A Day Out at Castle Combe

The Guild of Motoring Writers organised their annual Big Day Out recently – once again at the pretty, if unforgiving, Castle Combe circuit in Wiltshire. It is not every day that I get the chance to drive my road car on a race track, so I jumped at the opportunity to participate.

I had previously done this in my Audi S4, which has been my road car for nearly ten years now, but last October, I purchased an Abarth 124 Spider, and although I still have the Audi, the Abarth was the obvious choice to take to the track.

Its 1.4 litre four-cylinder turbo engine may ‘only’ have 170bhp, but it is such a well-balanced car to drive on normal roads that being able to unleash its full potential was something I was looking forward to. When it came to driving it on the circuit, I have to confess I was a little fearful, and did my braking much earlier and more gently than I needed to, and accelerated with caution. Nevertheless, it was a great deal of fun, and brought home to me the courage and precision demonstrated by proper racing drivers in real racing situations, to get the best from their cars.

The day was supported, as always, by a number of manufacturers. I have to admit that when I read the list of names, I was not particularly inspired. That said, it was great to catch up with Scott Brownlee, from Toyota, a long-time supporter of Radio Le Mans, and looking resplendent in his Toyota Hybrid Denso race jacket. The main support for the day came from Suzuki, with some additional cars being provided by Peugeot.

I had a go in the new Peugeot 508 GT, actually quite a good-looking car I thought, although I have never been a fan of the brand. The car is powered by a 1.6 litre four-cylinder turbo using petrol and provides a handy 225bhp. Its basic price is just over £36,000 and although relatively heavy, it provides a pleasant ride with adequate, but not startling, performance. The strangest thing for me was the instrument layout, with a rev counter that goes anti-clockwise. I found this most disconcerting. Surely analogue dials go clockwise to indicate increases?

In practically head-on competition was the offering from Toyota – or rather Lexus. This was the new ES 300h. At a price of £35,155 and featuring a normally-aspirated four-cylinder petrol engine of 2.5 litres, albeit aided by an electric motor, it gives 215 bhp, so which one to buy, if you’re in that particular market?

Comparing the numbers, the Peugeot gets to 60 mph over a second earlier than the Lexus, but will do 10 miles less on each gallon of fuel. As the tank of the Lexus is 10 litres less than on the Peugeot, this doesn’t mean you’ll go further on a tankful, but it does mean you’ll be spending £12 more each time you stop.

As I am not about to spend that kind of money on a new car, it is not a choice that concerns me in real terms. However, there is no doubt that I enjoyed driving the Lexus far more. Once I got out and started looking around it though, I am not sure that it is as pretty as the Peugeot. It is probably just me, but there is an element of an old Mark 3 Cortina about the Peugeot, which is quite appealing. The Lexus looks like, well a Lexus. All 21st century angles and edges.

My final drive of the day – apart from another ten-lap spin in the Abarth – was a trip in the latest Suzuki Swift Sport. If the Peugeot 508 GT reminded me of a Ford Cortina, then the Suzuki was a Mini Cooper S. Like the Abarth, the Suzuki is powered by a 1.4 litre turbo-charged engine, giving 138 bhp in a car that weighs just 975kg.

My Abarth has 170 bhp, and weighs in at 1135kg, but costs almost double, so the two cars are not really in the same market place. I don’t think it was quite as much fun as the Fiat 500 I drove a little while ago, but still, Suzuki has a car here that brings a smile to the face.

Thanks to all those who made the day possible, and as always, Jeff Bloxham for additional photos.

Mugello 12 hours - good stuff!

My first encounter with the Creventic organisation was back in 2012, when I was part of the Radio Show Limited team that covered the Dubai 24 hour race in the January of that year. Since then, I have visited 22 races in the “24h Series” and the Creventic Crew has never failed to provide exceedingly well for all our needs.

Last month, I packed my bags and headed off to Mugello – a circuit I had not visited before – nestling in the Tuscan hills about an hour’s drive south of Bologna. The drive is somewhat longer than that if you take the “scenic route”, which, unwittingly, I did on the way there. It may not have been a deliberate choice, but nevertheless it was a good one, for the views are stunning as the autostrada crosses one viaduct after another between numerous plunges into spectacular tunnels.

Once at the circuit, the paddock was a very happy place to be. Everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves. The circuit weaves its way in and out of a couple of neighbouring valleys, providing plenty of challenging, undulating corners and many blind brows. Creventic provided a circuit map with all the corner names on – rather than just an outline showing the locations of “Turns 1 to 15”.

There were 58 cars on the provisional entry list, and it looked like nearly all of them would take part. That’s not always the case with Creventic entry lists, but in the end 55 cars took the start, split into 20 cars in the “Touring Car Endurance” (TCE) division and 35 in the GT section.

Despite having seen so many Creventic races, this was the first ‘proper’ two-part 12 hour race that I’d been to. The only other contender for that honour was the rather unusual 2018 Silverstone GT race, which was also a two-part, 12-hour race, but with the second part running concurrently with the first 7 hours of the TCE 24-hour race.

When I was young, two part races were not unknown, but they would generally be ‘aggregate’ races. In other words, the result would be calculated by adding the results from each part together, with the winner being the one who had completed the most laps in the shortest time. That might mean that the car taking the chequered flag first after the second part might not be the winner, and it might mean a bit of a delay while the time-keepers did their sums, but to my mind there is a certain purity in this approach, lost in the modern genres of motor-racing, where the ‘order across the line’ is all-important.

It seems that aggregate races are not in fashion these days (although the Race of Remembrance makes it work), so teams are faced with some strategy decisions in the final stages of a Part One, to ensure that they can maximise the advantage provided by the action of forming up the grid for the second part and closing up all the gaps. It is a bit like knowing that a Safety Car period is going to happen at a specific time. With such knowledge, you can adjust your strategy and close up to the car in front.

At the end of three hours’ racing into the darkness at Mugello, only Barwell Motorsport’s Lamborghini had managed to stay on the same lap as the Scuderia Praha Ferrari. But that did not necessarily mean that part 2 would be purely a story of the race between the red Ferrari and the black-and-yellow Lamborghini.

Interestingly, looking purely at part 2 of the race in isolation, the number of laps completed were as follows:

No.	Car	Laps
11	Scuderia Praha Ferrari	245
91	Herberth Porsche	243
77	Barwell Lamborghini	242

However, the Herberth car had lost two laps in the first three hours of the race, so despite starting part 2 with much more fuel, the German car would face an uphill battle in part 2.

Expertise in Creventic racing in crucial, of course, and this perhaps is where Barwell lost out. In part 1, the Scuderia Praha Ferrari pitted four times, the Herberth Porsche three times, and Barwell only twice. This meant that early in part 2 (in fact at the end of the first racing lap), the Lamborghini was in for fuel, whereas the Ferrari was able to go for more than twenty minutes before heading for the pits.

The Ferrari team was also much quicker in the pits than the Lamborghini. Allowing for the fact that the Ferrari was putting in five litres less fuel at each stop, one would expect their stops to be around 5-10 seconds quicker. However, the Lamborghini was routinely spending a good 20-25 seconds longer in the pit lane than the Ferrari. The most likely explanation is that Barwell was spending more time getting their driver changes done. (Of course, in the Blancpain series, pit stops are subject to a minimum stop time, leaving a little more leeway in this area. In Creventic racing, once the wheels are changed, it is the driver change that dictates how long you spend in the pits.)

No.	Car	No of stops	Average stop time
11	Scuderia Praha Ferrari	14	2m 51s
77	Barwell Lamborghini	11	3m 17s
91	Herberth Porsche	14	2m 57s

This table shows that Barwell spent less time in the pit lane (even though their stops were longer, they made four fewer visits to the pit lane), but their tactical disadvantage was that they spent more time on the track when it was under code 60 than the rival Ferrari and Porsche.

Finally, of course, we shouldn’t forget that it is the pace on the track that counts. Both Scuderia Praha and Barwell had three-driver crews (with a single Am driver). Herberth used four drivers (with two Ams).

No.	Car	Driver	Best	Average
11	Scuderia Praha Ferrari	Král	1m 50.435s	1m 51.153s
11	Scuderia Praha Ferrari	Malucelli	1m 48.948s	1m 49.603s
11	Scuderia Praha Ferrari	Písařík	1m 51.543s	1m 52.547s
77	Barwell Lamborghini	Amstutz	1m 52.214s	1m 53.665s
77	Barwell Lamborghini	Keen	1m 49.018s	1m 49.881s
77	Barwell Lamborghini	Kujala	1m 49.099s	1m 49.845s
91	Herberth Porsche	Alleman	1m 51.784s	1m 53.318s
91	Herberth Porsche	Bohn	1m 51.265s	1m 52.260s
91	Herberth Porsche	Renauer A	1m 49.696s	1m 51.076s
91	Herberth Porsche	Renauer R	1m 50.391s	1m 51.724s

I don’t really think any further comment is necessary – Malucelli is clearly very quick, but it is interesting that both Kujala and Keen matched each others’ times. It should be noted that although Amstutz did not do much more than his minimum driving time, Jiří Písařík did more than three hours in total, and in the Herberth car, Am drivers Bohn and Alleman drove over 8½ hours together.

All in all, it has to be said that Scuderia Praha were worthy winners – although the car may not have had the single-lap speed to start from pole position, the car led 302 out of the 330 laps (including all of the first three-hour part and the first ninety minutes of the second part).

But the other winner, as always, was the organisation. Not just Creventic, but the whole package; the venue, the atmosphere, the weather: all combined together to make for a terrific weekend of proper endurance racing.

Too busy...?

Well, here we are, already into the second quarter of the year, and it has probably been one of my busiest – in terms of motor-racing activity – for twenty years. Of course, I had hoped that I would be too busy to write on the blog, and so it has become, to an extent.

February was relatively quiet, with time to write up race analyses from the Daytona 24 and Bathurst 12 hours, a visit to the Classic Car Show and a family holiday to the Wye Valley, but as March came in, so did plenty of jobs for me to do. All of which meant that writing anything here got fairly quickly pushed down the priority list.

It started off with the British GT Media Day at Donington Park, which saw the announcement of a 38-car grid for the 2019 British GT series – a very healthy state of affairs indeed. Of these, 14 are in the GT3 class, with cars from Aston Martin, Bentley, Lamborghini, McLaren and Porsche joining BMW and Mercedes in the top class. Nine of these were present at the media day (with Barwell’s brand new Lamborghini Evo ending the day fastest, just 0.024s faster than the RAM Racing Mercedes).

The series kicks off at Oulton Park on Easter Monday – surely worth a visit, if the weather is kind?

The middle of March was dominated by the Sebring WEC and IMSA double-header, which I did not attend, but I did pay close attention, and despite misgivings ahead of the event, I certainly had the impression from afar that it was a successful event. It will be interesting to see what elements are kept for next year, and what lessons are learned and changes made.

If nothing else, it would be nice if the weather is better next year.

Following the Sebring weekend, and the various write-ups that I had to do as a result, was a visit to a new circuit for me – Mettet in Belgium, for the opening round of the European VW Fun Cup, about which the less said the better. Then it was a quick dash back across the channel – with thanks to DFDS for making it so straightforward – before getting myself to Gatwick for the flight to Italy for the opening round of Creventic’s European Championship at Mugello, another circuit I had not previously visited.

The twelve hour race at Mugello was split into a three-hour part on Friday afternoon (following a delayed qualifying), which ended at 7pm, with the remaining nine hours on Saturday between 9am and 6pm. The Ferrari 488 GT3 of Bohemia Energy racing with Scuderia Praha was the class of the field throughout, running a faultless race and efficient pit stops to win, three laps clear of Barwell’s Lamborghini Huracan (which was due back at Silverstone on the Monday after the race!).

As always, it was great fun working with the Creventic crew and the TV folks from the 0221 Media Group. It was good to be back ‘in the fold’ of the Radio Show Limited team. Having known and worked with John Hindhaugh, Jonny Palmer, Joe Bradley and Nick Daman for so many years, I regard them very much as family and hopefully that is an impression we can convey to the listeners and viewers of the live streaming (along with some useful information).

I am always impressed at how many of the teams and drivers that we speak to say what fun they have at Creventic races, and Mugello was certainly no exception. It’s as much of a culture thing as anything else, but somehow no-one ever seems to lose sight of the fact that the people that are putting their hands into their pockets to allow the thing to happen, are doing so out of choice. It is a lesson that other areas of the sport could do well to learn from.

As an aside, how many people keep track of the number of motor racing venues they have visited? And do you, like me, have difficulty defining the rules? Do you have to witness competitive track activity for it to count? Does it have to be an active track? Do kart tracks count? Short ovals? What about temporary circuits? Anyway, under most counts, I reckon I am now over fifty, in 17 different countries.

I make no boast of this – I am sure there are many people reading this who can make bigger claims, but it is an indication of the extent of opportunities I have been able to take, and of course I am grateful to all those who have played a role in making it possible!

Yesterday, I had the opportunity for some ‘tourist laps’ around the Nordschleife, something I have not done for around twenty years – and what I found most noticeable (on top of the rather steep hike in the price) was the professionalism of most of those doing so. In 1995, when I last went round, they were proper ‘tourist laps’, with mostly normal road-going vehicles taking part, being driven by ordinary tourists. Yesterday, it was not much short of a full track-day, with more race-prepared cars circulating than anything else, and I would not be surprised to learn that many of them were being driven by people practicing for next week’s VLN race.

It certainly got the juices flowing – although I will be at RSL’s London studio to commentate on VLN-2 with Bruce Jones – I feel much better prepared now!

Le Mans 1995

Having been to the Le Mans 24-hour race as often as I have, people sometimes ask me which was the best, or the most memorable, or my favourite, and I never really know what to reply. They are (nearly) all memorable, in one way or another, and the best always has to be the ‘next’ one surely? I am told that Tom Kristensen has been asked to choose which of his nine wins was his ‘best’ and his answer is along the lines of “it’s like your children: they are all your favourite”.

For a number of reasons though, the 1995 edition of the race is one that stands out. Not least because it is the only Le Mans 24-hour race that my wife went to (although it should be noted that we weren’t married at the time, but despite the many traumas of the weekend, it failed to spoil our romance!).

It was a win first time out for the McLaren F1 GTR – a car that according to its designer, Gordon Murray, was “absolutely not meant to go racing”. The weather was appalling. Not that the rain was especially heavy, but it was simply relentless. Watching JJ Lehto going twenty seconds a lap faster than anyone else during the night was certainly memorable. On Sunday morning, as it seemed to be easing off, another band of rain passed through, then another.

The race is the subject of the sublime “Pursuit of Perfection” video, which I still maintain is one of the best Le Mans films of all time (including “Truth in 24”). These days, you don’t need to buy tapes or disks, just go to youtube and look for “McLaren at Le Mans: Pursuit of Perfection”. If you weren’t there, it will give you a flavour, and if you were, it will bring it all flooding back.

It was remarkable in that, prior to Le Mans, no McLaren had completed a race longer than four hours, yet not only did the combination of JJ Lehto, Yannick Dalmas and Masanori Sekiya win the race outright, but there were three other F1 GTRs filling the top five places.

The one non-McLaren in the top five? It was a Porsche-engined Courage C34, driven by Mario Andretti, Bob Wollek and Eric Hélary. Remarkably, Hélary was the only previous winner among the three of them, but a stronger line-up would have been difficult to find. As far as Andretti was concerned, although he wasn’t a Monaco GP winner, he was a Formula 1 world champion and winner of the Indianapolis 500, so saw this as probably his final chance of winning that ‘Triple Crown’.

Another of those ‘memorable moments’ occurred towards the end of the fourth hour of the race, when Andretti came up behind Antonio Hermann’s relatively slow Kremer-Porsche K8 ‘spider’, coming into the Karting ‘S’. I read somewhere that Andretti later claimed he thought it was the sister car, piloted by Hans Stuck, so didn’t expect driving of the standard of the less-experienced Brazilian banker. A bizarre comment, since Stuck’s car was bright red, and the Hermann car was yellow.

Whatever the case, Andretti lost control of the Courage and clouted the wall, damaging the rear suspension and wing assembly. Repairs took nearly half-an-hour, losing six laps and dropping the car to 25th position.

Much has been documented about the McLaren story over the years, but less from the side of the Courage team – at least that has come to my attention. Possibly because McLaren is British, and most of the teams running them were British, but it should be recognised that Courage had a British race engineer, in Michael Phillips, who was running the no. 12 Chevrolet-engined Courage C41 and a couple of British mechanics – Jason Thompson and Mike Lowman, who had come from the G-Force organisation that had worked on the suspension for the Courage C41. In fact, Jason was the crew chief for the no. 13 Porsche-engined car (the C34), and I met him recently to discuss the whole episode.

Is he bitter? You decide.

“The thing is,” he began, “that pit stop to repair the car after Mario’s shunt should never have taken so long.”

“How come?” I asked.

“Well, we had a spare car, and we robbed it for parts for the race car. Not just the bodywork, but the suspension as well. We’d set up the suspension, tracking, camber and so on, and got it just right in practice, then we took it off the car and put the new suspension on for the race. Top and bottom wishbone, uprights, brakes, everything. So we had a car ready for the race, with a complete spare corner, all ready and set up. And we knew the suspension we’d got spare could just be bolted on, we would just drop the bolts in and it would go, ready to race. We knew we could change the whole corner in seven minutes, because we’d practiced.”

“So what went wrong?”

“Well, when the crash happened, it was ‘right, where’s the spare suspension?’, and the truckie, who was a super-nice bloke, he said, ‘well, it was all in the way… so I’ve taken it back.’”

It turned out that “taken it back” meant that it had gone back to the Courage workshop, which in those days was not at the Technoparc on the inside of the circuit, but was outside, near to the motorway. A pit stop that should have seen the car back in the race in just a few minutes, ended up taking 29 minutes.

It wasn’t helped by the fact that the mechanics tried to fix the car on the pit apron first, before it was pulled back into the garage to be worked on properly. “I was shouting and pointing for them to pull the car back into the garage, but there was a bit of a language problem,” admits Thompson. “Courage was quite an amateur team, most of the mechanics only arrived for the weekend. During the week in the workshop there had just been me and a couple of other guys, but then on race day we suddenly had ten mechanics for each car. And because the no. 12 car (another Chevrolet-engined C41) had been disqualified in qualifying for being underweight, that car’s mechanics got shared out to the other two cars. So all of a sudden, the garage was rammed and none of them spoke English. I speak only a tiny bit of French.”

There was another issue in the early stages, Jason explained: “Early on, when it started to rain, the race engineer (Dominique Méliand) made a terrible, terrible tyre call. Mario was out in the car and I was on the radio to him, because none of the rest of the mechanics could really speak English. Initially Mario was out on slicks, but with the rain, he called in and said he wanted intermediates. So we got the intermediates out, but the engineer wanted to go to full wets. So because none of the team could speak English, they went and got the wets out. And as Mario was driving in, he could see the wets and he was on the radio, saying ‘No, intermediates… intermediates!’. And they put wets on, and Mario went out on those, but he wasn’t happy.

“That was where it all fell apart, really, because I couldn’t speak the language and the engineer was just telling the mechanics what to do. Even though I was the crew chief, I was elbowed out.”

More than twenty years later, Jason’s voice still expresses the frustration. “Even though we lost so much time, we still could have won, the car and the drivers were quick enough, whatever the weather did. We ended up on the lead lap, less than three minutes behind at the flag.”

It doesn’t end there though. Jason explains: “And then of course there was the second incident with the engine cover… which cost us a four minute pit stop.”

“What happened then?” I ask.

“It was just after half past nine in the morning and we were in third place,” Jason explained. “I had been working out whether we would be able to catch up with the leaders – with more than six hours to go, it was still possible, I thought.”

Jason went on, “Mario had just got out of the car, Bob had got in and we were walking away from the car. Then all of a sudden there was pandemonium and we were like, ‘what’s going on?’ because the engine cover was off and we didn’t know why – there was no problem with the car.”

It turned out that the problem was commercial, not mechanical. Even now Jason is unsure, but it does seem clear that the replacement engine cover had additional “MEITEC” stickers on the wheel arches. And of course it was nice and clean, so the “Texaco Havoline” and “JVC” stickers were also more clearly visible.

“But when they went to change it,” says Jason, tersely, “they yanked it off, and they broke one of the mounts. It didn’t take long to get the old one out and wind another one in, but still it lost us another two minutes unnecessarily.”

We have spent more than an hour talking, looking at photos and reminiscing. It is time to go to the pub. As I put on my coat, Jason says “I’ll always remember, I came out of the back of the pit after the race, and I saw my Dad, and he said ‘fantastic, you finished second!’ and I was in such a rage, I was thinking they [the Courage team] were idiots, because we had thrown this race away. I said, ‘we could have won, we would have won’. It was so frustrating.”

In the pub, we discussed other cars that over the years could have won; should have won but for this or that, and I reflected on the intensity and emotion that the Le Mans 24 hour race always seem to bring out in people. Jason Thompson still goes to Le Mans every year, with his brother and a group of friends, to watch as spectators. The passion burns very brightly here.

The Courage C34 at scrutineering - Jason Thompson with hands on hips

Wollek waiting to rejoin with shiny new rear deck. Thompson in white cap in front of fuel rig

Andretti pits, Thompson attends

The Triple Crown

When I was a teenager in the early 1970s, I was a firm and faithful follower of motor sport, although (probably more so than today) I had many other interests besides. What I don’t remember is much of a fuss being made in 1972 about Graham Hill achieving the “Triple Crown of Motorsport”.

According the The Sun (in June 2018), the Triple Crown is “one of the most sought after in racing”, and it is claimed “by winning the three most prestigious races in the world… the Monaco Grand Prix, the Le Mans 24 hour and the Indianapolis 500”.

Not being one to argue with Jim Sheridan (who wrote the piece), I thought I should double-check on Wikipedia, which agrees with The Sun and notes that it is an “unofficial motorsport achievement”, and that the only driver to have achieved the feat is Graham Hill, who won Monaco (for the first time) in 1963, the Indianapolis 500 in 1966 and Le Mans in 1972.

So I went back and checked Autosport magazine, which had eight full pages devoted to the race, as well as a full page tribute to Jo Bonnier, an editorial and various news items in its Pit and Paddock section. There was no mention of the fact that Graham Hill had gained the distinction of adding the Le Mans trophy to those he already had from Indianapolis and Monaco, nor did it speculate as to how long it would take another driver to record the same achievement.

Then I went to Motor Sport magazine, and was pleased to note that at least the Le Mans report in 1972 was penned by Denis Jenkinson, as I recalled that in 1971, ‘Jenks’ did not even attend the Vingt-Quatre Heures, preferring instead to head to Hockenheim for a non-championship Formula One race that was being held on the same weekend.

I have to admit Jenkinson’s report left me somewhat open-mouthed, as I was reminded not merely of the dangers of the sport in those days, but of the way in which they were viewed. This, remember, was the type of prose I was reading as an impressionable, fifteen-year-old budding motor-racing enthusiast. Hopefully, I am not infringing any copyright laws by pasting it in below:

On the next page, DSJ went on to describe the start, but before he did, he noted changes that had been put in place for the 1972 race:

If you have nothing better to do, then I wholeheartedly recommend that you go to the Motor Sport archive, here, where you can read the whole report for yourself. Trust me, it is worth it.

And if you don’t have the time, you will just have to accept my word for it that there is no mention at all of the Triple Crown, or how worthy the achievement of Graham Hill by winning it. Nor even, it has to be said, the hint of a suggestion that team orders in the dominant Matra team allowed “Hill’s car” to win the race ahead of its sister cars. Far more to the point was that the French drivers, Pescarolo and Cevert were put into the blue cars to bring them to the chequered flag in the first two places, 19 and 9 laps ahead of the third-placed car.

If Fernando Alonso equals Hill’s achievement by winning the Indianapolis 500 later this year, I will be very pleased for him, for he is unquestionably a great driver, whose record does not adequately reflect his talents (although he is not unique in that – there are many such drivers). What I will be sad about is the media frenzy that will no doubt be unleashed with all the extreme hyperbole of which today’s writers are capable.

I found it fascinating, researching this piece, getting lost in the articles that were written in 1972 (even the letters pages, which included one from an indignant Ian Titchmarsh!). I am well aware of course that we no longer live in the 1970’s, and that times have changed, but nevertheless I think the writers of today would do well to take a step back and look things from a different perspective from time to time.

I wonder if anyone will still be reading this in 46 years’ time? And if they do, I wonder if anyone will think it as relevant and entertaining as DSJ was in 1972?

Bathurst Ruminations

The 2019 Liqui-Moly Bathurst 12-hours was a remarkable race – it would have been good to have been there. However, the coverage was excellent, so it was possible to follow the action from far away, and despite the virtual jet-lag, it was still possible to get a good flavour for the race.

It was particularly pleasing to see so little of the race disrupted by caution flags – only nine caution periods accounting for just 22 of the 312 completed laps (or 313 if you count the pace lap, which arguably you should, since that is when the timing for the 12 hours started). With some justification, much was made of the fact that driving standards were high, and serious incidents were few and far between. However, it should also be recognised that still there was 1h 48m of running behind the Safety Car.

Compare this to 19 Code-60 interventions for a total of 3h 57m for this year’s Dubai 24-hours and it is not that different (provided you divide by two to account for the different race lengths!). But at Dubai, there was little talk of how few caution periods there were – most people I spoke to were more eager to say that the number and frequency of the Code-60 periods were much more than they had expected (or wanted). In a way, I suppose this merely puts Bathurst in context – one really expects to have more cautions, so close are the walls and so tortuous is the track.

Another way to look at it is to consider that six of the nine pit stops made by the race winning Earl Bamber Motorsport-entered Porsche were made under green flag conditions. Certainly, that meant that strategy played a bigger role in this year’s race that it often does.

In both 2014 and 2012, there were also just nine safety car periods, and in 2012 those accounted also for just 22 laps. However, in 2012, there were only 25 starters, and only 8 of those were proper GT3 cars. In some ways, it is hardly surprising that they kept out of trouble, despite the atrocious weather that blighted that year’s race.

The only other occasion since then when there have been fewer than 40 starters was in 2016, when 36 cars started, 58% of which were GT3 class cars, and 27 laps were lost due to Safety Car periods. This year the race boasted 38 starters, two fewer than were initially expected, but 66% of them were GT3 cars. To me, there seems to be a pretty strong correlation between number of starters and number of Safety Car periods. Although to be fair, it depends as well on the mix between GT3 cars and the ‘others’.

Year	Starters	%age GT3	SC periods	SC laps
2019	38	66%	9	22
2018	50	56%	16*	47
2017	51	61%	16	35
2016	36	58%	13	27
2015	50	54%	20	73
2014	40	30%	9	31
2013	53	34%	15	43
2012	25	32%	9	22

*In 2018, the race was terminated early with a red flag.

Note that in the calculation of the percentage of GT3 cars above, I have not accounted for whether the drivers were Pro or Am or a mixture of the two. Clearly, this also can influence matters. This year was the first that there were no GT3 cars driven only by amateur crews.

In any event, this year’s Bathurst 12 hours was a race to be savoured. The international aspect that the race has acquired in recent years was joined this year by an injection of youth. Matt Campbell (just 23 years of age) drove a storming stint after the final SC, moving from third to first in the final twenty minutes, passing first the Mercedes of Raffaele Marcielllo (at 24 years of age) and then the R-Motorsport Aston Martin in the hands of Jake Dennis (another 23-year old). But neither the Aston Martin nor the Porsche that were battling over the lead of the race at the end were really the quickest cars out there, although you would be forgiven for thinking so, based on that last frenetic hour.

The overall fastest lap of the race went to Josh Burdon in the no. 35 Nissan GT-R Nismo, at 2m 03.5382s, although this was almost two seconds slower than Shane Van Gisbergen achieved in during the 2016 race in the Tekno Autosports McLaren 650S.

The best average laps (looking at the best 20% of green laps) went to the two M-Sport Bentleys, the no. 107 being the quicker of the two. Mercedes, Audi, Ferrari and Nissan were all quicker, using this metric, than either the Aston Martin or the EBM Porsches. It should be noted that the difference between the GT3 field (as used by the wizards of BoP) was less than 0.5%, however, so I don’t think that any complaints are warranted.

Let’s look at some other numbers from Bathurst and compare them to Daytona and Dubai:

	Dubai	Daytona	Bathurst
No of lead changes	15	50	30
No of cars that led	8	7	13
No of cars in 'top' class	13	11	15
Winner's average speed	136 km/h	154 km/h	162 km/h
No of starters	74	47	38
Cars outside 70% of winner's distance	24 (32%)	4 (9%)	13 (34%)
Cars within 5 mins of winner	1	2	7
Winning margin	1 lap	13.5s	3.4s

I present this data as it stands, without wanting to make any point in particular. You can read into it what you want. Certainly I am guilty of comparing apples with oranges – Daytona is for prototypes, Bathurst runs to a 12-hour duration, Dubai does not use Safety Cars – all this impacts the numbers shown, to varying degrees. Nevertheless, I found it interesting to compile, so I hope you find it interesting to read.

And to close, a couple of maverick thoughts. A lot of the appeal of endurance racing is the fact that it is multi-class racing. Different categories of cars racing at the same time on the same track – involved in different battles, but fighting on the same battlefield. Dubai this year had fewer non-GT3 cars than ever before, Bathurst too. The Spa 24 hours runs pretty much exclusively to GT3-specification cars (albeit with different grades of drivers) and has done for several years now. Personally, I don’t think this spoils the spectacle. It unquestionably changes the dynamic of the race; it changes the appeal and the spectator impact. It alters the way that teams and drivers have to approach matters of strategy.

But here we are in 2019 – things are anyway different in endurance racing from how they were thirty or forty years ago. Maybe there is a place for single-class endurance races? Not as a replacement for the multi-class ones, but as an addition.

And second, what about the “holy mantra” of a 24 hours race distance? I think Bathurst proves that you can have a perfectly good 12 hour race. There are more 24-hour races these days than ever there used to be in the past. I have argued before that having more events has the overall effect of devaluing the status of the individual event. I admit that there is something very special about staying up all night, experiencing the exhilaration of completing 24-hours non-stop racing and the fatigue that goes with it. But you can have too much of a good thing. Dubai, Daytona, Le Mans, Nürburgring, Spa, Portimao, Barcelona…it all gets a little too much.

Races of eight, ten, twelve or even eighteen hours all require strategy, fortitude, durability and consistency. And would provide race organisers with a little more variety with which to spice up their seasons.

Alonso at Daytona

It was a pity that so much of the Daytona 24 hours this year was lost through caution and red flag periods, for it means that less data is available for analysis. But still there is enough to draw some conclusions, and I particularly wanted to look at the evidence regarding the performance of Fernando Alonso.

Alonso is news-worthy, no question about it. Whenever a Formula One World Champion shows up in another form of racing, it is going to pull in the crowds and invite microscopic analysis. What’s great with Fernando is that he seems to relish the challenge, much as fellow world champion Jenson Button does.

At Le Mans last year, just as at Indianapolis the year before, Fernando Alonso demonstrated that his talent behind the wheel is matched by his competitiveness and will to win. Don’t forget either that he has raced at Daytona before – in the 2018 Rolex 24 hours he drove a United Autosports LMP2 Ligier alongside Phil Hanson and Lando Norris. And it should be recorded that in 2018 the Spaniard was not (quite) as quick as young Norris, not in terms of best lap, average lap or even best stint.

And if one just looks at the drivers’ best laps from Daytona this year one finds the drivers of the Wayne Taylor Racing-run, Konica Minolta-sponsored Cadillac DPi as follows. (The list is in the order that they drove the car):

Driver	Laps Completed	Best Lap
Jordan Taylor	219	1m 34.643s
Fernando Alonso	177	1m 35.182s
Kamui Kobayashi	86	1m 34.598s
Renger Van Der Zande	111	1m 35.135s

Does this suggest some over-hyping of Alonso? Possibly, but readers here should know that I don’t hold a lot of store by outright best lap times: rather I like to look at average lap times.

Driver	Average of best 50 laps	Average of best 25 laps	Average of best 10 laps
Jordan Taylor	1m 35.730s	1m 35.450s	1m 35.184s
Fernando Alonso	1m 35.853s	1m 35.547s	1m 35.394s
Kamui Kobayashi	1m 36.362s	1m 35.720s	1m 35.294s
Renger Van Der Zande	1m 36.550s	1m 36.156s	1m 35.860s

Again, in none of the columns above is Alonso the quickest driver in the car. However, there is an argument that says that since Jordan Taylor had more laps in the car, then he had more chances to improve his average lap. In order to get a fair comparison, you need to look – goes the argument – at the average of the best 20% of green-flag laps.

Now the numbers look like this.

Driver	No. of green flag laps	Average of best 20%
Jordan Taylor	180	1m 35.438s
Fernando Alonso	126	1m 35.557s
Kamui Kobayashi	76	1m 35.438s
Renger Van Der Zande	102	1m 36.072s

All of which seems to suggest that Alonso, far from being the ‘star performer’, merely drove pretty much to the same pace (to within a tenth) as his team-mates. (The fact that Van Der Zande is slightly slower on all counts is perhaps a reflection of the accuracy – for once – of the FIA Driver Categorisation, which lists him as a Gold, the others are all Platinum).

Please don’t construe this as my criticising Alonso in any way, the point here is merely to analyse his performance in the car in relation to his team-mates and put some of the media hype into context.

The trouble with all this analysis of ‘fast laps’ is that it sometimes overlooks overall consistency. No good in being quick over 10, 25 or 50 laps and then losing time with spins or hesitancy in the traffic. To look at this, it is worth looking at lap times averaged over a full driving stint – thus taking into account tyre degradation, traffic management, etc. This table shows the best stint for each driver (ignoring in laps, out laps and those laps under caution).

Driver	Stint Length (green laps)	Stint time (time of day)	Average lap for stint
Jordan Taylor	20	02:36 to 03:16	1m 36.293s
Fernando Alonso	22	18:34 to 19:17	1m 35.871s
Kamui Kobayashi	22	20:25 to 21:09	1m 36.834s
Renger Van Der Zande	19	00:35 to 01:22	1m 36.728s

All of a sudden, Alonso looks a bit more impressive, doesn’t he? After all, it is the stint time that is a true measure of the driver’s effectiveness, surely? Except that any advantage over the competition is ruled out every time there is a full course caution.

But talking of the competition, let’s look at where Alonso was compared to the drivers who were in other cars at the same time. Fernando had three runs at the wheel of the Konica-Minolta car. The first was from lap 62 to 155. Here’s a graph showing the gaps to his car during this phase:

The comparison cars are numbers 6 (Cameron, then Pagenaud in the Penske Acura), 31 (Curran, then Derani in the Whelan Cadillac), 55 (Pla, then Tincknell in one Joest Mazda), 77 (Rast, then Nunez in the other Mazda) and 85 (Goikhberg then De Francesco in the JDC-Miller Cadillac).

And a word of explanation, in case the “Gap Graph” is not clear: a line with an upward slope means that the ‘control’ car (the no. 10 Wayne Taylor Cadillac) is increasing its gap, a downward slope means a decreasing gap. Put simply, when Alonso was in the car, he was always quicker than his competition.

Alonso got in the car for the second time, just before 5am, as the rain was beginning to fall. Almost immediately, it was back to full course caution, and the green flag wasn’t given until the beginning of lap 485. At this point, the Konica-Minolta car led from the two Acuras – Dane Cameron in the #6 and Ricky Taylor in the #7 – with Eric Curran in the Whelan Cadillac the only other car on the lead lap. Admittedly, all three are only “Gold” drivers, but by the time the yellow flags came again after just 32 minutes racing (15 laps), Alonso had opened up a gap of nearly 50 seconds to Cameron and over a minute to Taylor(R).

And crucially, having followed the Whelan Cadillac for eight laps in the final green phase of the race, Fernando made the move for the lead of the race on track, just two laps before the caution flag was shown for the final time, having opened up a lead of 12 seconds over Felipe Nasr in two laps.

That’s impressive stuff.