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.
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.
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| The Courage C34 at scrutineering - Jason Thompson with hands on hips |
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| Wollek waiting to rejoin with shiny new rear deck. Thompson in white cap in front of fuel rig |
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| Andretti pits, Thompson attends |
