No racing car was more perfectly suited to the epithet jolie laide than the Ligier JS5, with which the grand prix team founded by the French businessman and sportsman Guy Ligier, who has died aged 85, made its debut in 1976. Its high and bulbous airbox resembling the spout of a distended teapot, its progress announced by the uniquely ear-splitting howl from its 12-cylinder engine, the JS5 provided a striking prelude to the team’s 21-year existence in Formula One.

From the outset, this was a campaign to revive French fortunes in motor sport. Ligier’s circle of influential friends, who included the politicians François Mitterrand and Pierre Bérégovoy, encouraged his ambition and ensured that the team received funding from SEITA, the government tobacco manufacturer, whose Gitanes brand provided the cars’ colour scheme – a distinctive blue that also happened to be France’s designated racing colour. The raucous engine was supplied by Matra, a French aeronautics and weapons company, and Equipe Ligier’s lone driver in its first season was Jacques Laffite, a dashing Parisian who would go on to win six of their nine grand prix victories.

Ligier was born in Vichy, in central France. An orphan, he worked as a butcher’s assistant while making a reputation as a champion oarsman and as a rugby player, eventually achieving selection for France’s B team. An ambitious young man, he saved up his money to buy the second-hand bulldozer with which he started the construction business that enabled him to make his fortune, not least from helping to build France’s postwar network of autoroutes.

His first entry into racing was with motorcycles before he moved into Formula Junior and sports cars. He graduated to Formula One at a time when it was still possible for sufficiently well-heeled enthusiasts to buy a car, turn up at a grand prix and take part, which Ligier did on a dozen occasions in 1966 and 67.

He finished ninth at Zandvoort in a Cooper-Maserati in his first season before crashing and injuring himself at the Nürburgring a few weeks later. The following year, after he switched to a Brabham, the German Grand Prix would give him his best result: sixth, and his sole championship point. Ligier moved into Formula Two for 1968, running a pair of McLaren cars with his friend Jo Schlesser, but after Schlesser was killed he decided to call a halt to his single-seater driving career and turned instead to building cars.

The JS1 – its initials a tribute to his late colleague – was a handsome small coupé designed by Michel Tetu and powered by a Ford engine, and became the first Ligier car to compete at Le Mans. Its successor, the larger JS2, finished second in the 24-hour race in 1975, in the hands of Jean-Louis Lafosse and Guy Chasseuil, a single lap behind the winning Mirage.

Then came the switch to Formula One, and success in the second season with a win for Laffite in the Swedish Grand Prix at Anderstorp. In 1979, now using Ford engines, Laffite swept to victory in the first two races of the season, in Argentina and Brazil, before his team mate Patrick Depailler won in Spain. They looked genuine championship contenders before Depailler broke both legs in a hang-gliding accident and was replaced by Jacky Ickx.

Those wins turned out to be the team’s high point. There would be further successes for Didier Pironi at Zolder and Laffite at Hockenheim in 1980, and for Laffite in Austria and Canada in 1981, but after years of financial difficulties Ligier had sold the team by the time they registered their final victory at Monaco in 1996, with a JS43 driven by another Frenchman, Olivier Panis. The following year Alain Prost assumed control and renamed the team Prost Grand Prix. Five years later it was wound up.

Alongside its racing programme, the company had responded to the 1973 oil crisis by starting production of a moped-powered microcar which would became a familiar sight in the city streets and country lanes of France. A tough and forceful character, Ligier later focused his energies on persuading Mitterrand – now the president of France – to help him establish a grand prix circuit at Magny-Cours, where the French Grand Prix was held from 1991 to 2008.

He also moved into the organic fertiliser business, where he made another fortune.

Ligier is survived by his wife and their two children, Philippe and Pascale.

• Guy Camille Ligier, racing driver and Formula One team owner, born 12 July 1930; died 23 August 2015