Five questions with… Motul USA’s new general manager Celso Pierre

Celso Pierre started the year as the general manager for Motul USA taking over the helm from Guillaume Pailleret (who will now oversee the Americas). We had an interesting conversation about guiding a business through this pandemic, sim-racing and his clear vision for the future of Motul…

It’s been a bit of a bizarre experience. In the sense that I started in late January and only spent six weeks working with the team and getting to know everyone when suddenly this pandemic hit and we’ve been all stuck indoors. It’s been a bit of an interesting ride in order to get to know everyone and getting to grips with the company. I think the most important thing in this period is just to stay in touch with everyone and to keep the conversation going so that we’re ready to be back in full force once everything is back up and running.

I was born in Brazil so I have passion running through my blood and that passion is for football or soccer as it’s called in the US. That, and Formula One. My father was a mechanic and his job was fixing up mostly Porsches and Jaguars so my passion for automobiles already started at a young age. I came to the US over twenty years ago and I’ve been mostly working with companies that made fluid lines and tubing. So now I've switched over to a company that produces the fluids, so it’s been a bit of a harmonious next chapter.

I’ve always been passionate about motorsports and now, with no motorsport being held anywhere, I needed to find another way to keep in touch with racing. Sim-racing was the perfect answer. I built my own rig and had to buy a new computer because mine couldn’t keep up with the graphics, but I’ve been having so much fun since. I believe the popularity has always been growing steadily for sims, but the pandemic has really boosted their popularity. In my opinion it’s not going anyway anytime soon.

One of our main goals is to get our name out into the world more, and I believe sim-racing is an avenue we definitely have to explore when it comes to branding and business development. A lot of people stick to brands they know from when they were young or brands they looked up to when they started out in motorsport. As Motul, we need to be that brand.

The challenge for Motul in the USA is fairly straightforward. We have a great premium product that can pretty much sell itself just by the quality of it alone. It’s our job the get the product and the brand known to a lot more people. We need to show them our link in motorsport, we need to talk about the testing. If we play it smart in the coming years we can grow exponentially.