The celebrated engineer has joined Team Soutar Motorsport as its competition director ahead of the opening round at Phillip Island this weekend.

Team Soutar Motorsport is fielding two McLaren Arturas and a pair of Mercedes-AMGs in the entry-level GT category.

“It’s a good, young team, they’re good people, we’re trying to do something interesting,” Lacroix said.

“There’s some good cars and good drivers. It’s something different.

“There’s aero, you can play a little, it’s a bit more alive for me.”

Lacroix has stepped back from full-time Supercars duties in 2026, although retains a low-key link to PremiAir Racing.

His race weekend roles consist of the Soutar GT4 effort and a similar mandate for Anderson Motorsport’s Super2 team.

“I’m half-time, between Super2 and here I don’t work 300 days a year, so I’m quite happy with that,” he said.

“I’ve got more time for me and my family. It’s still motor racing, it’s still interesting and pretty intense. We should have fun.”

Best known for its exploits in the now defunct TCR Australia Series, Soutar Motorsport stepped into GT4 last year with two cars.

This year it will field McLarens for Zac Soutar/Glenn Nirwan (Silver-Am) and Jack Johnson/Willie Exton (Silver).

The Mercedes-AMGs are to be driven by Gerry Murphy/Jed Murphy (Silver-Am) and Bailey Love/Rob Love (Am).

Lacroix will work across all four cars and be on the radio to youngsters Johnson and Exton during track sessions.

Hailing Lacroix as “one of the geniuses of world motorsport”, Soutar said getting the Frenchman onboard is part of his squad’s evolution.

“Team Soutar Motorsport is pushing more towards being a customer racing team,” he said.

“We’ve got programs in GT4, Toyota 86 and are pushing into the Porsche side of things as well.

“Obviously when you expand and run more cars, you need to bring more brain power into the operation.

“There’s no better fit than Ludo to bring into what we do.”

Soutar said he initially laughed off the prospect that the mastermind behind Triple Eight and DJR Team Penske Supercars success would join his squad.

“Shane [Soutar] and I went to Sandown last year to watch the Supercars and we were cruising through the pits catching up with people,” he said.

“A friend of Shane’s actually mentioned that Ludo was free for this year, he wasn’t going to be full-time in the Supercars paddock anymore.

“We’d been looking for an engineer for our program for the year. We actually laughed it off at the start, we thought ‘as if Ludo would want to join a team like ours’.

“But after that the connection was made and Ludo sent an email saying he’d love to come and work with us this year.

“He flew down to the shop, we had a chat and it’s gone from there.”