Laurent Tapie

Re-founder & CEO

Laurent was born in 1974, exactly 100 years after Louis Delage, the founder of Delage automobiles. Laurent finished his studies in 1998 at ESCP/EAP and also obtained a degree in economics. He created his first company while still a student, in partnership with Reebok. Then he began his professional career at McKinsey as a consultant in the Paris office.

He left the firm in 2000 to become an entrepreneur. Over the years, he created or took over several companies in various sectors including online sports betting, credit redemption, and online gold and silver sales. He has been several times a jury member for an entrepreneurship contest and also organized a seminar on entrepreneurship for the École des Mines.

But beyond his inclination for business, Laurent’s passion has always been cars. With the money he made in his first business as a student, Laurent bought at the age of 21 a 1982 Porsche 911 Turbo prepared for the track by the Almeras brothers and started hitting the tracks regularly. In 1996, at the age of 21, he won an amateur driving competition organized by a Porsche club. The first prize was to get the privilege of driving a Formula 1 car.

This experience changed Laurent’s life forever. Although he owned several cars from the ‘Big 5’ (Porsche, Ferrari, Lamborghini, McLaren, and Aston Martin), he never could find again the thrill he felt in the Formula 1 car. So when Laurent decided to relaunch Delage, he immediately wanted the brand’s first hypercar to provide a feeling as close as possible to driving an F1 car.

Hence the D12.