WHEN JAGUAR ALMOST BLEW VICTORY
Jaguar too klem ans victory in 1988 for the first time in over 30 years, but the race was son early lost lostintheclosingstages.by Gary watkins
One more gear change, and Jaguar’s comeback victory would have been derailed at the 1988 Le Mans 24 Hours. The British manufacturer came that close to losing its first win in the French enduro since 1957 in the final hour. That the winning Tomwalkinshaw Racing Jaguar XJR-9LM lasted the course owed everything to the mechanical sympathies of lead driver Jan Lammers, and perhaps even some kind of sixth sense.
The Dutchman, who shared the victorious Jaguar XJR-9LM with Andy Wallace and Johnny Dumfries, knew he had a gearbox problem as the 24 Hours drew to a close. He’d listened to teammate Raul Boesel tell the tale of the retirement of his Jaguar in the small hours as he’d been tying his bootlaces in readiness for his return to the cockpit in the penultimate hour. And when the symptoms he’d just heard described by the Brazilian appeared to be manifesting themselves right behind him, he took a bold decision that ultimately secured himself a place in sportscar racing’s history books.
Lammers left the car in fourth and didn’t touch the lever again— he didn’t change gear from shortly before the end of his penultimate stint through to the end of the race. Thanks to the massive torque of the seven-litre Jaguar V12, he was able to continue at a decent lick in a gear designed to send the car down the Mulsanne Straight, then unsullied by chicanes, at 200mph.
What’s more, he was able to clutchslip his way out of the pits after his final pitstop. It didn’t matter if he damaged the clutch, he points out, “because I wasn’t going to need it again”.
“Raul said that he had been shifting from second to third, and it jumped out of gear,” recalls Lammers, who was at Le Mans for the second time with the Silk Cut-sponsored TWR squad. “He then explained that he went to fourth, and it jumped out again, and when he went to fifth, he said: ‘All of a sudden I had an empty ’box’. I went from second to third, and it jumped out. I went for fourth, and I expected it to jump out a second time,” continues Lammers. “It didn’t, and I immediately decided that I wasn’t going to touch the gear lever anymore.
“I didn’t know exactly what was wrong, but I’d had enough experience of preparing gearboxes when I’d been racing in Formula Ford 1600 to know how sensitive they could be. I just tried to make sure that I didn’t put one jitter through the transmission.”
Exactly how many laps Lammers did in this hobbled state isn’t quite clear. Eddie Hinckley, who engineered the winning Jaguar, reckons the problem struck a couple of laps before his driver was due to pit. His run sheets suggest that Lammers did another seven laps after his final stop. So that’s nine laps – or the better part of 40 minutes – in one gear.
Lammers knew that one false move could spell disaster: “I accelerated very slowly and when I lifted off for the corners, I tried to make sure that there was always a constant load going through the gearbox. I thought that if I accelerated or decelerated too quickly, the whole thing was going to fall apart.”
Lammers was probably right. The main pinion shaft of the five-speed transmission, which had its roots in a gearbox developed by British constructor March for CART singleseaters in North America using Hewland DG internals, had split in two at a point where an oilway ran through it. Somehow it was held together over those final laps by the splined hub that took the drive from fourth and fifth gears that straddled the break.
The chief mechanic on the winning #2 Jaguar, Rod Benoist, remembers the stripdown of the gearbox back at TWR HQ in Kidlington after the race. “As we took the gear cluster out, we saw that the main shaft had split in two,” he remembers. “It was a case of scratching our heads and thinking, ‘Thank goodness for that.”
Benoist thinks the chances of Lammers being able to select another gear were “about absolutely zero”. Alastair Macqueen, the chief engineer on Jaguar’s Group C programme, reckons that the Dutchman could have selected fifth, but that it wouldn’t have been a lot of use to him. Making it around the tight Mulsanne and Arnage corners, let alone getting going from standstill in the pits, would have been nigh-on impossible in the higher gear. And a downshift would definitely have spelled disaster. That means Lammers really was one gear change away from bringing Jaguar’s victory hopes to a juddering halt.
Lammers’ role in securing Jaguar’s first Le Mans victory in more than 30 years shouldn’t be underestimated, reckons Macqueen. “Jan had brilliant technical sympathy,” he says. “His part in that victory has been underplayed.”
First, Lammers had to recognise the problem. Then he had to drive around it and keep up a decent pace. The Jaguar’s lap times didn’t drop away massively over the final laps, according to Hinckley. “Normally, the times would have been in the 3m26s and 27s,” he says. “They went into the 3m30s straight away and, right at the end, down into the 40s, but such a drop wasn’t unusual in those times for the final stages of Le Mans.”
Lammers’ ability to keep up a decent pace was crucial at a time when the chasing factory Porsche 962C shared
“The main gearbox shaft had split” Rod Benoist