A former race car driver’s house was targeted by thieves in France last week, who managed to escape with a loot of luxury watches and leather goods estimated to be worth around $500,000. According to a report by Le Parisien, burglars struck at Frédéric Alliot’s house in Sèvres, a French commune in the southwestern suburbs of Paris, on Friday night. The former 24 Hours of Le Mans racer reported the robbery a little after midnight after finding his house completely ransacked. The investigators found that the burglars had entered after breaking a window on the second floor of the house and conducted a thorough search of the property.
It turns out that the 69-year-old is a collector of luxury watches. Unfortunately, the robbers got their hands on Alliot’s collection. There’s no information on the timepieces that were stolen in the heist. However, Alliot isn’t the first racing driver to be targeted by watch thieves. F1 drivers Charles Leclerc, Lando Norris, and Carlos Sainz have all faced the wrath of this growing menace. The number of watches recorded as lost or stolen has more than tripled over the last year, according to The Watch Register, the world’s largest watch database.
Frédéric Alliot participated in the legendary 24 Hours of Le Mans race four times in the late 1970s and early 1980s, scoring one podium finish. He is the younger brother of Philippe Alliot, a famous French racer who participated in Formula One from 1984 to 1990 and from 1993 to 1994. The brother later founded a company to help nurture new talents in their racing careers.
