Nineteen years the senior of his next 2024 Rally1 rival, and with fewer career points than Thierry Neuville managed to score in Sardinia alone – despite crashing on the second day – it’s fair to say Jourdan Serderidis isn’t your typical World Rally Championship driver.
But judging Serderidis by this metric is completely missing the point. After all, he didn’t drive a rally car until he was over twice the age Kalle Rovanperä was when he first became World Rally champion.
Rallying is not a career for Serderidis – it’s a hobby. And how many of us can say we are playing in the same league as the world’s best in our chosen pastimes?
While circuit racing (sportscars in particular) is littered with gentleman drivers, Serderidis stands alone at the top of the WRC – particularly among his peers with other drivers of similar age all competing in lower classes. And despite declaring he would retire before, he just can’t pull himself away.
From sharing a sauna with Sébastien Loeb to tales of when he used to be an athletic sprinter and what motivates him to drive against the world’s greatest, this is the true Jourdan Serderidis story.
Why does he do it?
Serderidis might be Greek, but his rally story starts a long way from the Acropolis
“I cannot explain,” Serderidis laughs. “Maybe I’m foolish, maybe I’m a completely crazy guy or I just don’t want to do something else!”
Serderidis tells DirtFish he has always been a rallying fan, but it was a chance meeting with the greatest driver in history that convinced him to give it a go for himself.
“That’s the story that’s always a bit strange [when you think about it],” he smiles. “We were on a lake in Sweden with my company. We were doing team building and also a customer experience on the frozen lake, drifting, etc. And by accident, we were in exactly the same hotel as Sébastien Loeb, [who was] testing before Sweden with the [Citroën] DS3 WRC.”
This was in 2012 – Loeb’s final full season. At this time he was an eight-time world champion.
“We met in the sauna, also by accident, and we were laughing a bit,” Serderidis continues.
“And then at the end of the day we were playing a kind of contest inside our team and asked Sébastien to give the cup to the winner of the contest. And of course he did it with pleasure. And I said, ‘I need to do rally’.”
Loeb is therefore indirectly responsible for Serderidis’ WRC appearances over the last decade. Not that Serderidis wants to compare himself to the Frenchman.
“He is a unique talent, whereas I have no special talent at all on that demain,” he grins. “I may have some talents in business, I may have some talents when I was doing athletics when I was very young, but I had no experience with karting or anything else in the past, so I started extremely late.
“That’s maybe the most, let’s say, unique experience is the fact that starting so late at 48 years old, still I could enjoy being there and not [be] totally out of the game.”
Serderidis’ rallying career therefore began in 2012, a matter of months after his impromptu meeting with Loeb, and he hasn’t looked back since.
A rich sporting past
Sport has long been part of Serderidis' life, even if motorsport only came much later
But getting behind the wheel was far from the now 60-year-old’s first sporting experience.
As he mentioned in that previous answer, Serderidis used to do athletics.
“I was a sprinter,” he confirms.
“There I had some talent, but I stopped very early because the problem with athletics is injuries, muscular injuries. Sprint is extremely hard, and I spent more of my time at the physiologist than on the track. So I stopped and I started to play football.”
That career lasted a lot longer at 34 years.
“I was willing to play football,” Serderidis adds. “So I played football until 42 years old. But amateur [level] so it was let’s say fifth and sixth division in Belgium.”
Whether Serderidis has had the talent to become a true professional is sport has become a moot point in his life, because his desire has been to enjoy it first and foremost. But perhaps more pertinently, he’s always started too late in life to ever make it that far.
“Sport has always been a pleasure and not something where I can get money for it,” he says. “I never had the objective to be professional, even though in football they also said that I could be a professional player because I was very fast. I was extremely fast, obviously [because I used to be a sprinter].
“But again, when I started football it was 18 years old and it was already much too late. Players start at four, five, six years old. So again, I had some talent, but not the specific talent that is required for football. And I was at university, so my objective was to succeed in the university and not football.”
It’s the same story with rallying. Loeb is the oldest winner of a WRC round in history and that was at just under 48. Serderidis’ first rally was at 48. But that hasn’t stopped him treating his rallying journey as if it was a career.
“I started in 2012 with R2 cars, which now is Rally4. I was always willing to drive the car driven by the young guys!” he laughs. “So I didn’t start with the old-timers or historic rallies etc.
“I just did one last year, East African Safari Classic, but that’s something else because it was also very, very tough and very exciting. But for me, I belong to this [modern] category.”
What motivates him?
Serderidis drove his Puma in Kenya, Greece and Central Europe in 2024
Serderidis didn’t hang about making his way through the ranks. First competing in Belgium, by just his second year (2013) he had his hands on one of the very first Ford Fiesta R5s, and made his WRC debut at that year’s Rally GB.
Four years later, he was a regular on the world stage and won the inaugural WRC Trophy in 2017 for older-spec World Rally Cars (the one and only year it ran), steering a Citroën DS3 WRC.
But it’s the Greek’s relationship with M-Sport that he’s synonymous with, and that today sees him compete in a Puma Rally1 that he himself owns.
Next year he’s set to appear on four WRC events – Sweden (after a warm-up at Arctic Rally Finland), Kenya, Sardinia and Acropolis – in a front-loaded calendar; the reason why we’ll explore in a second.
But first, what’s intriguing to learn about Serderidis is that he’s an extremely competitive person. Maybe that’s obvious given he’s a rally driver, but competing in the Rally1 class against manufacturer-paid professionals means he’s not usually involved in tight races in the leaderboard.
Yet it’s those comparisons that drive him.
I'm always looking to the other ones and comparing all the performances all the timeJourdan Serderidis
“So much,” he says. “I’m always looking to the other ones and comparing all the performances all the time.
“This is most probably one of the reasons I’m there [in a Rally1 car] and I’m not driving something else. I’m 60 years old but in my mind I’m 25 years old, I’m looking for any challenges I can do. And it’s natural, so I’m not forcing myself.”
Serderidis credits co-driver Frédéric Miclotte for his progression, but despite his competitive nature is the first to admit he’s never going to be challenging Neuville, Ogier and Tänak’s stage times.
“The main difference obviously today is that the professional guys, they drive all the time. I mean, every week. And the preparation they do, it’s something I don’t like is the videos. They do a lot of videos which is not fun for anyone, but it gives a big advantage.
“It’s a little bit killing the rally because the basics of rally is listening to notes. And this is where I improved the most during the 12 last years, and still I’m improving that part. But the guys, they know everything by heart, so it’s completely different,” he laughs.
“For me, the difference on this is maybe more than one second per kilometer. More than one second. So today I’m between three and four seconds [behind]. There is one [second] already just by this.”
Dakar desire
Serderidis has his sights set on driving M-Sport's Ford Raptor T1+ on the Dakar Rally
Serderidis still has ambitions in rallying – both in and outwith the WRC.
“I’ve been two times second in the Greek championship and maybe I will try to become Greek national champion,” he confirms. “So that’s also an objective, and that would be with a [Škoda] Rally2 car.”
But his next big challenge is rally-raid. And, inevitably, that means Dakar.
“I will do Sweden, Kenya, Sardinia and Acropolis, so it’s quite a big program. And then I will switch to the rally-raid, I think,” he shares. “So I will prepare myself with one baja in Spain, then I do Portugal, Morocco and I want to do Dakar in 2026.”
Which feeds the obvious question: why?
“It’s most probably the most difficult race in the world,” Serderidis believes. “It’s also long. It’s two, three weeks. Last year I did the Safari Kenya historic – it’s also 10 days and I enjoy a lot the principle of this kind of rally.
“Of course the car is not the same because I was driving a Porsche 911 from the ’80s and if I have to drive the [Ford] Raptor it will be something else. And in the sand. Because I have very little experience in the sand so that will be most probably one of the challenges I have to face.
“But coming from rally to that kind of discipline, we have a lot of examples of successful people. You see maybe Martin Prokop, [Yazeed] Al-Rajhi, Sébastien Loeb, Nasser [Al-Attiyah]… the fast guys are coming from the rally as well. So I want to try it and I want to do it once at least, this is the thing that I want to do.”
And as he just hinted, he’ll follow the same philosophy as in the WRC by jumping into the most capable machine available.
Kenya will be on Serderidis' schedule again in 2025
“It will be with M-Sport [in the Ford Raptor], so it’s a kind of continuity because I started already with the Fiesta R5 in 2013 and we have a long partnership together and positive collaboration since the early days. I don’t feel the need to change. I like to stay with the same people.”
Although the first half of his year will still center around rallying, Serderidis has already begun putting the work in to ready himself for Dakar – attending a six-day training program at France’s 321perform training center last week.
“If I want to do Dakar, I need to lose, I think, about 10 kilos, and to be in top condition. So I will try to work now on this,” he says.
It’s abundantly clear that Serderidis is showing no signs of slowing down. The only thing he feels is holding him back is eyesight.
“Already in the dark it’s really more difficult for me,” he admits. “The visibility, the vision is much less in the dark at 60 years old, and you cannot do anything on this. But when it’s bright like in Greece or when the snow is white or the sand, I think there I can continue.
“I will continue until I am stopping improving. Because I am still young in rally, I am still improving in fact. The point where I’m not improving is about taking more risks, and this is chemical because I want to do it, but my brain stops me!
“The top guys, they are able to have situations where there is an issue but they control it because they have such big car control, and this is the fantastic part of the sport.”
But so is what Serderidis represents. He’s there to challenge himself and have fun in an arena that affords him to do so. In what other discipline of sport can anyone with similar ambition propel themselves into the lion’s den? It’s what makes rallying so unique.
Yet Serderidis is a dying breed of driver who is truly testing himself this way. Rallying, and soon rally-raid, should count itself very lucky to have him.
