About Eric Gauthier

Eric Gauthier, owner of SP Motorsports and its partner company Suspension Performance, worked for Lotus Team in the early 1990s. He was a key member of the design team for active suspension, a ground-breaking innovation in F1 cars.

Eric later worked at Lotus Engineering, where he designed the front suspension of the Series 1 Elise.

With SP Motorsports, you have a rare opportunity to have your car prepped and maintained by someone who:

• understands suspension theory
  • Master’s degree in suspension engineering from Grenoble Institute of Technology (“the MIT of France”)
• understands racing
  • Ten years professional motorcycle racing experience
  • French Enduro champion
  • Two Paris-Dakkar finishes
• understands and practices the art of design
  • Three  years at Lotus factory & F1 team
  • Consultant to global manufacturers on suspension and brake designs

We are a family business

Eric’s wife, Jeannine, handles all the accounting, IT and marketing for SP Motorsports.

Jeannine is a semi-retired software engineer, who now advises software startup companies.

Jeannine owns a lightly modified Lotus Elise. She has a competitive side, and as you can see in this photo, she has been known to chase Eric around the track, trying to reduce the 15-second time difference between her best lap time and his.

Our toys

Our personal car collection includes:

• Jeannine’s 2005 Elise road car
• Eric’s 2012 Fisker Karma
• 2008 Ford F450 truck, for hauling our 48′ trailer
• 2006 Range Rover HSE, Eric’s daily driver
• 2006 Mini Cooper S Works, Jeannine’s daily driver
• 1959 dune buggy project, complete at last!

Eric is rumored to own 20+ motorcycles, but no one is quite sure since they are never all in one place at one time. His traditional favorite for off-road riding is his custom full-size 85cc TM enduro bike and his favorite for twisty roads is an MV Agusta Brutale 800. Eric recently took delivery of the very first production Redshift,  an electric motocross bike from Alta Motors.