Jox Jottings - Le Mans - The Aftermath

It was an excellent year for the actual job we were there to do, but as far as virtually everything else, it was the most glorious shambles you could possibly imagine. Le Grand Fromage melted the Volvo on the way down, Lennart destroyed the clutch on his back-up roller skate (having fallen at the first in his Espace), Adam had dropped his camera and was awaiting parts to be shipped in from USA by courier while trying and failing to sell his house and wrestling with his poorly wife Jenn, Claude was so distracted by domestic problems of Global magnitude back home, he backed his Lancia into this writer’s Porsche with some enthusiasm, Dave D has big (and I mean big) lens, that acts as an extension to his ego, it simply stopped working, (this meant that simply standing on a step ladder in Paris and taking race pictures from there, he had to go trackside with the hoi polloi; USA Tim got food poisoning (he was left on his own and his French is sufficiently mysterious that he could have ordered almost anything by mistake); By now we had nicknamed our beloved ‘Grand Fromage’ … he was now known as ‘Lucky’ Dave. His next crisis was a call from the credit card people asking, politely, how was able to use his debit card in France and his credit card in UK at the same time… theft of card from home? Cloning? In some ways it good to hear that it had been cloned … then your friendly Smug Bastard drew the short straw… Lucky Dave needed a lift back to UK. So SB,, who had, all in all, emerged pretty well emotionally unscathed despite his battered Porsche found he had a puncture … to cut a long story short it resulted in a very boring journey home at no more than 128 km/h. At 129 km/h all hell broke loose and tooth loosening vibration set it !! But enough of our worried what might you ask was the racing all about?

As usual all but one of the drunken ill-informed predictions your ‘expert’ team made were wrong! We reckoned the fragile, non race tested,(except Sebring where one scraped home) new technology Audi were up against Pescarolos well oiled, well refined, well organised team and Audi wouldn’t win.. wrong. LM P2 we all hoped that Mike Newton in the Lola AER would pull it off, nice guys, great team (RML are pretty good we reckoned!), he did. LM GT1 we all went for Aston Martin but also admitted later that this was all emotional clap-trap and deep down we knew the Corvettes would do their usual ‘we didn’t bother to try in testing or get the cars wet in qualifying because we couldn’t be bothered’… OK so they cleaned up! In LM GT2 we had reckoned that the Ferrari would take the fight to Porsches, the Panoz had been a bit lucky at Sebring, so the Porsches would come home first as usual. OK so the Ferrari had the pace but that rear wheel jamming ruined it for them… Porsches did not purr round in their traditional manner, drive shafts, gearboxes etc all played up. So well done Panoz you fooled us all!

In LM P1 two things began to become obvious. Firstly the Audis were much quicker than anybody expected, so the thought that their speed deficit would be cancelled out by their lack of pit stops was wrong. Also, until one sees the final analysis, they didn’t seem to have a much of an edge on fuel consumption. It soon became clear that the Pescarolos simply were not fast enough. It is always good to see Jan Lammers in the fight and the Dome was plenty quick enough to scare the grown ups and before going out with an accident it was running as high as 3rd . Incidentally we think that Audi were out to break the distance record for the race. At the time of writing it seems they might succeeded of with 380 laps completed they covered a mere 5187 km! That is roughly Calais to Barcelona and back twice in 24 hours at an average speed of about 215 km/h! Not having that statistics to hand we may be wrong.

In LM P2 we had reckoned that the No.25 RML Lola AER would be a star, if it held together. It did and won its class by 17 laps. Only six of the twelve LM P2 cars saw the chequered flag. The nearest anybody got to a moment of suicidal depression was the No.33 Intersport Racing Lola AER . It stuttered and appeared to die with three minutes of the flag! Thankfully it staggered over the line and classified as a finisher.

LM GT1 saw the Astons in pretty impressive shape. Fast, efficient and with a star driver line up they were looking good. But a clutch failure took the lead car out of the equation, the other car suffered from some full on curb thumping at hands of Darren Turner and the No.64 Corvette Racing C6-R eased painlessly into the lead. These LM GT1 cars are getting very rapid and reliable. Bearing in mind it was a hot dry race, with very few safety car interventions, it was possibly the first time a road car based GT1 car had finished as high as 4th. People had had a bit of a laugh when Ortelli wondered if a GT1 car could win outright. If it had rained ….. who knows!

Don Panoz was very probably a happy man on Sunday evening! Never one to be pessimistic we doubt even Don really believed he could see off nine Porsches and take the class win! But the No.81 Team LNT Panoz Esperante with its all British team of drivers, Tom Kimber-Smith, Richard Dean and Lawrence Tomlinson went and pulled it off! But the No.83 Seikel Motorsport Porsche 911 GT3 RSR, the car that had got into testing at last minute, cobbled together a single race car from parts that belonged to a couple of others and they nearly pulled it off. They lost time with a broken gearshift and it was too late to get it back. The other comparative minnows were No.87 Scuderia Ecosse Ferrari 430 GT team they are a pretty hot team but an irrevocably jammed rear wheel that somehow welded up the nut etc left them stuck in the garage for an eternity.

The baptism of fire award should possibly go to ‘Young’ Ed Morris. After the seemingly impossible step from UK Ginetta Championship to No.35 G-Force Racing Courage Judd ( a mere 540 bhp/475 Nm torque full on LM P1 car!!) Ed then discovered the thrills and spills of regular one lap outings during the race and eventually retirement, while they tried to sort out electrical gremlins that cut the engine out a 9,000 rpm!. We suspect that ‘not so young next year’ Ed will be back. Watch out for him he is calm, personably and very rapid young man.

So, to summarise … it was a good one … Audi .v. Pescarolo, diesel.v.petrol ; then RML .v. the rest; then Aston Martin .v. Corvette, UK heavy metal.v. Yankee heavy metal; Finally Porsche .v. Rest!

The weather was pretty hot, the humidity higher than this big fat, bald smug bastard enjoys. 235,000 people, a record apparently.. more noisy Danes than you could imagine, they made the Brits seem quite well behaved!

Your CA guys had the most extraordinary year. Roll on the Classics… as Arnie said

“ I’ll be back …”

Jock Simpson