The team announced Lacroix’s departure at the end of 2025 following two years as its competition director, much of which was also spent race engineering.
Lacroix, lauded for having earlier been instrumental to success at Triple Eight and DJR Team Penske, said he felt “less relevant” under the tight Gen3 rules.
The Frenchman’s exit from PremiAir coincided with the appointment of Triple Eight founder Roland Dane as team principal.
While Dane was left seething when Lacroix defected from Triple Eight to DJR at the end of 2016, the pair have well and truly moved on from the spat.
In fact, Dane has now signed Lacroix to a part-time consultancy role, which the engineer will juggle alongside other projects – including work for the Anderson Motorsport Super2 team.
Dane told Speedcafe the plan is for Lacroix to be “helping me with a couple of things back at base” and that he won’t form part of the team’s travelling crew.
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Lacroix’s previous competition director role will not be directly filled.
While Dane still sees plenty of value in Lacroix’s insight and experience, there’s no shying away from the fact much of his skillset is no longer of use to a Supercars team.
Lacroix was the technical force behind Triple Eight’s ascension in the mid-2000s under a far more open rulebook.
Success in Gen3 Supercars is about details and processes, rather than free-thinking ideas.
“The areas where he’s going to help, I’ll keep that in our team at the moment, but there’s a lot of truth in his observation around Gen3,” Dane said.
“Ludo’s strength always came from designing new ways to try and maximise the opportunities within a set of technical rules.
“Well those are, like almost every other formula in the world, almost all locked down.
“It’s the same as the skillset in the engineers in NASCAR has changed since they went to their spec car, that’s changed here as well.”
As for the bad blood that existed between the pair after Lacroix’ defection to DJR Team Penske, which Dane slammed at the time as “duplicitous”?
“Both Ludo and I are pragmatists,” he said.
“If that means moving on from where we’re at and recognising when we can be of assistance to each other then we’re pragmatists and realists.
“As I’ve said to almost every employee I’ve ever had, we don’t need to love each other, we need to get on and make stuff happen.”
Lacroix also cited a long commute from his Brisbane home to PremiAir’s Arundel, Gold Coast, workshop as a reason for wanting to step back from the team last year.
Dane is currently looking to relocate the team to a new facility, although says it’ll be “in the vicinity” of the current workshop.
PremiAir is among three Chevrolet teams set to enter an information sharing alliance this year, although details of how that will work remain unclear.
The Peter Xiberras-owned squad was previously a data customer of Triple Eight, which has defected to Ford.
PremiAir will field rookie Jayden Ojeda and series returnee Declan Fraser in its two Camaros this season.
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