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..

A Muddled Formula

The other week, I was clearing through my things when I came across some photos I had taken as a kid at Donington Park at a World Sportscar Championship round, some time in the late eighties or early nineties. Aside from the awfulness of the photos (I want a Nikon D80, but there's a lot to be said for my Fuji S9000 when set against an old Miranda ME-Z), there were a couple of other things that struck me. The first thing was that those old Group C cars really were incredibly good looking machines. They were perhaps the last serious racing machines to be truly aesthetically wonderful. The Sauber-Mercedes 'silver arrows' are to my mind, perhaps as close as we'll ever come to the platonic ideal of a racing car.

The other thing that hit me was that the photos clearly show that there was a really big crowd there that day. It was no one-off either, I remember pictures in Autosport from the Brands Hatch sportscar race showing the spectator bank at Paddock Hill Bend absolutely thronged with people. Yes, this may come as a surprise to younger readers, but there was a time, not so very long ago, nwhen sportscar racing was very big indeed, particularly in Europe.

How things have changed. I happened to catch TV coverage of this year's Silverstone Empire Trophy 1000kms LMS race the other weekend, and whatever else there might have been, crowds of people there certainly were not. A few faces dotted the perimeter fence and the grandstands, but here was Britain's premier sportscar event, and I'd be surprised if there had been much more than a thousand paying spectators in total - a small fraction of what a typical British Touring Car race brings in.

It's not hard to see why. The race itself was a foregone conclusion. If the oddly named Peugeot 908 HDi FAPs kept running, they would win. As it happened, only one of them did make it to the end - the other falling foul of overly fussy rules about running with damaged bodywork. But who were they racing against, exactly? Peugeot is a major car manufacturer with past experience at the top level in F1 and World Rally and yet only once a year, at Le Mans, do they come up against anything remotely resembling opposition, when Audi brings out its R10 diesels.

The rest of the time, they do the European series while Audi does the ALMS. Behind them are a series of rich, enthusiastic amateurs in 'off the shelf' prototypes. The quickest of these, the Charouz Racing Lola, was 3s off the pace of the Peugeots in qualifying, and a good deal more fragile to boot. The truth of the matter is that in reality, there are not four but five categories, LMP1, LMP2, GT1, GT2, and an invitation class for the French car maker's diesels. Its a situation aggravated still further by rules which tilt in favour of diesel power plants, which remain unavailable to the privateers who make up the bulk of the field.

So why were things so different in the 1980s? Two words. The Porsche 956/62. Sure, in a way, things weren't so different. The Rothmans-backed works cars were usually the quickest around, at least in the years before TWR and Sauber got their act together, but it wasn't always that way. The Porsche 956/62 was that rarest of things - a genuinely effective first rate turn-key racing car. In addition to the works cars, the factory sold chassis to pretty well anyone with the cash to buy one, and any reasonably adept racing team with a pair of quality drivers could run at a competitive pace.

The proof of this lies in the fact that customer teams like John Fitzpatrick, Brun, Joest and RLR/GTI Engineering were on occasion capable of beating the works in a straight fight. In fact, had many of the cars not been crewed by pay-drivers, teams like Kremer and Obermaier racing might have been in a position to offer a serious threat as well. Two examples stand out in particular. Joest's 1985 victory at Le Mans, ahead of the works team, where they simply out-paced the factory team was perhaps key to their later being charged with the job of running the works cars; And Walter Brun's out-of-the-blue performance at the same race five years later. Many remember the crushing disappointment of pay-driver Jesus Pareja when his Brun 962 expired just minutes from the end of the 24hr race, while running second. Not so many recall that, but for an electrical problem in the early morning, two wealthy businessmen in an outmoded car would have been vying with the leading works Jaguar for outright victory!

Indeed, the decline of the world sports car championship could be said to have been down, in no small part, to the fact that the Porsche 962 slowly became simply too old and outmoded to enable the private teams to compete. Ultimately, the 3.5l era arrived and the cars were simply outlawed. Lola and Euroracing had a go at creating a customer prototype for the atmo era, but it was never cheap or reliable enough, and the attempt failed (beautiful car though, the T92/10, and there's an interesting story or two for another time...)

In a nutshell, the problem is that creating a reliable, high performance turn-key sports car that is simple enough for a private team to run competitively is really not easy. And the current kings of sportscar racing don't seem much inclined to try. Audi would never let customers buy their R8s, only borrow them, and they were forbidden from making any modifications. As for Peugeot, their 908 is simply not yet a sufficiently reliable car to go around hawking to customer teams, even if they were inclined to allow it.

The result is that most teams are reliant on cars built by relatively small concerns, such as Zytek, Courage and Pescarolo. These cars aren't bad, but they simply don't run trouble-free in the way that Audi's R8 used to (and to a large extent, its R10 still does). Neither are these cars quick enough to compete with the works Peugeots, although how much of that is down to rules which have simply handed things to the diesels on a plate is hard to determine. The lack of any true contest (at Silverstone, even the Peugeots were clearly not actually racing each other) is serving to drive all but the most dedicated of fans away. Without spectators or a public profile, the big sponsors will stay away, and without their money, teams are almost entirely reliant on money from wealthy older gentleman-racers to fund operations. On occasion, a professional is brought in to partner these guys, but that so often merely results in the frustrating thought that if only the car were driven entirely by people who knew what they were doing, it might be competitive.

There's nothing particularly wrong with a racing category aimed at rich amateurs with interesting machinery but a) Shouldn't the premier sportscar category be aiming a little higher? and b) If that is the road we are going down, why are Peugeot being allowed to come in and rain on everyone's parade?

Now those of you who are keen on your sportscar racing (and I count myself amongst you on a good day, else I wouldn't bother writing this), there is the argument that while European sportscar racing is a bit of a mess, the ALMS has been providing really rather close racing. You'd be right, but its been achieved only by messing around with the rules so as to create an artificially close contest between two categories of car which should not be in direct competition - the Audi R10s in LMP1, and the Porsche Spyders (and to a lesser extent, the Acuras) in LMP2. Had that not been the case, I rather doubt that even Penske would have been within a country mile of the Audis. And remove Penske and Audi from the mix, and the ALMS actually looks a good bit more sparse than the LMES. The moribund GT1 category is a case in point. So, come on, Audi and Peugeot. Race each other or take your toys away and let somebody else play...

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?