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!
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