Former F1 Team Builds Microcar: Spoiler - It’s Very, Very Slow

Cast your mind back to the mid-1990s, and you may remember some pretty-looking blue cars taking part in Formula One from the Ligier brand. The French factory raced in F1 until 1996, and it was responsible for bringing some seriously good-looking cars to the F1 grid.

What you might not know, though, is that the company long had a second strand of its business, very different to racing machines – microcars.

That brings us to this, the Ligier JS50. It’s billed as a ‘sporty city car reinvented’ and is powered by a four-stroke twin-cylinder diesel engine, which pumps out *checks notes* around 8bhp. With that diminutive output in mind, we’re starting to question quite how ‘sporty’ this dinky supermini actually is. We are also questioning why Ligier bothered to take the thing to the Green Hell to thrash it around the hallowed asphalt - but here we are.

We can’t find an official release for the activity, but multiple sources are reporting that the dinky JS50, which has a top speed of less than 30mph, managed to scoop the record for the slowest ever lap of the track, crossing the line in 28 minutes and 25.8 seconds. The little JS50 even managed to do better/worse than the plucky Trabant P50, according to Autocar. 

In all honesty, those are rookie numbers - hand me the keys Ligier, I bet I could go slower!

The outlet goes on to say that in preparation for the lap, two drivers schlepped from Paris to the famous track, making it all the way on a single tank of diesel.

Cars like the JS50 are a rare sight in the UK, and fall into a specific category in France called ‘voiture sans permis’, which literally translates to ‘car without a license’. They can be driven by people as young as 14 in France, and other marques that play in the sector include Aixam and Citroen with its Ami.