Backstoriestoafamouswin

All five TWR entries failed scrutineering in the Place des Jacobins in the shadow of the gothic splendour of Le Mans cathedral because they were somewhere between 25 and 30mm too long.

The LM version of the XJR-9 had been running adjustable mounting plates in testing while the rear-wing position was finalised, and the production version had never been put on the car until they arrived in Le Mans city centre.

“They didn’t fit in the truck with the wings on, so the wings never went on until we got to scrutineering,” recalls Macqueen.

“It was a fairly simple fix— a 10-minute job on each car — by extending the front of the plate with some suspensionmounting plates that we had with us in the truck.”

The winning car went into the race with a significantly different set-up to the other four XJR-9LMS. Lammers and Hinckley had raised the front ride height during qualifying in search of a more benignhandling car, but it also ended up running lower at the rear during the race. Lammers suggests that this was an idea that Hinckley came up with between the warm-up and the race, but the engineer suggests that it actually resulted from a mistake.

“When we measured the car after the warm-up we found that the rear was lower than we’d intended,” says Hinckley. “Jan said it was a bit hairy in the Porsche Curves, but that it gave him a bit of extra straight-line speed. It wasn’t anything clever on my part.”

A broken windscreen sustained by the winning car cost its one-lap lead over the chasing Porsche on Sunday morning, but had the TWR Jaguar been in the same spec as 1987 it would have taken much longer. The XJR had previously sported bonded-in windscreens, but for 1988 they were clamped in place courtesy of the rules for the North American IMSA series, which Jaguar entered for the first time that year.

“The screens on the original Jaguars were bonded in and would have needed chiseling out,” says TWR Jaguar designer Tony Southgate. “It made sense to have them standard across all the cars.”

Walkinshaw was in the thick of the action during the change, taking the broken screen off Benoist as he was handed the replacement.