DEREK BELL
The Legend
It had to happen. I have been driving piston-powered machinery since I was five years old, starting with tractors, so I like to think I have an affinity for piloting anything with an internal combustion engine. On the flipside, I have never been a fan of electric cars, but I am aware that the future has already arrived and there’s no turning back.
So, in February, I got my bum in a Porsche Taycan and was floored by how good it was. Obviously, given my links with Porsche, you might say I am biased, but anyone who knows me will tell you I am normally a sceptic about this sort of thing. I was fully prepared for the slingshot acceleration, but it was the fact that you didn’t have to make allowances elsewhere that amazed me.
And the point of this? Well, it’s clear to me that motor sport is heading in this direction.
We cannot simply stick our heads in the sand and expect it to be otherwise. I admit that Formula E has yet to excite me, but this appears to be the way forward, with several other categories following suit. Even rallycross is heading this way.
Being an old bloke, I am not sure that I am prepared to embrace all this electric stuff, but those several years my junior clearly are. The world is changing and motor sport needs to adapt accordingly.
That said, I got a little moist of eye in the run before the start of the Daytona 24 Hours when I demonstrated my old Löwenbräu-liveried Porsche 962. I have written about this car extensively before, so won’t do so again, other than to say how nice it was to get in a car without needing an army of laptop-wielding technicians on hand just to start it. Instead, I merely turned an ignition key, buried my right foot and off I went. Might I have mentioned before that I am more analogue than digital? Yes, thought so…
While on the subject of sports car racing, I have mentioned more than once in this column how frustrated I am that there is little commonality between regulations for top-flight sports cars in the US and in Europe. Well, not any more.
A new premier class for sports prototypes called LMDh – it stands for Le Mans Daytona, but nobody seems to know what the lowercase ‘h’ represents – was announced at the Daytona International Speedway ahead of the 24-hour race. Numerous teams were present to learn that LMDh cars will be able to race alongside Hypercar entries for overall victory in the WeatherTech SportsCar series and the World Endurance Championship, but manufacturers remain cagey as to how interested they are in this brave new world.
As for the race itself, it certainly held my interest, although I couldn’t help noticing that the grid was a little thin. And then a few days later, I received the worst of news: former winner John Andretti had lost his battle with cancer. John was something of an all-rounder, competing in everything from NASCAR to Top Fuel dragsters, but he was perhaps at his best in a sports car.
I was his team-mate at Daytona in 1989, and it’s a memory I cherish. Jim Busby invited me to drive his Porsche 962, which was one of the best-prepared cars I ever raced in the USA. I was delighted to be paired with Bob Wollek, who was the fiercest of rivals on track but a great mate off it, and John who I had raced against several times. Bob knew Daytona like the back of his hand, while John was pretty handy in a prototype.
We were all too aware that it was going to be a Jaguar-versus-Nissan battle during qualifying, though, and sure enough Geoff Brabham put the all-singing, all-dancing Electramotive Nissan on pole by about a century. That thing was insanely fast. And us? We were languishing back in 15th place on the grid.
There are races when everything goes wrong, and I had an inkling early on that this might be one of them. Ours was one of nine 962s in the field, and it was comfortably the slowest. We had no pace, at all. We had problems with the electrics, the brakes, just about everything.
Then something amazing happened. Crew chief Mike Colucci and his team worked around the clock and transformed the car for the race. The 962 was completely different and we came home the winners, ahead of one of the works Jaguars. I believe the margin of victory was about 80 seconds. If you had told me beforehand that we would finish, let alone win, I wouldn’t have believed you. It was also my eighth win in a 24-hour race.
I didn’t drive alongside John again. He went off to race in Champ Cars, then stock cars, so we were on different paths. We still saw each other from time to time, though, and he remained a charming and unassuming gent to the end. John Andretti proved that nice guys win.
‘BEING AN OLD BLOKE, I AM NOT SURE THAT I AM PREPARED TO EMBRACE ALL THIS ELECTRIC STUFF’