Motor Racing's Darkest Day

On the back of most race day tickets is a short anachronism. "Motor Racing Is Dangerous. Spectators attend at their own risk." Thankfully, the risk has long been fairly miniscule. That's not to say that spectators have not been injured, or even killed. Set against the vast numbers attending motorsports events each year, though, the numbers are tiny - a spectator is almost certainly at far more risk of dying in a road accident on the way to or from the event. While rallying, in particular, has perhaps been lucky that there haven't been more serious accidents involving spectators (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yyVHj3sHVHQ for something really hair raising...) the truth is that tickets might more accurately read "Motor Racing Used To Be Dangerous" though that might perhaps be tempting fate.

A documentary which appeared on the intermittently wonderful BBC4 recently reminded viewers of a time when spectator safety was altogether more rudimentary, if not non-existent. It told the story of the Le Mans disaster of 1955, which resulted in the death of 83 spectators, with many more injured. Drawing on interviews with two men who drove for the front-running teams, Mercedes and Jaguar, and a number of spectators who were present that day, the documentary was interesting not only for the black story at its heart, but for the way in which it showed viewers a picture of motor racing culture as it was over half a century ago.

Over 300,000 people attended the race that year, which, to judge by what those interviewed on the programme had to say, was then seen as one of the major events on the social calendar. A woman recalled being excited to go to Le Mans that year on her honeymoon. Another recalled how everyone would dress up for the occasion (the contrast between 50s race goes in their hats and bow ties, and the modern equivalent in their replica team gear was especially striking). Just 10 years after the end of World War 2, the world was beginning to rediscover a sense of levity, of excitement, after the austerity of the immediate post-war years. With the war still very much in the recent past, much was made of the battle between the two front running teams, the German Mercedes squad and their English rivals, Jaguar (though it should be pointed out that this can be taken too far - Mercedes had one Stirling Moss on their driving squad, which was very international in flavour).

If the documentary has a flaw (aside from the schoolboy error of claiming La Sarthe is 'the longest circuit in the world') it is that it appears to try to suggest that the accident was in some way the result of that rivalry. The fatal accident occurred some time after seven in the evening. Mike Hawthorn, having just lapped Lance Macklin's Austin Healey, slowed to enter the pits. Macklin lost control of his car as he swerved to avoid Hawthorn's slowing Jaguar, which sent him straight into the path of Pierre Levegh's Mercedes. Levegh's car launched itself off the back of Macklin's car, catapulting straight into the packed grand stand opposite the pits, disintegrating and exploding on landing, its magnesium chassis burning fiercely. The result was far and away the worst death toll at any motor racing event, grainy black and white photographs showing a scene not unreminiscent of the aftermath of a terrorist bombing.

As is perhaps inevitable with an event of that magnitude, the controversy would go on long beyond the end of the race. Amazingly, from our modern perspective, the race was not stopped. The organisers cited the need to ensure that ambulances heading to the circuit to tend the injured were not obstructed by tens of thousands of spectators heading in the opposite direction. Mercedes withdrew their cars from the race, inviting rivals Jaguar to do the same. Jaguar declined the invitation, and when Mike Hawthorn and Ivor Bueb were photographed celebrating their victory, spraying champagne, it became a national scandal in France. In the long term, the result was the same for both teams. Mercedes and Jaguar withdrew from international competition in the aftermath of the accident, neither to return until the mid-80s when both would again fight it out for victory at Le Mans - with Jaguar taking the honours in 1988 and 1990, and Mercedes winning the last race before the introduction of chicanes on the Mulsanne in 1989.

The single issue which caused the most debate at the time, though, was that of whose fault the accident was. Even now, the two surviving drivers interviewed for the programme, Levegh's team mate, American John Fitch, and Jaguar driver Norman Dewis, had radically different views on the subject. In Fitch's view, the blame lay with Hawthorn, who according to Fitch, was devastated by guilt in the immediate aftermath of the accident and only later changed his story, blaming (by implication at least) an error from Macklin. Dewis, by contrast, considered that Macklin had simply lost control at the near-flat out corner leading onto the pit straight, and questioned whether the ageing Levegh (he was nearly 50 when he died) still had the reflexes necessary to race the powerful Mercedes 300SL, suggesting a sharper driver might have taken avoiding action when Macklin's Healey went out of control.

Watching the amateur cinefilm footage of the accident, which had been seen by few before the making of this documentary, though, it strikes me that this was simply a racing accident, that really, nobody could be said to be to blame for the accident. A public inquiry (which also had access to this footage) came to the same conclusion. Perhaps it is because people wanted someone to blame, but it seems to me that by focusing on the actions of the drivers, they were looking in the wrong place.

The government's report on the accident remains unpublished to this day, but it doesn't take a long government inquiry to establish that the reason the accident had such devastating consequences, the 'blame' if you wish to use the word, lay with the complete absence of protection for spectators. Back in the 50s, armco and catch-fencing had yet to become standard features (and no matter how much the latter may frustrate amateur photographers like me, it is simply a necessity when spectators sit level with the track surface, on the outside of a fast corner). The grandstands were right next to the circuit, the track at that point was very, very narrow, and there was no 'in road' to separate those heading for the pits from those continuing at full chat across the start/finish line. Add in the vast performance differentials between the fastest and slowest cars and the only real surprise is that such a serious accident didn't happen earlier.

It remains the single worst day in motor racing history. Thankfully, there has been no accident on such a scale since. I for one rather doubt that the sport could, in these safety conscious times, survive another accident in which there were mass casualties among spectators. Looking at the footage from the 1955 Le Mans race, the casual disregard for spectator safety is faintly chilling. But then those were different times. Two World Wars had caused devastation across Europe on a scale which is hard for people of my generation to really understand. The documentary suggested that the 1950s were the 'golden age' of motorsport. And if your romantic ideal of the sport is a vision of brave amateurs, fighter pilots with steering wheels, doing battle in dangerous circumstances, then perhaps it was. But the world has moved on, and those of us sitting in the grandstands should perhaps be grateful.

The Fastest Tortoise

It's not been the best couple of weeks for the man in charge of Red Bull's driver development programme, Helmut Marko. First he finds himself at the centre of allegations that the team attempted to nobble Mark Webber and ensure that Sebastian Vettel won the Turkish Grand Prix, and then, two weeks later, the record he held with Dutchman Gijs Van Lennep for driving the fastest ever Le Mans 24 hour race finally fell after 39 years.

The Le Mans 24 hour race was a very different beast in 1971, when Marko and Van Lennep took their Porsche 917 to victory at an average speed of 138.1 mph. Where now there are strict rules about how many mechanics can work on the car when it is in pitlane (4), how long a driver can remain at the wheel over a single stint (no more than 4 hours) and how great a portion of the 24 hours a driver may drive (no more than 14 hours) things were all a lot more informal in the early 1970s, as even a cursory glance at photographs from pitlane, which was thronged not only with mechanics but with journalists and all kinds of hangers-on.

And where the Audi R15 TDIs that finished 1-2-3 last weekend are a model of a very particular kind of measured, teutonic efficiency, their big diesel engines almost silent, breezing effortlessly through the night. By contrast, the Porsche 917, perhaps the platonic ideal of a racing sports prototype, was a fearsome beast which, particularly in its early days, left many of its drivers genuinely terrified. With around 600BHP, it had about as much power as the modern Audi, but that power was delivered through a much more primitive chassis which, just to add to the fear factor, had a magnesium chassis in order to save weight. Not, in short, something you would want to be stuck inside if it were to spear off the road and the go up in flames.

Yet at first glance, it might seem remarkable that Marko and Van Lennep's record lasted as long as it did. The Automobile Club De L'Ouest's ban on the big 5 litre Ferrari and Porsche sportscars played a part (cynics might suggest a transparent attempt to give a helping hand to the French Matra organisation) and there is no doubt that the sportscars of the mid 1970s were not as quick as those of the era which immediately preceded it, in much the same way that the sports prototypes of the mid 1990s couldn't hold a candle to the all-conquering Peugeot 905s and Toyota TS010, but there can be little doubt that the Group C cars of the 1980s were a good deal quicker than the Porsche 917 had ever been. The early Porsche 962s and Jaguar XJR-5s might not have had any more power, but they did have the benefit of another 15 years or so of development and they were considerably faster. How do we know for sure? Well, at least in part because the Kremer brothers ran a modified 917 in the 1981 Le Mans race and, while it certainly wasn't slow, it wasn't quite as quick as the more modern Porsche 936s and would almost certainly have been completely outclassed had the Kremer brothers deigned to run the car against the 956s the following year.

No, the single biggest obstacle standing in the way of anyone aiming at the 1971 record has been that the circuit at La Sarthe has been made steadily slower and slower over the years. It was in 1972 that the end of the lap was slowed down by the introduction of the Ford Chicane, and the bypassing of the fearsomely fast Arnage by the Porsche Curves. Later came the introduction of the Dunlop chicane and just when the 1971 record looked like it was coming under threat at the height of the Group C era, with Jan Lammers, Johnny Dumfries and Andy Wallace coming very close in 1988, the 3 mile long Mulsanne straight was broken up by the introduction of two chicanes and average race speeds dropped considerably as a result.

The increased use of safety cars and the mixed grid of gentleman drivers in underpowered LMP2 prototypes and GT2 Porsches and Ferraris had made it still more difficult to break that fastest race record in recent years. In all truth, the Audi and Peugeot diesels have probably had the speed required to top Van Lennep and Marko's 222kph average for some years, but wet races and long safety car periods (often the result of accidents involving prototypes and much slower GTs) have mitigated against the record actually being broken.

Finally, last weekend, the Audi R15 of Timo Bernhard, Romain Dumas and Mike Rockenfeller broke that 39 year old record, winning the race at an average speed of 140mph and heading up an Audi 1-2-3, with all three cars creeping under the bar set by Porsche nearly 40 years earlier. The irony was that the fastest Le Mans ever wasn't even won by the fastest car in the race that weekend. The gap between Peugeot and Audi has, if anything, got bigger since last year, with the French cars lapping up to four seconds a lap faster than their German rivals. But anyone familiar with Aesop's fables will know that the steady determination of a tortoise can sometimes beat the flighty but unreliable hare. And so it proved. The Peugeots led the first half of the race but then, one by one, all four of their cars hit problems, and eventually not one of them would finish the race. Whether there was something fundamentally wrong with the 2010-iteration of the 908 or whether they simply pushed the engines too hard after getting held up early on by minor niggles isn't clear, but either way the old cliche is true: to finish first, first you must finish. Peugeot hared off into the distance early on, but Audi, it seems, had produced the fastest tortoise in the world.

So another long-standing record has gone. It took 44 years for Fernando Alonso to snatch the late Bruce Mclaren's record as the youngest Grand Prix winner of all time, though that record would belong to the Spaniard for just a few short years before Sebastian Vettel stole it away from him. Likewise, Emerson Fittipaldi's claim to be the youngest world champion ever lasted for 33 years before Alonso took it from him, only to find his arch-rival Lewis Hamilton took the record away from him just 3 years later. Which begs the question, how long will Audi get to keep this record for? No record lasts forever, it seems. Though I would be surprised if the 251mph recorded by Roger Dorchy in Gerard Welter's WM Peugeot down the old Mulsanne straight will ever be bettered...

Racing on the Radio

Sport isn't suited to radio coverage. It's all about the drama of the moment - the visual impact of moments of sublime skill. The inspired shot at goal, the intense squabble over a set point in tennis, the overtaking manouvre that leaves your heart in your mouth.

Its appeal is essentially visual. Hearing a man shouting "he shoots, he scores" is at best a poor substitute for seeing it happen and at worst, just plain irritating. Hearing Jonathan Legard or Maurice Hamilton, as was then, telling you that Fernando Alonso has just passed Schumacher round the outside at 130R is a poor substitute for seeing it happen.

There's an exception to every rule though. My stepfather enjoys listening to the test cricket coverage on Radio 4 as he works. It's not a sport I've ever really understood, but I can well understand why it might work as well over the radio as on the television. It's a long, drawn out battle that ebbs and flows. Occasionally, someone early in the batting order might go out for a duck, or an LBW might do for a key player, but the drama lies in the fact that it's happened, not, principally in the way its happened. There's long stretches where nothing in particular is happening, providing commentators with time to get diverted into the back story to the game, the characters involved, and reminiscences of past matches.

There's a certain similarity with long distance sportscar racing, something which was not lost on the Radio Le Mans team last weekend, as John Hindhaugh sought to explain to his American co-commentator what 'Leg Before Wicket' actually means. A 24 hour race isn't about wheel-to-wheel dicing and spectacular passing manoeuvres. It's about strategy. Finding a second or two a lap, every lap, for lap after lap. Going an extra lap between fuel stops. Most of all, it's about keeping out of trouble. In consequence, it works just as well, if not better, on the radio, as it does on the television.

From this, you will gather that, in spite of what I said here last year, I once again failed to make the trip to La Sarthe - something which has been on my 'to-do' list for getting on for a decade now. Real life, sadly, getting in the way once more - this time I found myself in Parliament on the day I should really have been on the Eurostar heading south. The Saturday evening, after a day's hillwalking, I stuck Radio Le Mans on in the background and while it isn't like being there (although I've always said that much of the thing about seeing motorsport in the flesh comes in the sound - so maybe I'm not missing much with those silent diesel Audis and Peugeots), it felt much more like being there than my usual experience of watching the racing on the television.

Perhaps it's because it was like listening to the radio commentary at the circuit (for English speakers, Radio Le Mans is the at-circuit commentary, but thanks to the internet, its possible to listen anywhere in the world. The unspoken truth of endurance racing is that relatively little happens on the track much of the time, so the time is not spent telling the listener who is passing who or who has run a touch wide out of Arnage, or whatever, but rather of trying to give the whole story of what is, after all, an immensely complex race - 52 cars, each with 3 drivers, in action for a whole 24 hours.

So we had the diversion of a lengthy debate between Jim Roller and John Hindhaugh regarding whether quick F1 drivers made good endurance drivers - interrupted, amusingly, by an interview with Aston Martin driver and former Super Aguri man Anthony Davidson. As an aside, the fact that the race was eventually won by former-F1 men Alex Wurz, Marc Gene and David Brabham, and that current F1 man - Sebastien Bourdais - seemed to be amongst the very quickest and most consistent drivers in the field and probably would have won the race had that car had an entirely trouble-free race. As it was, they found themselves a lap back and the team decided to instruct the two Peugeots not to race each other.

Aside from that, we had plenty interviews with both those competing in the race and with other characters from the racing world who were along for the weekend, including Indy 500 winner Dario Franchitti, whose brother was competing in the race for the first time. Speculation as to whether the two Franchittis might team up with cousin Paul Di Resta for a combined assault on the 24 hour race was quite intriguing. The Andrettis came close to winning the race with a family team, but so far as I can remember, nobody has actually gone the whole way and won teamed up with a brother or father.

Le Mans a race that is both one of the most intriguing events in motorsport and yet not one which, once the initial novelty of seeing prototype sportscars on the television has worn off, actually provides much in the way of visual spectacle. As such, it is absolutely ideally suited to radio coverage. OK, so I'm sure it's not quite like being there - certainly, the sight of an Audi or Peugeot through the Porsche curves must be quite something these days, even if the sound is decidedly uninspiring - but it left me feeling much closer to the action than I ever do when sat watching a Grand Prix of a Sunday afternoon. Next year maybe I'll finally get down to La Sarthe and see for myself.

Iconic Cars - The Second in an Occasional Series

Last month, I wrote the first of a short series on iconic cars from the 1980s, singling out Austin Rover's brutal 4 wheel drive, rear engined Metro 6R4 rally car. My second choice is, in many ways, the polar opposite of the in-yer-face Austin-Rover. The Porsche 956/62 that becam3e the mainstay of sportscar racing through much of the 1980s was an elegant exemplar of German efficiency - all flowing lines, a classic design. Oh, and unlike the Metro, it was also enormously successful.

Sportscar racing was in a bit of a mess as the 1980s dawned. Open top Group 6 sportscars that looked some years past their sell-by-date competed against road-car based GTX Porsche 935s and odd privately built GTP coupes. The dearth of real competition was perhaps best illustrated by the fact that Jean Rondeau was able to win the 1980 race with a self-built car. It would be the last time that a car not built by, or at least funded by, a major motor manufacturer would win Le Mans.

For 1982, the FIA threw out the Group 5/6 rulebook under which sportscar racing had been run since the early 1970s and created the 'Group C' formula, which restricted performance mainly through fuel consumption limits which, theoretically at least, allowed small capacity normally-aspirated powered cars and large-bore turbo-charged machines to compete on equal terms. Rather than being about outright horsepower, Group C would be all about efficiency.

Porsche, whose 935 and 936 machines had been at the forefront of sportscar racing through the late 70s, decided that they wanted to be in on the new Group C category from the very beginning. Taking the 2.6l 'boxer' engine which had won Le Mans when installed in the back of an ageing Porsche 936 the previous year, the works designed and built a very modern looking replacement around it - the Porsche 956.

The car made its debut at the opening round of the Group C championship - the Silverstone 1000kms of 1982. The car was light years ahead of the Group C competition: the ill-fated Ford C100, Joest Racing's hastily converted 936, an early WM-Peugeot and a Cosworth DFL engined Sauber C6. As it would turn out, however, this would be the only Group C race where the Porsche 956 was ever beaten - not by one of its Group C rivals, but by an old Group 6 Lancia LC1 Spyder which had been given dispensation to race (as a matter of accuracy, I should point out that, what I mean is that the 956 was never beaten until its replacement, the 962, appeared).

The Porsche works skipped the next round, their home race at the formidable old Nordschliefe and returned to the fray at Le Mans with a 3 car entry, in the now legendary Rothmans livery. The cars finished an easy 1-2-3. The winner finished 30 laps ahead of the first non-956 finisher (a private Porsche 935(a six year old Group 5 machine, which perhaps served only to illustrate the lack of strength in depth in sportscar racing at the time).

Such was the sheer scale of Porsche's dominance that Group C could quickly have died a death - with every race a foregone conclusion. Think of how great an advantage Audi have had in the ALMS and the LMES in recent years, at least until Peugeot turned up in the LMES and Penske started to extract some real pace from their Porsche RS Spyder, and then multiply by a factor of two. The only other manufacturers in at the beginning were Ford, who never really managed to sort their problem-child C100, and Lancia, whose Martini liveried LC2 might have been a beautiful piece of kit, and stunningly quick over a single lap, but had neither the fuel efficiency nor the reliability to threaten Porsche over a race distance.

Fortunately, Porsche had, from the very beginning, built the 956 as a turn-key racing car which could be sold to private teams. One year on from the 956's debut, at the Monza 1000kms of 1983, there were a total of 8 Porsche 956s in the field. And just to prove the point that the private teams were serious, Reinhold Joest's 956, in the hands of Bob Wollek and Thierry Boutsen, won the race. In 1984, in the absence of the works team, Joest won Le Mans with a privately entered 956 and then repeated the feat a year later with exactly the same car, this time beating a squadron of 3 works Porsches into the bargain.

Over the following few years, John Fitzpatrick Racing, Brun, Kremer and the late Richard Lloyd's RLR outfit all proved themselves capable of beating the works and winning outright with customer Porsches. For me, this is one of the key reasons I have singled out the Porsche 956/62 as my 'iconic Group C sportscar'. The Sauber Mercedes C11 may have been prettier, the TWR Jaguars may have attracted more of a following at the time, and the final evolution of the Peugeot 905 might have been far and away the outright quickest Group C car ever made, but through its sheer ubiquity the Porsche 956/62 remains for me the quintessential Group C car.

The cars weren't just successful on this side of the Atlantic. The Porsche 956's replacement, the near-identical 962 was originally created to comply with tougher IMSA safety regulations which required that the driver's feet must not sit forward of the front axle-line. The car initially struggled against the Jaguars and Marches in IMSA, which did not have the fuel-economy based rules of Group C, but a larger 3.2l engine brought it into contention and enabled Porsche to pick up five wins in the Daytona 24hr race between 1985 and 1991 and pick up several IMSA GTP titles.

In the end, Porsche were unable, or unwilling, to keep up in a development race with entries from other manufacturers, including Mercedes (Sauber) Jaguar (TWR) and Nissan (Lola). As a Group C car, the 962 took its last Le Mans win in 1987, after the quicker Jaguars broke, and its last World Sportscar Championship race win a couple of years later at Dijon in 1989 (a Joest car, unsurprisingly). They did come close to winning Le Mans again in 1990, after a once-in-a-lifetime drive from wealthy amateurs Jesus Pareja and Walter Brun, but a battery problem knocked them out of contention for the lead and then engine failure saw them fall out of a safe second place with just minutes left on the clock.

The Porsche 962, though, was a car that would not die. Though the Group C category for which it was designed collapsed at the end of 1992, the cars would go on winning. Jochen Dauer and the Porsche works got together to create a one-off Porsche 962 road car to enable them to enter the GT category of Le Mans. Though this was an especially blatant way of sneaking a 962 Group C in through the back door, the plan worked and Mauro Baldi, Hurley Haywood and Yannick Dalmas chalked up one last win at La Sarthe for a car built to the same basic design as the 956 which Ickx and Bell had won the race with 12 years previously.

A year later, longtime Porsche stalwarts Kremer recorded one last 24 hour race win for a 962 of sorts when they won the Daytona 24hr race in a WSC spec, 'spyder' which was essentially a 962 with its roof chopped off. Come to that, the Porsche WSC95 which Joest took to 2 Le Mans victories in 1996 and 1997 relied on the 962 engine and running gear, albeit installed in what was essentially an old Jaguar XJR-14 with, yes, its roof chopped off.

Older readers might pick out the Porsche 917, the Ferrari 250LM, the Ford GT40 or the Jaguar D-Type, but for me, the Porsche 956/62 will remain forever the very definition of the sports prototype racing car.

All Day And All Of The Night

I've always meant to make the trip to Le Mans for the 24 Hour race, but somehow I never seem to have a free weekend for the trip in mid-June. Neil, at Fastest Lap, made it all the way over from the US to the race last year and It's something I really must put right someday. It won't be this year though. Once again real life has got in the way, this time in the form of a looming deadline at work which will probably see me chained to my desk over the weekend.

Le Mans is undoubtedly one of the three big motor races. It ranks alongside the Monaco Grand Prix and the Indianapolis 500 as an event whose name will mean something even to those whose interest in motorsport is no greater than mine in golf. For me, it is most special event of the three. While Monaco is really just another Grand Prix, and one where on-track overtaking is even less likely than usual, and the Indy 500 is only of many oval rounds of the Indy Racing League, albeit one with an absurdly long build-up and more press attention than that series can usually attract, Le Mans is a truly unique stand-alone race. Not merely one round of championship, it is simply the big sportscar endurance race of the season. I

It is not the only 24 hour race but it is far and away the most significant. The Daytona 24hr race always attracts a solid line-up of the best US driving talent but the circuit is not a patch on Le Mans and the cars are little more than spec-formula racers. The Nurburgring 24 hour race is held on a still more legendary circuit and attracts a huge entry, but is largely an amateur affair. The clincher, for me, it was also the subject of the only ever decent movie about the sport, Steve McQueen's atmospheric Le Mans.

When the sport first got its hooks into me, Le Mans was an annual epic battle between the likes of Porsche, Mercedes, Jaguar and Nissan with their fantastic looking Group C prototypes. It featured the longest straight in motorsport and was perhaps the one event which still retained something of the spirit and the danger of an earlier era. I can well recall the Porsche/Jaguar fight of 1988, Mercedes win in the final year before they broke up the Mulsanne with chicanes, and Mazda’s shock win for its rotary engined 787 in 1991, ahead of all the fancied runners.

In recent years though, the race itself has not been especially interesting Since 2000 the fastest LMP1 category has been not so much a race as a day-long advert for Audi, save in the year they put a roof on the Audi R8 and called it a Bentley in order to generate a bit of publicity for a different part of the Volkswagen-Audi Group. The efforts of such as the well organised but underfunded Courage team, the big-bucks but hopeless GM Cadillacs or Don Panoz' team with its front engined LMP1s never looked to be a serious threat. Jan Lammers' Racing for Holland Dome-Judd was an outside bet for pole in its early days but never stood a chance against Audi over 24 hours. Last year, Peugeot joined the party with their diesel engined and daftly named 908 FAP HDI coupe (has nobody told the team that fap is a slang term for masturbation?) but they stood little chance of coming out ahead of the all-conquering Audis at their first attempt.

This year, though, things look a little different. The early rounds of the Le Mans Endurance Series have demonstrated that Peugeot now have a car which has edged ahead of Audi's older R10. Audi, with sportscar veterans Joest Racing in charge of their team, have decades of experience running in this category of racing to call upon, and by now near bullet-proof reliability to call on. It's a battle being played out according to the oldest plot in racing. Outright speed against solidity and experience. If you're an Aesop man, you'd back Audi's tortoise, but if you're more inclined to take the advice of legendary sportswriter Damon Runyon and remember that "the race is not always to the swift... but that's the way to bet" you might back the French team. They do have form after all - their 1993 victory remains the fastest achieved by anyone at Le Mans since they put those pesky chicanes on the Mulsanne straight. Who knows, maybe Jacques Villeneuve can follow in the footsteps of Graham Hill and win the F1 title, the Indy 500 and Le Mans.

Behind them, there's plenty else to keep the enthusiast interested. The class-within-a-class battle to be fastest petrol engined car, and first non-manufacturer entry, home looks equally intriguing. It will probably come down to a fight between Hugues De Chaunac's ORECA Courages and Henri Pescarolo's Pescarolo Judds. On driver line-up, you'd have to back ORECA. who have a very solid line up of French guys like Duval and Grand Prix winner Olivier Panis at the wheel, but it would be a fool who would write off the Dumas/Boullion/Collard Pescarolo. An interesting wild-card comes in the form of Czech businessman Antonin Charouz's Lola-Aston Martin coupe. The only petrol engined car to have threatened the diesels on pace, it probably won't go the distance but you never know.

One of the wonderful things about sportscar racing is the sheer variety of equipment on display. Japanese chassis builder Dome is running its own car for a trio of little known Japanese drivers. Desperately short of mileage, it is unlikely to figure, but it is the most beautiful machine on the grid, at least to my eye. The Epsilon Euskadi Judd runs it close, and a line-up of three former Grand Prix drivers in the second car- Johannson, Nakano and Gounon should get some pace out of it, although I'd be surprised if it was still running at the end.

Sadly. the most competitive LMP2 teams, all of which are based Stateside, are giving Le Mans a miss, as the ACO's rules, unlike those of the ALMS, give them no serious chance of mixing it with the Audis and Peugeots. A shame, as the Penske and Dyson Porsche Spyders, and the Acuras would certainly make a race of it. As it is, the Porsche Spyders of Team Essex and Verschuur are likely to emerge victorious, if only because their customer Porsches are most likely to run trouble-free for 24 hours.

GT1, on the other hand, is almost a mirror-image of the Audi/Peugeot battle for overall honours. Works Aston Martins and Corvettes go head to head and predicting a winner is far from straightforward. Both teams have well-sorted, competitive cars, and both have put together serious, professional driver line-ups. Me? I'm hoping that the Astons win, though I must confess this is mainly because they are painted up in the same Gulf colours as those awesome Porsche 917s of the early 1970s. There's some decent private Astons and Corvettes in the field too, although there's little chance of them winning unless the works cars race each other into the ground.

GT2 I can't summon up much enthusiasm about, though it can often end up the closest fought of all the categories. The cars are just too slow. It will be interesting to see whether Ferrari can finally break Porsche's dominance of the category though, as a mere trio of 911s go up against 7 Ferrari 430s, several of which boast all-professional driver line ups.

Now, I've just got to work out how I can get away from my desk for long enough to keep up with the action. As for making the trip to La Sarthe. Maybe next year..

Stranger than fiction

It's got action, drama, suspense and danger. In other words, it's got everything that a Hollywood scriptwriter is dreaming of. So why have films about motor racing been so uniformly awful?

I remember seeing the trailer for the Tom Cruise/Nicole Kidman NASCAR-fest, Days of Thunder as a 12 year old kid and thinking, even then, that it was all but guaranteed to be terrible. When I finally got round to watching it, years later, I must say that my suspicions proved to be on the money. Ridiculous, implausible 'racing action' melded together with an absurdly cliched love story so lacking in chemistry that it's frankly amazing that the lead actor and actress were actually married in real life. And that's leaving aside the question of how Kidman was supposed to be a 'top brain surgeon' at an age when most medical students would not yet be out of college.

OK, you might argue, Days of Thunder was a real rotten tomato of a film, but what about the others? The awful truth is, Days of Thunder is not even the worst example of the genre. More recently, we had the diabolical Driven. If 23 year old Nicole Kidman as a brain surgeon stretches credulity, a 55 year old Sylvester Stallone as a racing driver simply threw reality out of the window. The film was nominated for no less than 5 of Hollywood's ignominious Golden Raspberry awards (for worst screenplay, worst performance by a supporting actress, worst on-screen couple, worst picture and worst supporting actor - twice! in case you're wondering.) This after all, was meant to be the Grand Prix film that had Bernie Ecclestone's backing. Bernard, however, evidently knew enough about show business to spot a giant turkey when it came calling. and so the producers had to go running off to speak to the guys at Champ Car, who must have figured that any publicity is good publicity.

What of the rest? Talladega Nights, I am told, is a reasonably entertaining comedy if you like that sort of thing, but as someone with an abiding loathing of both Farrelly Brothers films and NASCAR, I've never actually seen it. Going back a few decades, John Frankenheimer's Grand Prix has achieved quite a reputation among motorsport fans of a certain age, though more for its innovative use of special effects than for the quality of the story or the acting. The film, which I have to admit I am not overly fond of, is a reasonable period piece, but as someone who grew up in the era of the onboard camera, the special effects have rather lost their sheen. That leaves a rather predictable plot, and one can't help noticing that at nearly 3 hours, this is a very long film, and it feels it.

To my mind, the best racing film ever made was Steve McQueen's vanity project, Le Mans. Unlike the movies mentioned above, it doesn't really even try to impose much of a plot on the event, and feels in places more like an art-house documentary about 70s sportscar racing than a Hollywood feature. The first half an hour or so features literally no dialogue. It was not especially successful at the box office. Steve McQueen may have been a major star, but the Le Mans 24 Hour race has never really meant all that much to the cinema-going public in the USA. The film is, by the way, quite possibly the origin of the famous quote "When you're racing, it's life. Anything that happens before or after...is just waiting" (it has been suggested that the line was stolen from something which Maurice Trintignant said). If you are at all interested in motor racing of the era. this is the one motorsports film I would recommend making time for.

So why don't they work? It's hard to say for sure, but I suspect that it is because they are essentially redundant. Name a really worthwhile sports movie? It's not easy. The problem is that there is very little that you can do in fiction that you can't do in real life. Why watch a film about Grand Prix racing when you can simply watch a Grand Prix? It is interesting that, just as there have been few successful films about motor racing - in fact, I'd say there has been precisely one - so there haven't really been many novels in which it features either. Years ago, as an impressionable 7 year old, I read Four Wheel Drift, a children's book set around Le Mans by Bruce Carter, but to be honest, I don't remember much about it. Some years later, I also read some of Bob Judd's F1 based novels, but found them far-fetched even in comparison to the kinds of thriller one typically finds at airports (Monza wasn't too bad, though).

As an aside, I'm currently participating in a rather hare-brained event by the name of National Novel Writing Month. Amongst other things, it's the reason this post is a day late. The idea is to write a 50,000 word novel in a month. It will, of course, be of awful quality, but the point is to write something from beginning to end. I've attempted it twice before, but have never got beyond the half way stage. This year, I thought I would have a go at writing a "Dick Francis on wheels" to steal a line Murray Walker used to describe Bob Judd's books. Its early days yet, but I feel if there is one thing I'm learning, it's why successful authors don't generally write fiction about sport...

POST SCRIPT: Anyone see Nigel Roebuck's Top 10 drivers of 2007 in Autosport this week? I was amused to see that his list featured exactly the same drivers as mine, and in a somewhat similar order to boot! Do think he rather overestimated Kubica though...

Grand Slams and Quadruple Crowns - Villeneuve Goes to Le Mans

So Jacques Villeneuve is going to Peugeot to race at Le Mans. After all the talk of his going to NASCAR, he has decided that his year will instead focus on June in La Sarthe. This is good news, I think, for the race itself. In recent years, topline rally drivers, Colin McRae and Sebastien Loeb, have turned their hand to the event and generated plenty of publicity for a race which, thanks to Volkswagen Audi Group's domination since the turn of the century, has not been at its most exciting. A formula one world champion though? Its been a while since a top line F1 driver has had a go at Le Mans. Plenty of drivers try Le Mans as junior drivers - Michael Schumacher raced for Mercedes there in 1990, Mark Webber did the same ten years later. Eddie Irvine came close to winning the event for Toyota in 1993 and 1994, and Johnny Herbert actually did win for Mazda in 1991. But bona fide F1 stars, guys with world championships to their name? To my memory, the last to appear on the entry list was Mario Andretti, back in 2000. By that time, he was 60 years old, and driving a Panoz, so there wasn't much chance of him achieving a great deal, but Le Mans was an itch he had tried to scratch several times before, never quite succeeding.

He first came to the race in 1983, paired with his young son Michael Andretti and equally precocious Frenchman Alliot. In a Porsche 956, they finished 3rd at their first attempt. Andretti would be back a few years later with his son Michael joined by brother John, attempting to win the race as a family. That time, they could only manage 6th overall. It would be late on in his career, once he had retired from the Champ Car World Series, that he would come closest to winning at Le Mans. In 1995, against a motley grid of hamstrung prototypes and GT cars, Andretti partnered Bob Wollek and Eric Helary to second place in a Courage C34 Porsche. Even allowing for the rain, which played into the hands of the Mclaren GT runners, the race ought to have been his for the taking, but an incident between Andretti and a rent-a-driver in a GT car lost them time and handed Mclaren its only Le Mans victory.

What is interesting is why Mario Andretti kept going back to Le Mans well into his 6th decade, and long after he had stopped racing in any other category. The answer: unfinished business. Andretti had the F1 world championship, and the Indy 500 to his name, and he very much wanted to add victory at Le Mans to his list of achievements - the motor racing equivalent of the Grand Slam. He never did achieve it, but it is this record which Jacques Villeneuve, Indy Car Champion and Indy 500 winner of 1995 and Formula 1 World Champion of 1997, is now chasing.

Only one driver has ever claimed all three: Graham Hill took the F1 world championship twice, in 1962 and 1968, was victorious in the Indy 500 in 1966 and paired up with French Le Mans expert Henri Pescarolo to win the 24hr race in 1972 in a Matra. Others have claimed victory in two of these events - Texan AJ Foyt won at Le Mans in 1967 and won the Indy 500 no less than four times, but never had any interest in Formula 1. Jim Clark won at Indy and had 2 F1 titles to his name, but never won Le Mans. Emerson Fittipaldi also claimed both the Indy 500 and the F1 title. Going further back, to a time when sportscar racing perhaps held more significance, Jochen Rindt and Mike Hawthorn were F1 champions who at Le Mans and American Phil Hill won the F1 title and took no less than 3 victories at Le Mans but, despite being born on the far side of the pond, to my knowledge never so much as started the Indy 500.

Comparisons with a Grand Slam of the major tennis or golf tournaments, though, are not entirely warranted. For a start, its absolutely clear that, in tennis, the four major championships are Wimbledon, Roland Garros, Flushing Meadows and the Australian Open. In Golf, there is perhaps ever so slightly more room for debate, but those who care about the sport (I do not) would list The Masters, the US Open, The British Open and the PGA Championship as the big four.

In motor racing, its all a bit more confusing. Its pretty clear that Le Mans is the biggest sports car race, but is winning Le Mans more important than a sportscar world title? Perhaps, given that the quality of the field at Le Mans has, throughout most of the last fifty years, been higher than that to be found in the sportscar championship as a whole. A driver can fit Le Mans around an F1 or Champ Car campaign, but couldn't do the whole Sportscar championship (and that's not forgetting that in some years there hasn't even been such a thing). More to the point, is winning the Indy 500 more of an achievement than winning the Indy Car Series? The race might mean more to the man on the street, but is one race really more important than a whole championship? How to rank Nigel Mansell's achievement - winning the F1 championship and the CART championship in consecutive years, but never (quite) winning at Indianapolis? Perhaps its better to forget the additional complications caused by the IRL/Champ Car split...

If Jacques Villeneuve wins Le Mans, his achievement will in fact be unique. He will become the first driver ever to claim the F1 championship, the Indy 500, the CART Championship and victory in Le Mans, a quadruple crown, if you like. Exactly what kind of achievement is this though? Every top tennis player might dream of winning the Grand Slam (or at least compete in all the Grand Slam events) but there have been great racing drivers who never showed much interest in any category outside their chosen specialism. Michael Schumacher never much liked Le Mans, and never showed the slightest interest in attempting the Indy 500. AJ Foyt was famously indifferent to Formula 1. Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost never tried their hand at either Le Mans or the Indy 500, feeling that F1 was the pinnacle of the sport and everything else a mere distraction (though Prost has had a successful second career as an ice-racer, of all things). The truth is, the great majority of drivers aren't much interested in chasing Graham Hill's triple crown, or any similar such achievement. And even if they were, increasing specialisation and the nature of driver contracts makes doing so very difficult.

In the end, the motor-racing grand slam is a more esoteric task - the kind of personal goal which some great drivers feel they must set themselves, but not the gold standard measure of success that it is in some other sports. After all, did not Mario Andretti have his own quadruple crown of sorts? He may never have won Le Mans, but he did have the Indy 500, the Indycar and F1 championships and the Daytona 500, the world's premier stock car race, to his name. And if its big races, rather than world championships, that count, maybe Juan Pablo Montoya might like to try to add that to his Monaco Grand Prix and Indy 500 victories. After all, neither Andretti nor Villeneuve ever won round the streets of Monte Carlo.

I've always liked the concept of the all-rounder, and I wish Villeneuve the best of luck in his efforts at Le Mans. He might need another year to pull it off, given that Peugeot are going up against the dominant Audi team, who have won 6 of the last 7 24 hour races. But maybe we're thinking too narrowly. Villeneuve won the F1 championship in a Renault powered Williams. Perhaps, if and when he's done with Le Mans and Peugeot, he'd like to have a word about a Monte Carlo rally campaign with Citroen?