vitaly Petrov. Vitaly was a decent driver, but he wasn’t on the same level as Robert. Robert was as good as it gets. Of all the drivers I’ve worked with, I’d place him up there with Kimi Räikkönen and Fernando Alonso. Robert was superfast, he made very few mistakes, he had excellent racecraft, and he was really good at motivating the people around him.”

The 2010 Renault F1 car, the R30, was not a great one, and, although Petrov managed a few minor placings here and there, he struggled with it for much of the season. Kubica drove it brilliantly all year, delivering three podium finishes, and he scored points more often than not.

In 2011 López’s and Lux’s company, Genii Capital, became the team’s new owner, relegating Renault to engine-supplier status, and its name was changed to Lotus.

Both drivers were retained and pre-season testing went well, Kubica topping the time sheets in the new-for-2011 R31 on February 2, which was the last day of the pre-season Valencia test. But three days later he had a big shunt in a Skoda Fabia during the Ronde di Andora rally, leaving him with multiple fractures to his right shoulder, right elbow, right hand and right leg. He had a number of operations and although the indications were that he would make a reasonable recovery in time, it was equally clear that he was not going to be racing again in F1 any time soon. In fact he would finally return to F1 nine years later, as a Williams driver, but never again would he be the unstoppable force he had once been.

“I had no idea that Robert was doing that damn rally,” says Boullier, still disquieted by the memory, even after the passage of 14 years. “His manager, Daniele Morelli, called me on the Sunday morning: ‘Big drama, Éric.’ Well, it was. It really was. Robert was in a coma, and at one point we though he might die.

“Thank God he didn’t. But he never raced for us again. As a replacement we hired Nick Heidfeld, who was a logical choice, but he wasn’t on Robert’s level, and the truth was that we’d lost one of our prime assets.” Petrov and Heidfeld started the season well, bagging a brace of third places in Melbourne (Petrov) and Sepang (Heidfeld), but neither of them shone in the next few races and, after the Hungarian GP in July, Heidfeld was dropped, to be replaced for the remainder of the season by Bruno Senna, who, truth be told, performed less well than Heidfeld or Petrov.

“We knew we now had to make changes, and we did,” Boullier says, scratching his chin. “Kimi had been out of F1 for two years, doing a bit of rallying, but he wanted to come back to F1, and we thought he’d be worth taking a chance on. Yes, I figured that he might be a bit rusty at first, but he was still only 32 and he’d been absolutely brilliant in his prime. Alongside him I brought in one of my Gravity [Sports Management] drivers, Romain Grosjean, who was young [25] and superfast, especially over one lap. I thought Romain’s quali pace would keep Kimi digging deep, and it worked.” It did indeed. In 2012 Räikkönen won in Abu Dhabi, he was second in Bahrain, Valencia and Budapest and he was third in Barcelona, Nürburgring and Spa. He ended up third in the F1 drivers’ world championship, beaten by only Sebastian Vettel (Red Bull) and Fernando Alonso (Ferrari). Grosjean drove well, too, bagging podium finishes in Bahrain, Montreal and Budapest.

Räikkönen kicked off the following season, 2013, with a fine win in Melbourne and drove superbly all year, finishing second six times (China, Bahrain, Spain, Germany, Hungary and Korea) and third once (Singapore), while Grosjean stood on five podiums (Bahrain, Germany, Korea, Japan and India).

In 2014 Ron Dennis contacted Boullier to ask him whether he would like to become McLaren’s F1 team principal. A deal was quickly done and Éric was soon on his way from Enstone to Woking.

The season started well – Kevin Magnussen finished a fine second on his F1 debut in Melbourne – but thereafter results were disappointing. The drivers, Magnussen and Jenson Button, were not really the problem, but Dennis thought they were, as Boullier recalls: “Early in the season Ron had asked me who my ideal driver line-up would be. I answered, ‘Vettel and Alonso.’ Ron then said, ‘OK, you get Alonso and I’ll get Vettel.’”

Boullier succeeded, but Dennis did not. However, Alonso’s four seasons at McLaren delivered almost nothing. “The McLaren-Honda marriage just didn’t work,” Boullier admits now. “Our chassis weren’t mega in those seasons and Honda’s power units were sometimes poor. On top of that, there was war at board level. Ron and Mansour [Ojjeh] were at daggers drawn, the Bahrainis were taking Mansour’s side, and I, plus Jonathan Neale, Jost Capito and Zak Brown, were in a difficult position. And our engineers didn’t understand or therefore manage well the consequences of F1 going to the hybrid era. I tried my best but by the middle of 2018 it was over, and I announced my resignation.

“It’s probably the first time I’ve ever apologised to a Frenchman”

“It’s a frustrating memory. I remember arriving back in Woking from a visit to Honda’s F1 headquarters in Japan some time in 2014 and asking Ron, ‘How is it possible that Honda will be ready to compete with Mercedes and the others as early as next year, when they’re clearly still so far behind?’ Ron replied, ‘Don’t worry.’ Later, I revisited the Honda plant and I called Ron from there. ‘Come here and see for yourself,’ I said to him. But, again, he assured me that it would all work out OK. But it couldn’t, and it didn’t. They just weren’t ready. They’d begun work on their F1 project at the end of 2012. Ferrari and Renault had started in 2010, and Mercedes had started in 2009. The Honda guys were miles behind. When we went testing at Jerez in February 2015 and we were terrible – slow and unreliable – Ron called me and said, ‘You were right and I was wrong. This is probably the first time I’ve ever apologised to a Frenchman.’

“We had two great drivers in 2015 and 2016: Alonso and Button, world champions both of them. They were upset by our underperformance – understandably. As a result it was difficult to manage them. Jenson was more of a gentleman about it. He moaned behind closed doors but Fernando went public about his frustration. We all remember his ‘GP2 engine’ comment on the radio [Suzuka, 2015], his deckchair stunt [Interlagos the same year], all that. It was a stressful time.

“But I’m pleased that McLaren is back to its very best now. It was me who introduced Zak to Mansour and [Sheikh] Mohammed [Bin Essa Al Khalifa], our two main board members, and it was me who hired Andrea Stella from Ferrari, so I’m glad that Zak and Andrea are both doing so well now, as I say.”

Boullier became managing director of the French Grand Prix association in 2019, a position that came to an end when France lost its F1 race after the 2022 event. Since then he has been multitasking on a number of projects, some of which he can discuss and some of which he cannot. “I’ve been working on a plan to bring a grand prix to Tangiers, in Morocco,” he says. “That could be awesome.”

The F1 World Championship sorely requires a grand prix in Africa, and it has visited Morocco before, although the country has hosted only one F1 event of world championship status, in 1958, a race won by Stirling Moss and marred by the fiery and ultimately fatal accident that befell his Vanwall team-mate Stuart Lewis-Evans.

In 2019 Boullier founded Circle, a start-up company whose small but mustard-keen workforce have designed, patented and will soon begin to manufacture a tiny four-wheeled electric vehicle for hire in cities. “It’s a fantastic project,” says Éric, suddenly enthusiastic again, having struggled to smile during his description of his time at McLaren. “The business model is similar to the scooters and bikes that you hire in many cities nowadays, via an app, but our product is a proper little car, powered by batteries that you charge outside the car. So when one battery is flat, you swap it with a new battery that already has charge, and there are six batteries in each car, so you never have to be delayed while your battery is being charged, as you do with conventional full-size EVs. Our car is now fully homologated for the EU, it’ll do 90kph [56mph], and we’ll put it into production next year. We have orders from all over Europe.”

Will we ever see Boullier in F1 again?

“Well, why not?” he replies. “Actually, I’ve had some interesting discussions recently…”

Born: 09/11/1973, Laval, France

• 1998 Almost hired by Renault Sport.
• 1999 Graduates from Paris’s Institut Polytechnique des Sciences Avancées; begins internship with DAMS, then given full-time job as a data engineer.
• 2000-01 Race engineer for DAMS-run Cadillac team in the Le Mans 24 Hours (2001 as the works team).
• 2002-03 DAMS involved with Luc Besson’s motor racing film Michel Vaillant.
• 2002 No racing with DAMS so works with Racing Engineering for the World Series by Nissan; wins teams’ title.
• 2003-04 Becomes principal of the DAMS-run Formula Renault Eurocup team.
• 2005 Runs DAMS’ Formula Renault 3.5 and GP2 campaigns.
• 2005-09 Involved with A1 Grand Prix teams for France, Switzerland and Mexico.
• 2007-08 Wins for DAMS in GP2.
• 2010-14 Renault F1 (later renamed Lotus F1) team principal.
• 2014-18 Team principal at McLaren.
• 2019-22 MD of French Grand Prix.
• 2019- Circle city hire cars project.