People

Claude Galopin

Galopin was a mechanical engineer who was recruited by Ligier in 1984 to be a race engineer. He stayed with the team until the middle of 1988 when Ligier had a major clear-out of staff and Galopin moved to the GBDA Formula 3000 team, which was part-owned by former Ligier driver Rene Arnoux. The team fell apart at the end of that season and Galopin was then taken on by Henri Julien to head the design team of the AGS Formula 1 team. Two months later the team was taken over by Cyril de Rouvre. Galopin stayed on as chief engineer until the end of the year when he returned to Ligier to work as a designer and as race engineer to Philippe Alliot for the 1990 season. He worked with Richard Divila on the design of the 1991 Ligier but when this failed to lived up to expectations he was fired by Guy Ligier and spent a year out of racing before joining the DAMS Formula 3000 team (a revived version of GBDA) in the middle of 1992. In 1993 he engineered Olivier Panis to the title in the International Formula 3000 Championship and followed up with a second title in 1994 for Jean-Christophe Boullion. In the course of 1995 he designed a prototype Formula 1 car for DAMS but the money could not be found to race this car but the team was able to salvage some of the project by selling the gearbox to Minardi.

Galopin remained with DAMS as a race engineer until the team was closed down at the start of 2002, at which point he went to work with the expanding Pescarolo sportscar team.