A Class win, followed by an unexpected setback

Now and again my blog posts carry personal news rather than deep race analysis or my ponderings on the state of the world of motor-racing, and this is going to be such an article (eventually). Originally, I was thinking of how to share with you all the sense of achievement of a 992 class win in the Barcelona 24 hours, but then events took a somewhat unexpected turn.

I may be getting ahead of myself though. Regular readers may know that I have been helping out in the Red Camel Racing garage this year, assisting with tactical and strategy decisions during the Creventic 24H Series races. It hasn’t been a great season for us – starting with a disastrous broken engine in Dubai, followed by a distant second place at Mugello and disappointment at Spa and Monza with various issues providing only slim pickings in terms of championship points. The Estoril round was better, with a class win in the Qualifying Race followed by a second place in the 12-hour encounter providing evidence that we were able to challenge at the front of the 992 field.

The team arrived at the Circuit de Catalunya with high hopes – despite one of the strongest fields of the season so far. The Red Camel team consists of the family driving talents of Ivo Breukers, his two sons Rik and Luc, and the Swiss driver Fabian Danz, who regularly joins the squad for the longer races. I have explained in previous articles how our crew is made up of part-timers, none of whom is a qualified racing mechanic, but each of whom is filled with enthusiasm to show what can be done against far more experienced – and better-funded – rivals. Against such strong opposition as we had at Barcelona – from Willi Motorsport (Ebimotors), Red Ant, Duwo and HRT – mixing with the leaders would be a question of being quick in the pits as well as on the track.

To this end, the crew spent their evenings leading up to the race at Red Camel’s workshop practicing pit stops, and eventually getting the time for a change of brake discs down to just 70 seconds – at least in the quiet of the ‘practice pit lane’ in front of the shop!

The team arrived at the circuit on the Wednesday before the race, in order to participate in the “Track Day” session – establishing that the car was well set up for the race and the drivers were comfortable with it.

The Unofficial Private Tests on Thursday passed uneventfully, our best lap being half-a-second slower than the fastest 992 time, but we were very aware that the competition from Willi and Red Ant both had crews of all “Semi-Pro” drivers, whereas we had two “Am” drivers on our driving strength.

Friday was spent trying to optimise the set-up, but this meant heading down a couple of blind alleys, which was not helped by the arrival of rain either. The rain intensified for our qualifying session, with the result that only the first session (which had to be done by the “Am” driver) counted. Fabian Danz did a great job for us, but of course Red Ant had the benefit of being able to use a Semi-Pro, and promptly slotted their 992 on the overall front row of the grid!

We consoled ourselves with the usual platitudes – it’s a long race, grid positions are not important for a 24-hour race, consistency is more important than speed over an individual lap, etc., but inevitably it meant that there was some disappointment with only starting on the 9th row of the grid when our chief rival was so far ahead.

As usual though, we made our plan: we agreed the driver rotation, decided the points at which our ‘pit windows’ would open for fuel stops and driver changes, and knew how long the tyres, brake pads and discs would last before we would want to change those. As expected, the opposition was strong, although we were able to keep the pace of Willi Motorsport’s entry, the #903 Red Ant entry was simply too fast for us to keep up with. We kept with the plan though, pitted whenever the Code 60 periods fell in our favour, and cursed mildly to ourselves when things fell against us.

As the race entered its final phase, we found ourselves on fresh tyres with a ten-second deficit to the Red Ant car and plenty of fuel to play with. It got a bit messy at this stage, as Huub Eijndhoven at the wheel of the #903 desperately tried to keep Rik from overtaking. A late-race Code 60, caused by Jimmy de Breucker visiting the gravel in the other Red Ant car, enabled Eijndhoven to save a bit of fuel, with less than twenty minutes of the race to go. Jimmy De Breucker (father of Kobe, one of the crew of the #903), eventually got going again with eighteen minutes to go. Obviously, I was not an impartial observer in all of this, but to me Eijndhoven’s tactics were becoming increasingly questionable and it was with a sense of relief that Rik finally got past in what was to most observers at the time, the faster of the two cars. A race control message briefly announced that one of the several incidents between the two was under investigation, but was later revealed to need no further action.

For Red Camel, taking the chequered flag first in the 992 class (and in 7th place overall) was the cause of unrestrained – and in my view, justifiable, celebration. It had been a win for the entire team. Each of the drivers played their part: we had been consistent, our Am drivers had driven their fair share of the race (and then some), the refuelling had been done efficiently, utilising some, but not all of the Code 60 periods and our tyre and brake changes had been close to flawless throughout the 24 hours.

The tables and graphs show how we were not the fastest car out there, but we were able to get to the front at the right time by good teamwork and effective pit stops.

The graph above shows how we were able to beat the Willi Motorsport (#955) entry on pace - but we were slower than the Red Ant car (#903)

Below - a comparison of our four drivers against the four (Semi-Pro) drivers of Red Ant.

So far, then so good. We packed up the garage, cleared everything away and packed my bags ready to check into a city centre hotel, as I wasn’t flying home until the Monday evening. First, though, we would stop at the post-race party to say our goodbyes and thank the competition for a great race. On my way, I carelessly tripped up some steps, fell backwards and found myself unable to move my right leg. An ambulance was called, and instead of joining the rest of the team in celebration, I was carted off to the local hospital, where X-rays revealed that I had broken the top of my femur (basically a hip fracture).

Alone, in a foreign country and unable to speak the language, it was a problematic time. On the Tuesday afternoon, I was operated on, to have a nail and two screws inserted into my thigh. Already the following day, the nurses suggested that I get out of bed and sit in an armchair for a few hours, and on the Thursday I received a visit from a physiotherapist, who took me for a walk, with the aid of a frame, down the hospital corridor.

The following Monday, a week later than I originally intended, I was on an aeroplane back home and, although climbing stairs was a bit much for me still, I was able to sleep in my own home at last. And now, nearly a month later, I am getting ready to ‘get back in the saddle’ and commentate at the Formula Ford Festival at Brands Hatch. If ever there was a motivation to recovery, surely that must be it!

Safety Cars and Track Limits

Last week I managed to get around to posting my first article of the year and here I am, already posting my second! I am making an effort to catch up – not that anyone really relies on my blog, but please indulge me anyway.

My last post was a bit of a ramble and I want to make this a bit more targeted. Firstly, Safety Cars. A new procedure was introduced this year at Le Mans to handle Safety Car interventions. Briefly, the procedure involved sending out three Safety Cars (as normal) onto the track initially, to neutralise the field as quickly as possible. They would continue to circulate, and the pit lane entry would remain open, for as long as it took to clear the incident. The pit lane exit would be closed, until the end of the line of cars following a Safety Car went past.

So far, no change from the way it has worked in previous years. However, once the incident that caused the Safety Car had been cleared, a new process was introduced, with the aim of getting the cars lined up behind the leader of each class, with each class in a separate group. This consisted of three stages: one, the ‘merge’ – removing two Safety Cars and leaving the field backed up behind the remaining one; two, the ‘wave-by’, where every car whose class leader is behind it is allowed to pass the Safety Car and catch up with the tail of the field; and three, the ‘drop back’, where first the LMP2 cars, and then the GTE-Am cars fell to the back of the line of cars.

If it takes a while to explain, it takes even longer to execute, and relies on everyone knowing what they’re doing. Personally, I thought it was a recipe for confusion and chaos; but in practice it worked pretty well. The objective was achieved and all the cars lined up in their right class positions. The main issue was the time it took to happen. Although we had three Safety Car interludes, the first one came directly after the start of the race, so the cars were just about in class order anyway. Even then, it took an additional 14m 25s between the incident being declared ‘cleared’ and the green flag being waved. The following two uses of the Safety Car took, respectively, 34m 10s and 23m 56s. That’s a total of 1h 12m 31s of potential racing time lost, while cars were ‘faffing around’ getting themselves sorted into the right order, quite aside from the actual job of getting the incident cleared. If we would have had four classes, as in previous years, it would have taken even longer.

Apart from the time taken though, is the philosophical question of whether closing the field up behind the leader is the ‘right’ thing to do. I must admit I tend to count myself among the many hoping, as Richard Williams put it in this month’s Motor Sport magazine, “never… to see the integrity of a historic race threatened by practices borrowed from Daytona and Sebring”. The trouble is that without these practices, the field may get artificially spread out, and in these days of artificial performance-balanced racing, it is tough to come back if you do find yourself half-a-lap down.

The Spa 24 hours uses a ‘Full Course Yellow’ procedure, followed by a Safety Car, achieving the same end in a different way. The difference in SRO racing is that although it is multi-class, the classes are based on the crew composition, not the car performance, so no account is taken of the classes when sorting out the order of the cars behind the leader. So then it is pot luck whether you have your ‘ace’ driver in the car at the time of the appearance of the Safety Car or not.

I have just returned from Estoril, where Creventic were running one of their 24H Series races – a 12-hour encounter which had a 6-hour Qualification Race beforehand. Creventic do not use a Safety Car at all, but neutralise the field using ‘Code-60’ when necessary. This is a slower version of SRO’s Full Course Yellow, (operating at 60km/h rather than 80km/h) but it is restarted directly with a green flag, leaving the cars where they are, theoretically at least, when the signal to restart is given. Interestingly, this also leads to accusations of unfairness, as an awful lot can depend on the timing of the Code-60; how much fuel you have aboard, how close you are to the pit entry and whether there is a fuel pump available. Inevitably, the organisers are looking at ways of improving the process.

I mentioned Howden Haynes in my last post, and I’ll mention him again now. His objective was always to set the car up to be at its optimum at the end of the race, not at the start. It’s an especially sensible policy if you’ve got a Safety Car rule which bunches up the field.

It's not really fair to compare the Spa and Le Mans 24 hour races, but just because I can, here are some statistics. I include the Creventic race at Estoril for interest:
- Le Mans had 24 changes of lead among 8 different cars, representing five different brands;
- Spa had 68 changes of lead among 19 different cars, representing seven different brands;
- Estoril had 4 changes of lead among 4 different cars, representing three different brands (in a 12-hour race).

In addition
- Le Mans had 3 Safety Car periods, and 5 Full Course Yellows accounting for 3h 37m
- Spa had 9 Safety Car periods and 8 Full Course Yellows accounting for 4h 47m
- Estoril had 6 Code-60 periods accounting for 31m (in a 12-hour race)

Track Limits are becoming a bit of a theme, not just in Formula 1, but also at Le Mans as well as at Spa. At Spa, more than 2500 race control messages related to track limit offences.

At Le Mans, 801 messages from race control warned of track limit offences.

At Estoril, drivers were told in their briefing that the blue and white kerbs formed part of the track, and that, provided they did not stray beyond that limit with all four wheels, then they would not be penalised. It was fully appreciated that this was a more lenient approach, but the Race Control staff realised that spending too much time assessing Track Limit offences would possibly lead them to overlooking other, more serious safety issues. Hence their approach and there were only 23 warnings given and six 10-second penalties issued for track limit violations – and one of those was later cancelled.

These kinds of comparisons are futile, of course, and irrelevant for a number of reasons, not least because of the amateur nature of the entrants in Creventic races compared with the professionalism of Le Mans. But they may give some cause for consideration somewhere.

Anniversaries

A month has now passed since Le Mans, and I realise with some concern that I have not posted anything on this blog all year. I have always said that this blog is a personal outlet for me to indulge in various ramblings, and that I won’t be held to deadlines on it – it is, after all, my choice when and what I write. But what should you, my loyal readers, do? Well, that’s up to you really. At various points in the past I have posted detailed analyses of races here, travelogues of some of my visits to races, and personal opinions on the state of different championships and racing categories. Now I find myself just writing something because it’s a long time since I did so.

First, a quick medical report – for those who follow my ups and downs closely – my multiple myeloma remains in remission. I have been told that this won’t last forever, but I can live a relatively normal life these days, with the biggest health issues relating as much to my advancing years as to the cancer.

This means that I have been able to have a busy year thus far. On the racing front, I have worked with Red Camel at the Creventic races at Dubai, Mugello, Spa and, just last weekend, Estoril. On top of that I have commentated on the PA at Silverstone and Donington Park, and – the highlight of the year – at Le Mans.

Although it was pretty special to be at Le Mans last year, after a two-year hiatus finally getting to my 40th Le Mans 24-hour race, this year’s 100th anniversary was in many ways even more special. The presence of Ferrari, Porsche, Peugeot and Cadillac meant that the paddock atmosphere was buzzing, and my one trip into the spectator enclosures during Wednesday evening qualifying confirmed that spectator attendance was indeed record-breaking.

It's been a big year for anniversaries, and these days there seems to be a greater need to celebrate them than ever before. The fact that the first Le Mans 24-hour race took place one hundred years ago this year was difficult to miss – as was Porsche’s 75th anniversary. The Spa 24 hours was also celebrating its 75th running (although anyone who was there in 1993 will be unable to forget the abandonment of the race early on Sunday morning, following the unexpected death of King Baudouin). Silverstone is celebrating 75 years since its first race this year – the Festival later this year will remind everyone – and talking of Silverstone, the British Racing Drivers’ Club is 95 years old this year.

For a chap called Bob Curl, Le Mans 2023 saw a particularly special anniversary. It was seventy years since his first visit to Le Mans. In 1953, at the age of sixteen, he set off from his home with his push bike and a train ticket and witnessed the fabled “hangover victory” of Duncan Hamilton and Tony Rolt in their C-Type Jaguar. Bob is a tremendous enthusiast and a splendid chap. His name is indelibly linked with the Nomad, a car that he designed and built back in the late sixties for Mark Konig. Look it up in the Dailysportscar archive, or simply type “Mark Konig Nomad” into a search engine of your choice.

(I’ll probably get into all sorts of copyright trouble if I post any pictures here, but without doubt the Nomad – all three of them – are very pretty cars).

Anyway, seventy years on, Bob was at Le Mans again: camping outside the Porsche Curves, and when I spoke to him a week or so ago, it was clear that he had a great time. So much so, that he’s already made his reservation to stay there again next year!

I have to share one other tale about Bob, and that is his autograph book. Obviously, he grew up in the years before mobile phones and selfies became the rage, when small boys would get the autographs of their heroes. I was honoured a few years ago, not just to see, but to hold in my hand, Bob’s autograph book; and it must surely be the most complete record of the leading lights of motor sport over the years. Nuvolari, Fangio, Moss, Clark, Stewart: they are all there. He even has SCH (Sammy) Davis, winner of Le Mans for Bentley in 1927. When Bob first showed me this autograph book, he showed me the gap which had fortuitously been left on the same page as Davis’s scrawl and asked me if I thought that it might be a good place for Fernando Alonso, winner of the race some 91 years later, to sign. Of course I said it was a splendid idea, and at Silverstone later that year, Fernando duly signed in the gap and, being Fernando, thought it was all brilliant.

Anyway, Le Mans 2023 was unquestionably a thrilling race and I was so glad to be there to witness it – even if I did spend most of the race in the broadcasting studio of Radio Le Mans. It certainly exceeded my expectations and I must admit that I didn’t expect either Ferrari to keep their pace up as well as they did. The end result was in doubt even into the last two hours, when Toyota found themselves between a rock and a hard place. Brendon Hartley had to hand the car over or go beyond his drive time limit, and Sébastien Buemi had already had nine track limit warnings to his name. Toyota did not want to risk him getting a penalty and that left Ryo Hirakawa, who could feasibly have caught Alessandro Pier Guidi’s Ferrari in that final shift, but for his unfamiliarity with the braking on the Toyota, which had become a lot more erratic in the closing stages of the race. The Ferrari was also not without its problems – restarting the car after the pitstop was a known issue, which could have changed the outcome completely. It was a proper ending to an endurance race, with the reliability of both of the two cars fighting for the lead in doubt.

In the glory days of Audi, I became good friends with Howden ‘H’ Haynes, who engineered Audi to success in the 24 hours in 2008. ‘H’ was co-founder of Progressive motorsport, whose competitive spirit and attention to detail not only introduced Kyle Wilson-Clarke (later race engineer at Porsche, after Audi’s withdrawal), but also Leena Gade, who went on to engineer the winning Audi in 2012.

Another graduate of Progressive was Justin Taylor, who continued the winning tradition by running the no. 51 AF Corse-entered Ferrari at Le Mans this year. I have heard that Justin was using the (manual) stop watch given to him by H to determine the car’s position on the track, and thus to know when to talk to the driver on the circuit. Anyone who has seen Audi’s “Truth in 24” movie will have gained a bit of an insight into H’s approach to a race: he is highly intelligent, meticulous and competitive. It is a way of working that he shares with everyone that he comes into contact with and he has undoubtedly had a big influence on Taylor. I should have known better than to doubt that philosophy continuing to influence the race!