Matra

Former French company

Matra, the French Aerospace Champions

A French aerospace and defense group built the cars that carried Jackie Stewart to the 1969 title, then chased success with its own V12.

Matra was a French industrial group best known for aerospace and defense work, led for three decades by Jean Luc Lagardère after he became chief executive in 1963. Seeing the promotional value of racing, Lagardère created Equipe Matra Sports, which entered French Formula Three in 1965 and soon won French and European titles in the junior formulas with its monocoque MS5.

Matra chassis first appeared in World Championship races as Formula Two entries at the German Grand Prix in 1966. For 1968 the company joined forces with Ken Tyrrell's private team, which ran Matra cars with Ford engines under the name Matra International. Jackie Stewart won three races that first season, at Zandvoort, the Nürburgring and Watkins Glen, and in 1969 he won six more on his way to the drivers' championship. Matra took the constructors' title the same year, the first for a French built car.

Matra also raced its own works cars powered by its own V12 engine, driven by Jean Pierre Beltoise, Henri Pescarolo and Chris Amon among others. Beltoise came closest to victory with second place at the 1968 Dutch Grand Prix, but the V12 cars never won. Matra competed as a constructor until 1972, and in all its cars started 62 World Championship races and won nine, every one of them by Stewart in a Matra entered by Tyrrell.

The company turned to sports cars and won Le Mans in 1972, 1973 and 1974 before withdrawing from motorsport at the end of 1974. Its V12 came back in Formula One as a supplied engine from 1975 to 1982, notably with Ligier. The group itself was later absorbed into the Lagardère Group and parts of it merged into what is now Airbus.

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