Remembering Group C

Let's leave F1 alone for a week. I've nothing to add to the vast acres of coverage of the Renault 'race-fixing' scandal. The series of articles on the subject on Joe Saward's blog and last week's MPH column in Autosport together give a pretty good overview of the whole grubby affair. It appears that we have seen the back of Flavio Briatore. For me, he was always the personification of so much that is wrong with modern F1. His lack of any real interest in racing, his love of tawdry glamour, his willingness to do anything for a quick buck. I doubt he'll be missed.

The Renault team, though, has got a stay of execution - at least so long as chairman Carlos Ghosn doesn't decide that enough is enough. So there will still be two full manufacturer teams in the sport next year, assuming Toyota don't make a dash for the exit door, as is currently rumoured.

In the end, I'm still not convinced that Formula 1 really makes that much sense for major car makers. For the man on the street, it has always been first and foremost about the drivers, and not about the cars. Ferrari are a bit of a special case, and dyed-in-the-wool anoraks like me have our favourite teams, but most people are fans of Alonso, or Raikkonen, or Hamilton, not Toyota, BMW or Renault. In any case, the cars these days are so devoid of distinctive character, so visually alike, that it would be hard for most people to tell them apart were they painted uniform white, let alone decide upon a favourite.

The other weekend, I was catching up with my father, and he said that if he was to pick his absolute favourite experience of seeing motorsport trackside - he'd have to go with the opening laps of the 1990 British Empire Trophy, at Silverstone, the third round of that year's Group C Sports Car Championship. For me, it doesn't top the opening lap of the European Grand Prix at Donington - I was a huge Senna fan as a kid - but I was there with him and I can see what he means. The sight of the Sauber Mercedes and TWR Jaguars going doorhandle to doorhandle through Woodcote as if they were in a ten lap sprint rather than a 3 hour endurance race was quite something to behold.

It strikes me that this was the kind of series that made sense for motor manufacturers. For a start, it was all about the cars, rather than the drivers. Nobody really cared whether Mauro Baldi and Jochen Mass beat Alain Ferte and Andy Wallace. It was about Jaguar versus Porsche, versus Mercedes, versus the Japanese arrivistes, Mazda, Nissan and Toyota. And the cars were much more interesting than modern F1 cars. At the risk of oversimplifying massively, it was essentially a fuel-economy formula. Teams could run, within reason, whatever engine configuration they wanted, but simply running the biggest, most powerful block possible would leave the car running dry long before the race's end. As a result, there was huge variety in engines - Jaguar tried both stock-block 7 litre normally aspirated and 3 litre V6 turbo engines, Mercedes ran a 5 litre turbo, Aston Martin a 6 litre Callaway beast, while Toyota experimented with both 4 and 8 cylinder turbos. Mazda ploughed their own furrow with the distinctive, wailing 1.3l rotary engines which can still be found in their road cars.

It must also have counted for something that these cars were works of beauty, something that can be said of no modern F1 car. The Porsche 962 is a design classic, while the late 1980s series of Sauber Mercedes machines are to my mind perhaps the most visually arresting racing cars I've ever set eyes on. Worthy successors to the Silver Arrows of 1930s Grand Prix racing. Nissan and Aston Martin's efforts - the RC90 and the AMR1, also stand out, though somewhat heretically, I never much cared for

Group C racing never received the kind of coverage that F1 did - a short-ish entry in the back pages of the broadsheets, but little in the way of terrestrial TV coverage, save at Le Mans. It did, however, attract vastly greater crowds than sportscar racing manages to these days. People might not have been able to tell you who was at the wheel, but even casual racing fans would have known who won Le Mans - and even those who couldn't care less about motorsport might have recognised a TWR Jaguar XJR9. Not something one could say with confidence of the Aston Martin Lolas, Courage-AERs and ORECA-Aims that were fighting it out for the LMES series at Silverstone the other weekend. The lower profile of the series, in comparison to F1, probably helped play a part in keeping budgets sensible too. The potential rewards were smaller, and, while I have no way of knowing for sure, budgets probably reflected this. Certainly, a private team with the money to buy a Porsche 962 could, for many years, stand a chance of beating the works if they could buy in a couple of talented guys to drive it.

For a few years, Group C provided the purist racing fan with a fascinating, multi-dimensional contest fought out with exotic, mechanically interesting racing machinery. The drivers were very much a secondary consideration, but guys like Martin Brundle, Andy Wallace, Alain Ferte, Mauro Baldi and Bob Wollek certainly weren't slow. Oh, and there was that young German kid with the funny-shaped chin in one of the Sauber Mercedes. He didn't do bad...

It didn't last. The series went from having capacity grids and huge crowds in 1990, to struggling to put together a grid of 10 cars, to play to deserted venues, just two years later. There was no 1993 World Sportscar Championship. The death of Group C could probably be a whole article in itself. Was it simply a victim of the recession of the early 1990s? Of the growing media attention given to touring car racing? Or was it killed quite deliberately by the FIA and Bernie Ecclestone, who weren't keen on anything that looked like it might one day be a threat to F1. Certainly, in retrospect, the switch to F1-spec 3.5l normally aspirated engines was a bad move. But whether it was intended to kill the series, or whether it was simply a miscalculated attempt to provide a market for old F1 engines, is hard to say. Its our loss. Sports car racing has never been the same since. Every now and again, the LMES, or ALMS, looks like it might be on the up-swing, but it never quite works out. Probably now, with so many sports and activities competing for the public's attention, there will only ever be room for one high-profile racing series, and that will be Formula 1. But it's a shame, because in many ways, Group C racing personified so much of what F1 lacks.

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..

Night and Day

Thanks to the fantastic 2007 racing calendar over at Fastest Lap, I realised just in time to follow it, that, one week on from the Monte, the Endurance racing season kicked off this weekend in the rather milder climes of Florida.

I was speculating a couple of weeks ago on whether Jacques Villeneuve might equal Graham Hill's so far unique achievement of winning at Le Mans and Indy, as well as taking a Formula 1 World Championship. I was taking it as read that Le Mans is the world's premier 24 hour race, but the more I think about it, the less sure I really am.

It all rather depends on how one chooses to determine these things. If we're talking about the race with the longest, most illustrious history - the one that will be the most familiar to man on the street, then there's no doubt its Le Mans. If we're talking about the race with the fastest, most technically interesting, and in the case of the new Peugeot 908, damned beautiful cars, then, once again, Le Mans wins hands down. If, on the other hand, what you really care about is how open the race is - how many potential winners there are, and how many really first-rate drivers are in the field, then I'd say Daytona comes out comfortably ahead.

Let's face it, realistically, if you're not in a Peugeot or an Audi this year, you are not going to win Le Mans. Come to that, you're probably not going to win it if you're not in an Audi, and that has been the case for the last seven years or so. By contrast, it was rather more difficult to pick a winner from among the 28+ cars entered in the Grand-Am DP class at Daytona this year. One might well argue that the Chip Ganassi Riley-Lexuses would be where the smart money would go, but that would be to ignore an awful lot of other potential winners. Brumos or Michael Shank Racing could certainly have been winners with Riley-Porsches, Alex Job Racing , Howard Motorsports and Cheever Racing must be amongst those who were in with a shot with a Crawford, even if received wisdom has it that the Riley is the chassis to have at Daytona.

The DP cars themselves? Well they're not quite Spec-racers, but they aren't especially technically complex, and certainly calling them prototypes is something of an abuse of the word. Slightly odd looking little stubby things, with a rev-limited 500BHP, they are to my mind more than a little reminiscent of the old C2-class Tigas and Argos from sports car racing's second golden age in the 1980s. On the other hand, they're easy enough to drive that a competent amateur can go reasonably quickly in one, they have little enough downforce that they actually slide around a fair bit, and on a track like Daytona, they're actually quite a spectacle.

The overall quality of the driver line-up at this year's event was remarkably impressive too. From NASCAR came Jeff Gordon, Tony Stewart, Juan-Pablo Montoya, Jimmie Johnson and others. From IRL came Sam Hornish Jr, Tomas Scheckter, Helio Castroneves and Dan Wheldon, to name but a few, while Champ Car provided Paul Tracey and the recently departed AJ Allmendinger. Also on hand were a host of ex-F1 drivers, such as Max Papis, JJ Lehto, Jan Magnussen, Tomas Enge and Roberto Moreno. And that's not to mention the established sportscar pros, who were of course out in number - Andy Wallace, Wayne Taylor, Scott Pruett, Sascha Maassen and Butch Leitzinger, for instance.

The result was an Endurance race which was much more interesting, and much more of a genuine contest than Le Mans has been for many a year. Dan Gurney's eldest son, Alex, got the pole and led the early laps, before falling victim to an incident involving a backmarker Porsche. SunTrust racing's Max Angelelli was next to take up the baton. The Brumos Porsche took the fight to Ganassi and SAMAX for a while and as the hours ticked by, though many of the fancied runners fell by the wayside or encountered problems of one kind or another, there was two way fight right to the end. The Ganassi Riley-Lexus of Montoya, Salvador Duran and Scott Pruett traded places throughout the second half of the race with the SAMAX Riley-Pontiac of Patrick Carpentier, Darren Manning, Ryan Dalziel and Milka Duno. In the end, the Ganassi car came out ahead after 24 hours - but by only just over a minute. A small enough margin, that might have been even closer had the SAMAX car had 4 real first rate drivers, as Duno was never on the pace of the other 3. For Montoya, and for fans of esoteric records, there was the added bonus of becoming the first driver ever to win the Monaco Grand Prix, the Indy 500 and the Daytona 24 hours. Who knows, he might even add the Daytona 500 when he comes back in February, although its probably a little too early for that.

So, a good start to the road racing season in the US then. How many 24 hour races have been decided by such small margins? The favourite might have won, but it wasn't half a race. Let's hope its a portent of things to come this season.

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?