For the 1989 season Alliot stayed on but Dalmas, who had been ill with Legionnaires' disease, was dropped after Canada and replaced by rookie French driver Éric Bernard and later by Michele Alboreto, who had recently left Tyrrell.

At the end of the year, Larrousse sold 50% of his shares to the Japanese Espo Corporation, and Aguri Suzuki was hired to partner Bernard for the 1990 season.

It transpired the team had made an honest mistake by registering the car as manufactured by themselves, when in fact it was designed and built by Lola in England.

[2] Larrousse signed an engine deal with Brian Hart for 1991 but early in the year Espo withdrew and the team struggled financially.

[3] In the autumn of 1991 Gérard Larrousse signed up Robin Herd from Fondmetal for the construction of an F1 chassis and 65% of the team was sold to the Venturi car company.

After escaping from a raid on his house in France by judicious use of a hand grenade, he was killed during a nine-hour gun battle with police in a German hotel.

Japanese pay driver Toshio Suzuki substituted for Alliot in hopes of increasing finances for the flyaway end of season races in Japan and Australia.

New partners were brought in, in the form of Swiss-based Fast Group SA, an organization headed by Ferrari dealer Michel Golay and former F1 racer Patrick Tambay.

Despite these occasional flashes of speed, Comas and Beretta generally ran in the lower-midfield in what proved to be a tricky car powered by an aging engine.

As the money ran short, however, pay-drivers replaced them, including former Larrousse veterans Alliot and Dalmas, as well as rookies Hideki Noda and Jean-Denis Délétraz.

The team appeared on the entry list for the 1995 season with Érik Comas returning as one of its drivers,[5] but needed to merge with an organisation with an available F1 chassis to survive.

[7] Larrousse consequently ordered the previous year's chassis, the LH94, to be upgraded to the new technical regulations as a temporary solution, whilst he waited to see if the French government would give the team financial support, as way of compensation for the fact that the so-called "Evin's Law" had banned possible revenue from tobacco and alcohol sponsorship.

[13] Prior to the San Marino Grand Prix, Larrousse announced his team's withdrawal from F1, blaming others for failing to produce promised funding.