Any Le Mans Drivers/Owners on F-Chat?

Mark please keep the stories coming as they are truly fantastic. I suppose that I should mention that it is my lifelong ambition to compete at both LeMans and Daytona. It is what gives me motivation and what has me make sense of my days. Your stories are truly an inspiration.

 

Mark,

I am very impressed with your racing stories and experience. I would like you to know that I followed much of your career as a kid as well as the haywoods, Millens, O'connells and Dales (Jeremy Dale not the 3 or 8) of the day. Much of the reason why I got into racing was watching and reading about drivers like you. Not that it was a complete underdog but the Mazda 787-B is much if not all of the reason why I built an RX-7 to go club racing with here in the US.

It may sound corny but thanks for inspiring a poor kid from NH to work hard and make some dreams come true.

These are some pics of what determination can inspiration can provide.
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Probably the kind of "fan" that also liked the top of the Mulsanne bump to be skimmed off on behalf of Mr. Nobby Haug because they couldn't fix the aerodynamics on their cars...

 

Uh... Les Hunaudieres straight... Mulsanne is the right turn at the end of the Hunaudieres straight...


Oddly enough I see a lot of people calling it the Mulsanne straight. Does it sound better?

 

Great stuff, Mark. Thoroughly enjoyable.

 

Ha! interesting, learn something everyday. Wonder why its so known as Mulsanne? Easier for us yanks to pronounce?

 

Could be but also the bulk of Dutch Le Mans fans keep calling it Mulsanne... I believe that I even heard one tv commentator call is Mulsanne... but then again... what does he know?

I guess mulsanne straight sticks better.

 

I knew the hairpin at the end was Mulsanne but I assumed the straightaway was too... Well, it's easier to say than Les Hunaudieres

 

Hi Aprilla Fan,
I know Hurley, Steve, Johnny and I was in Atlanta when Jeremy got into Fabrizzi's 333 in turn 12 and ended both of their racing careers. I think we have all seen that terrible in-car video. That was also the same race where Steve Millen go into the Ferrari 333 in the back kink (when it was still there) and wore his halo for 6 months which Steve has never been back professionally. He does still compete in some international historic races however in his Nissan 300 ZX TT. Of all the races I have been involved in. this was the worst of the worst. It was my first year in IMSA and to see 3 of the best drivers in the world go down was something I hope to never see again.
BTW, I was working with Team Peru and Eduardo Dibos at the time, I'm sure you remember them as a Mazda fan...

 

Hi Joe,

Yes I am very familiar with Eduaro and the #4 RX-7 Team Peru efforts. I also followed Peter Farrell and Jim Downing. I lived in Alpharetta Ga. for a while and used to stop in at Jim Downings place from time to time.

I would have loved to taken the next step from an SCCA driver to IMSA / ALMS driver. Sadly though, that takes a lot of $$$. In an effort to save some $$ I jumped ship to m/c racing. I love it! Don't get me wrong its still very expensive but 2 tires versus 4 tires every weekend is sooooo much nicer on the wallet. Plus there is something to be said about scraping your knee on the pavement at 100 mph.

Like I said to Mark, thanks for giving me something to shoot for. I have had (in my eyes) a very successful racing career.

The pic of my "7" is in"mid-transition" from street car to race car. (the only one I have on this PC) I had a lot of help for the finished ITS product from Collin Bennett who was a former Lotus F-1 mechanic and was working full time as Mike Amalfitanos mechanic. I dunno if you are familiar with mike but he has a hell of a vintage Porsche and Ferrari collection.

As a fan watching on TV, I can remember the incident between Dale and Fabrizzi. Being a die hard tifosi I was pi$$ed that he took out a 333. He used to make that olds scream though.

Personally in my racing career (no where near the level of many of the folks on here, including yourself.) Between Sports cars and bikes I've gotten to race some great tracks. LimeRock, Daytona, Road Atlanta, Mid-Ohio, Talledega GP, Jennings, Kershaw, Beaver Run, Pocono, Bridgehampton (my FAV!!) and many others. NHIS, my home track, is a great track to learn on. It is so technical and tight that if you can drive fast there, you can go anywhere else and be VERY competitive.

I know I am not the fastest guy out there in many cases, (in some cases I have been) ultimately, I try very hard to garner the respect of my fellow racers by racing clean and using my head (and mirrors when I have them).

As an adult its nice to say this: thanks for being a roll model.

Scott

 

Kram:
That was an awesome read. feel free to spew more stories like that. You have very good writing skills. My nose was about an inch from the screen of my laptop!

 

Wax, your post was intriguing, so I searched a bit also. I've never met Roland, except for in passing at last year's Rampage.

I don't see anywhere that Roland himself says he was at LeMans, as a racer, owner, etc. When you look at http://www.sportcarschool.com/about.html he doesn't say anything about LeMans.

Where did the 2 time LeMans Champion come from?

 

Even to this day, most motor racing sanctions have allowed drivers to compete under pseudonyms. Could very well be the case with Roland, but under what name? Michael Hunt? Johnny Lickalottapuss? Derek Bell?

 

My bet would be "Mario Andretti" but DARN... Andretti never won Le Mans, let alone win it twice... ;-)

 

Another bet that I won't enter... "Roland won his F40 LM in the lottery"... TWICE!

 

Jack, you’re right!

True confessions: I can’t spell the Hundderners, er ..... Hamdammers, oh gosh, the Jam sambers straight, and neither can the spellwell of this computer.

Worse than that I was so far off Google couldn’t help.

Until I read your post!

Thank you (and sorry)!

 

Scott,
Many thanks for your kind words, only no one ever heard of me. My mother never heard of me, hell, I’ve never heard of me! But thanks anyway...
The pictures of you look great - I’m a knee down man myself, I love it.

Would Colin Bennett who helped sort out your Mazda be a rotund individual with a red face, thick glasses and a great sense of humor backed by a rapid delivery? If so, it would quite a coincidence. Back in the day the Colin Bennett I’m thinking of (ex-Lotus, knew Chapman, helped build his Indy cars) owned a race preparation team near Chester with the unsurprising name of Colin Bennett Racing. I drove a few of the cars he prepared over the years, such as an Ibec (don't ask), an '86 March 3000 and - ironically the ‘82 Dome at my first Le Mans.

So there you go.......

 

I have to tell you that the Mulsanne takes on a whole new meaning in the rain. 2001 it rained so hard right at the start of the race and rained the whole time we were in the race. Our driver, Cort Wagner was in the car and he could barely see anything, much less the turn-in for the chicanes. What made matters so much worse was the Bentley going by at speed and the aero would put up a 30' wall of water in front of us making visibility 0! Now where was that turn-in? It was quite a night!
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Mark,

That would be the one and only Colin. Sharp delivery of a perfect..."Un-Fookin-beliveable". Yes he certainly did have a F-3000 team and had a young upstart driver by the name of Damon Hill drive for his team. A magnificent technician and stories that will keep you rolling for hours.

As my 7 evolved from street to track there was a brief time that it served double duty as a fun summer car / track car. As an arrogant 21-22 year old my license plate read FLUBYU. He was helping me with some alignment and geometry work on the car when Colin, standing at the rear of the car, pushes his glasses up a bit and says, "FLU-BY-U huh? Slowest Fookin car in here and you've got FLU-BY-U." keep in mind I was sharing space with a 917K, 2 908's an Arrows Footwork Ex-Alboreto F-1 car, an F-40, a 962 and a Chevron B-19 (which Collin literally mounted to the wall of the shop) I stood up from the right front tire of the car and looked around for a quick second, fully appreciating the company my car was keeping. Dumbfounded and not knowing what to say we looked at each other and both busted out laughing.

The last I saw of him he was packing his stuff and moving back to England. I believe Eddie Jordan had a job lined up for him on his team.

The fact that we as racers run in small circles is part of the reason why I love the sport so much.

Thanks for the compliments on the pics. Racing bikes has made me that much better of a car racer. When I get the chance to do an occasional track day in a car, things seem to moveso much slower in comparison. If you ever get the chance to race Daytona on a bike. DO IT! That is by far the sickest experience I have had on a bike. (new configuration included.)

Great stuff all around!

 

Le Mans
June 1986

Mazda had contacted me over the winter and asked me to drive their new 757 at Le Mans.

This wasn’t a bolt out of the blue, in fact it was something I had been angling for. They were a good team, they paid top dollar, and I knew their lead driver, David Kennedy, indeed he had helped me with advice when I was starting out.

(David, who had done everything including some F1, was the T.V. commentator of a Formula Ford race I was driving in - very early days. “It looks like...... and yes! We have a new leader who is.... Oh! No, we don’t..... And that was my claim to fame, piling the car up on national T.V. , it was also how I met David.)

Mazda had seen me fight it out with David when I was with ADA at a Silverstone 6 Hour, the two of us running nose - to tail for the best part of an hour, each lap slightly quicker as our fuel load shrank, every lap under our respective qualifying times. Fortunately it was his nose and my tail, for at Becketts we came across a Porsche 956, out of the pits and on cold tires. The Porsche spun, looping across the track; I just made it through the gap and David had to drive all over the place to miss him, leaving the Mazda a dot in my mirror by the time he had recovered. So based on that, his recommendation and the Spice result, Mazda gave me a job.
The team tested the cars at Castle Donnington, more for everybody to get to work together than to set up the cars.
We took off from Silverstone the Sunday before the race, which for me wasn’t easy. There was a race on the Club circuit that day, but it was running late, so I had to leave my car after qualifying and walk away from a slot on the second row of the grid. Arrgh!

Silverstone had been the home of a bomber squadron during the war, and the runway which had once felt the bump and bounce of heavy Boeings was still operational, but only just, and only for pre-booked light aircraft. Our plane was a twin engined Beach that was piloted by a delightfull old boy in a blazer and school tie by the name of George Webb.
George had been in the Battle of Britain and still flew in a slightly twitchy way, starboard wing down and hunting between trim and horizon, as though the shaky straight-and-level would make it harder for any ME 109's still lurking over France to bounce him from out from the sun. The flight was eventful in that David tried to take up where the Luftwaffe had failed all those years before. It had started innocently enough with David bringing a can of Fanta and a bag of potato chips on board. When thirst called, some where over Deauville, he set about opening the drink, only to realize that the pop it might make when the seal was broken would put George in a spin, perhaps literally. David leaned forward and showed the can to George before pulling the tab and offering him a swig; George, thinking of other things, kept the drink. David was now left with a bag of salt-and-onion chips and a thirst, so he decided on revenge: He put the bag on his knees and drew his hands back for the clap that would burst the altitude-stretched plastic and make George jump and spill the Fanta over his lap. It looked to me like the bang would probably give the old boy a coronary, and as the other set of controls were being manned by Nigel Stroud who had exactly one hour on gliders, I snatched the bag away just as he slammed his hands together. It ended up with the two of us wrestling for control of the chips, grappling and lurching from empty seat to seat down to the tail of the airplane. As our weight shifted the aircraft would go out of trim, and George would find himself all over the sky. Oblivious of the cause, he took to fooling with the engines and trim wheel in a vain effort balance the craft and effect a cure. In the end the bag of chips was ripped open with teeth and thrown under a seat, and so we flew on, David looking like Oliver Twist with an empty bowl.
Unfortunately the team had moved out of a broken down but charming chateau and into an Ibis hotel, so there went all hope of good French food and country air. Still the cars were superb! Nigel had done a wonderful job designing them, and I can honestly say that they were the best handling endurance racers that I ever drove. The rotary engines were very strange at first, for they had a flat torque curve and would pull from 800 r.p.m. all the way up to 13,000, and additionally had no fly wheel effect. If the car had a flaw it was in mating the engine to a Porsche synchromesh gearbox, for while the box was very slow the motor was very free and the combination would need care were it to last the race.
Working for a large Japanese concern was quite an eye opener and there were a few cultural clashes even with the best of intentions. The car had been designed and finished, and it was up to us to just get in and drive it. The process of dialing the chassis in for the conditions was viewed as slightly heretical by Japanese management, and perhaps a comment that the construction had not been well done or that the engineers had botched their job. David, Pierre Dieudonne and I (as well as Nigel, the car’s designer), saw it differently, for to us a car was akin to a radio - useless unless dialed in. In the end we got our way while they were seen to get theirs; we all stood round in a circle and when the correction spring/gear ratio option was called out we all shouted "HI" to endorse it - and to politically cover ass should someone have messed up, for this way no ONE made the decision, thus no ONE was at fault. Very strange. To accommodate our foreign ways we were fitted up with a foreign crew chief. He was a Korean called Kio, at least he was viewed as Korean for had to register as such, although his parents and grand parents had been born in Japan. Thank heavens his English was quite good, so we didn't have to resort to a stick in the sand to communicate our deepest thoughts on the shock absorber rebound settings. What ever adjustment we put on our car was immediately transferred to the Japanese driven car, a situation I viewed as complementary. Finally, we were informed at the team briefing that the Japanese car would out qualify us and that David would be the fastest driver amongst us. That I could understand; they were a Japanese company and their boys needed to show the folks back home the native drivers were world class, and as for David being head of the queue, well, other than hubris there is little reason for three grown men to flog the car when a controlled effort by one will put it on the same place on the grid. He was also a hell of a good driver, and for that matter, so was Pierre.
Once sorted out and on the track the Mazda 757 was a great car, much better than the Spice (now a Pontiac Spice) and a world better than all the other endurance racers I had raced at Silverstone or Brands. It had a fuel flow computer (a real ‘wow’ back then) and a Stack RPM counter, which had sufficient digital memory to ensure that any over rev would be noticed by management.

I asked Kio to run me through some on-track repair techniques, and he obligingly went with me to one of the uncovered cars. The motor was like a small dust bin bolted to a large gearbox with the whole lot mounted as far down as it could go. It looked tiny compared to any piston engine I’d raced, sort of like a golf-cart joke.
“You will never see this during the race,” Kio confidently predicted.
“Well, I’m sure you’re right, but things sometimes break,” I countered.
“You do not understand. The rear engine cover is too heavy for one person to remove. No matter what happens to you on the circuit, you will never see the motor during the race.”

At the start David did a great job, hacking through all sorts of traffic, and then it was my turn. The fear I had felt when I had first climbed into the Dome had to turned into a concern by the time I drove the Spice. Now that it was my third year at Le Mans and the car was this good the race had turned into a fun job I really enjoyed, hard work, but good work.

You can tell a lot about a car when at 200 mph you use it to slipstream something else, preferably something else that is as big as a house. When you first tuck in behind the other fellow all you can see is the back end of his car, and that close up it’s pretty ugly. At the same time your machine starts to fly, because now the motor isn’t fighting with the air, it’s overcoming rolling resistance and little else. You get pulled along, both of you accelerating, until you get to your top RPM limit, at which point you have to lift to prevent damage to the engine. The car in front then starts to pull away, and suddenly you can see bits of the armco and grass out of the sides of the windscreen and you know where you are. An instant later you start to feel the shock wave as the air he is displacing closes back together. Up until now it was doing so behind your car, now the pressure point is moving, first over your rear wing and then, as he pulls away, towards the front of the car. This is where things get tricky, for now your car’s center of aerodynamic pressure is completely different from its center of gravity. In more practical terms your rear wing is working very hard and your front lip, which is still getting a free ride, is doing very little. You have to watch it, otherwise the car will pendulum and then and very bad things will happen, but it’s a short watch because now that your free ride is leaving your motor starts to feel the load. You’ve anticipated that and have already floored it, but by now that won’t make you go any faster. As the engine picks up load so the wave of closing air carries on moving to the front of the car, jostling the mirrors and shaking the bodywork in ways the wind tunnel didn’t predict. Suddenly you’re back on you own and the faster car is pulling away as though he has just changed gear, and then he too hits his top speed and the rate of acceleration is shrinks until he is no longer running from you, just slowly walking away.

The race its self was a disappointment with the cars breaking down well before things got tense. The Japanese car called it a day when the gearbox input shaft snapped at about five thirty in the afternoon. The same fate befell us when Pierre was driving at about three thirty in the morning. I was sleeping in the driver’s caravan when I heard the door open and saw him walk in, the instant I woke I knew it was over for all three drivers cannot be simultaneously in the same room if things are going well.

A couple of months later I read the metallurgical report and saw the failure had been caused by a flawed heat treatment process that had embrittled the shaft and not, as intended, given it with a extra measure of flexibility.

The weird thing was that it didn’t really bother me because my perspective had changed so much.


The problem now was that single seaters I had used to get a license for Le Mans were so seductive I had fallen for their charms. In ‘86 I had driven in British F3 and had somehow found a fastest lap at Thruxton, a third at Brands and a second at Silverstone; Damon Hill and I tied for X place in the championship (can’t remember!) The Monaco race was by invitation only, and the boys down there had thought to invite me, and it had been great. The F3 win was just around the corner, or so I felt, and this was in spite of the grids size, which was now huge, with thirty plus cars showing up to most meetings (when Senna, who I must say was the most gifted driver I ever saw, had won the British F3 Series, a win that had earned him a seat in F1, some meetings had produced FIVE cars. You couldn’t finish sixth if you tried!). Furthermore the nine or ten major villains I had been banging wheels with in FF 2000 were now in F3 - and they had brought their friends with them too (Gachot, Hill, Cheever, and blow-ins, like Simpson and Von Kowien, Heussman, (SP?) Harrington - and more).

In a moment of lucidity I saw that I had gone from wanting to get into the party to wanting it to be my party, and that wasn’t realistic - I didn’t have the talent. I decided to do it for one more year, and either get the offer I couldn’t refuse or get on with my life and do all the other things that had gone on hold since I had first rubbernecked at Le Mans in ‘81.

 

Very cool thread and Kram, reading your posts is a delight.

Not to sidetrack this, but what is the year round (not during the 24 heures) status of Le Mans? Parts of it are open roads, so can anybody drive on those bits? Is there a racing school? I know there is the big 24 hours track and then there is the smaller Bugatti track. I'm wondering about the big one.

Reading Kram's posts made me think about going there one day when there isn't a race and see how far I get with a rental car. I did that once at Spa before it got all private and it was fun.

 

Another outstanding post. I soo look forward to the next installment.

 

Great stuff! You made my Christmas weekend. It makes me miss working on and around race cars.