Look at any Le Mans field from 1992 until the end of the LMP1 era, and you can guarantee there were cars at the sharp end of the grid designed by Paolo Catone. If fact, it may not be an understatement to say that no one else has penned as many sports prototype designs as he has.
However, for Catone, his career did not start out in sportscars. It was single seaters where his involvement with racecar design began in 1982. ‘I started out as a gentleman racing driver, spending my Saturdays and Sundays running around, winning some races. But, at the end of the day, I was good, but not good enough,’ says Catone with refreshing honesty.
Though he had an engineering background, he was not involved in racing for a living at the time, but that would change when some friends asked if he could design a Formula 3 car.
‘I had a contact at Minardi and, discussing with them, they decided to give us an ex-Formula 2 chassis,’ he recalls. ‘We modified the suspension, put in the Formula 3 engine, and made something that could do some races in the European championship. It was really amateur.’
Amateur it may have been but, in 1984, things changed dramatically when Giancarlo Minardi decided to go Formula 1 racing.
‘He asked me if I was interested. I dropped everything I was doing and said yes!’
Concurrent to the F1 project, Minardi was also trying to get an F3000 project off the ground and it was this that Catone initially found himself working on.
One in four
‘I came in to help one engineer transform the F2 car to F3000 but, when he left after one month, I was left alone in charge. At the same time, I was also working on the F1 bodywork. Because at the time, the drawing office was just four people – one doing calculations, two doing mechanical and one for the bodywork.’
So it was that just two years after his very first stab at racecar design, Catone was
