Laurent Aiello’s remarkable career encompassed touring car titles in France, Germany and Britain, as well as Le Mans 24 Hours victory with the Porsche 911 GT1-98. In Britain he is best-known for his efforts in the British Touring Car Championship with RML’s ultimate Nissan Primera and he raced the legendary Audi R8 prototype, but it’s an earlier car he quickly selects as his favourite.
“The 406 was built around my style of driving,” says the Frenchman, now 55. Aiello raced the Peugeot Sport-developed 406 in Germany’s Super Tourenwagen Cup for three years, winning 20 races and never finishing lower than third in the points against top opposition from Audi, BMW and Opel.
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Nevertheless, Aiello did feel the pressure of making the front-wheel-drive machine work against the rear-wheel-drive BMWs and 4WD Audis. After finishing third to Audi’s Emanuele Pirro and BMW’s Steve Soper in his 1996 STW rookie, there was a big push for the second campaign.
“All the effort and the money put into the project was on your shoulders, so you couldn’t make the wrong decision, especially on the aero parts because once it’s done it’s done for the year [due to homologation rules], or the differential,” says Aiello, who had also won the French Super Touring title in a Peugeot 405 in 1994.
“When you have a big budget you can try five solutions but the Peugeot budget wasn’t that big so we had to pick two and make the right decision at the start.”
As with many successful cars, the team knew it had something good on its hands when the 1997 406 hit the track. “Straight away,” is Aiello’s response when asked when he thought he could fight for the STW crown.
“Before the season there was a Michelin test and from the start we knew the car was strong,” he remembers. “The car was really fast.
“It was not easy to drive because we realised that to be competitive with the RWD BMWs and the 4WD Audis we had to have an oversteering car at the back, the 406 almost turned itself.”
Interestingly considering the pace of development at the time, it’s the 1997 version that Aiello regards as the ultimate, even though he won six races and nearly retained his title the following year.
“The 1997 car was the peak,” he asserts. “The 1998 car wasn’t as quick because we lowered the engine a little bit more and the oil system didn’t work as well, so we weren’t as fast down the straight. The team worked hard to find a solution and they did but we lost the championship by three points.”
"To be competitive with the RWD BMWs and the 4WD Audis we had to have an oversteering car at the back, the 406 almost turned itself"
Laurent Aiello
Having been pipped by BMW’s Johnny Cecotto, Aiello then head to the BTCC and the Primera, which he describes as having been “developed for two or three years before I got there and you could tell”.
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Once he had adjusted to the Primera, Aiello reeled off 10 wins on his way to the title before heading to the revived DTM, where he took the 2002 crown in an Abt Audi TT-R.
