🇫🇷 Emmanuel Collard

Emmanuel Collard is a retired professional racing driver who spent 27 seasons racing in international endurance and single-seater championships. Graded FIA Silver, he competed primarily for AF Corse in multiclass endurance series; he drove GT3 and GTE machinery in the FIA World Endurance Championship, the European Le Mans Series and the Asian Le Mans Series, and also raced in the International Formula 3000 single-seater series early in his career. He won the 2016 WEC championship with AF Corse.[1]

Collard accumulated 190 starts across his career, taking six wins and 33 podiums. His strongest period came in endurance racing from 2012 onwards; he scored four wins and 23 podiums across 49 WEC starts, including the 2016 title. In the European Le Mans Series he took two wins and five podiums from 11 starts between 2021 and 2024, racing GT3 and GTE cars alongside a spell in the single-driver Road to Le Mans series. His earlier career in the FIA GT Championship between 1997 and 2009 yielded two podiums from 76 starts for Brixia Racing, a span that showed the long arc of his professional involvement in that series; he also raced the Nürburgring 24-hour endurance events and other international 24-hour series. His final season came in 2022, when he contested three WEC rounds and finished tenth in the championship.[2]

Collard typically finished ahead of Christian Ried, a three-time WEC LMGTE Am champion graded FIA Bronze, across their shared races; he regularly raced against Andrea Bertolini, a two-time FIA GT Championship winner and FIA Gold-graded professional, and usually finished behind him. Among the stronger drivers he met, Collard beat Nico Müller, an established professional graded FIA Platinum with extensive experience in DTM and Formula E, five times. His primary team AF Corse, which fielded him for 53 of his starts, has taken 198 wins across the index with its strongest driver being elite professional Liam Lawson.