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So, how many races are we talking about here? There were exactly 200 of them, including a few in non-Porsches powered by Porsche engines. That’s unless you add the 1977 Nürburgring 1000km, in which Bell was nominally part of the winning crew but didn’t actually get to drive the victorious 935, owing to team owner Georg Loos’s liking for a ‘fluid’ driver line-up. Of those 200 Porsche-propelled race drives,
Octane’s columnist won (or co-won) 39 and occupied the podium after 86, which is undeniably impressive. Equally impressive is that Bell apparently remembers every one of them in detail, the bad as well as the good. He has won Le Mans five times, and only one (1975) wasn’t in a Porsche. It was instead in a Gulf GR8, but even that was run by the team and under the sponsor of the 917 in which Bell made his Porsche racing debut in 1971. It was the Buenos Aires 1000km and Bell won with Jo Siffert. But he didn’t savour the victory, Ferrari’s Ignazio Giunti – second on the grid, to Bell’s car’s third – having died in a fiery crash.
Nowadays Bell is a bit of a brand ambassador for Porsche, among others, but there’s no corporatism in this 276-page, amply illustrated book. Whether concentrating on the Porsche drives makes for a better book than a complete Bell race-based biography would have done is debatable, but it does provide a theme of sorts.
The format divides Bell’s Porsche-related career into four eras, the last spanning 1988 through to wind-down after 1997 and his final race (Historics excepted) at 2000’s Daytona 24 Hours in Steve O’Rourke’s 996 GT3-R . It was a low-key end, the car eliminated in an accident after 75 laps, but vicariously joyful for Bell, who watched his son Justin finish second in a Corvette.
A book such as this could easily become a relentless race-by-race slog, but it rises above that thanks to the contexts set by Richard Heseltine (yes, another Octane contributor) before Derek gives his extensive, insightful anecdotes on the races, the engineering, the background, the personalities, the politics. The filming of Le Mans with Steve McQueen gets a good airing, too.
You don’t have to be a Porsche fan to enjoy this book. Nor even a Bell fan; the tales of an intriguing race era standing up on their own. And in the intro, non-Porsches get their turn, with a great pic of Bell’s two-wheeling Alfa GTV at Bathurst.