It’s 25 years since a road car beat all-comers in the fabled 24-hour race. This is the very car, and those who were there tell its tale
It’s 25 years since this McLaren F1 won Le Mans. Paul Fearnley relates how the world’s greatest ever road car became an alltime legend at La Sarthe
There was a fundamental but unscientific parameter amid and behind the cutting-edge technology of the McLaren F1 GT: would you want to drive it to the South of France? Right from his first sketch in 1988 to a ten-hour ‘happy clappy’ blue-sky session with the original engineering team, via three pages of handwritten notes to himself, had designer Gordon Murray envisioned making a 24-hour detour around Le Mans. The creation of the world’s fastest road car – one that was also comfortable and, in supercar terms at least, practical – was his chance to get away from racing after 20 years spent as an innovative and successful force in Formula 1. ‘I had to forget about motorsport,’ says Murray. ‘But you can’t unlearn what you know. That’s not to say I designed a racing car. I didn’t. If I had, I would have given it much longer overhangs, a wider track and a better option of venturi shape.’ Well, of course.
‘So I wasn’t that interested when first approached about racing it,’ he continues. ‘Ron Dennis definitely wasn’t. It was the cars’ owners who made the decision for us. They planned to race it with or without our help and I was worried that they might make it unsafe, slow and unreliable.’
Which left Murray with a conundrum. ‘We had to fit a rollcage because the governing body wouldn’t accept the carbonfibre structure. That pissed me off: it was plenty strong enough. We fitted fire extinguishers, spent one day in a wind tunnel and did a new nose, stuck a wing on the back, adjusted the springs and ride height – and went racing.’ For context, the original road car spent 1100 hours being honed in the wind tunnel.
The resulting GTR iteration won the first six rounds of the 1995 BPR Global GT Championship, which further whetted those owners’ appetites for Le Mans. The car, however, was unproven beyond four-hour races and McLaren was again reluctant – yet, again, it acquiesced. An ‘endurance kit’ that included carbon brake discs was swiftly assembled on the understanding that all the owners would buy it – and also test it for 24 hours at Magny-Cours at the end of May.
‘The car hardly missed a beat and I thought the owners would be happy,’ says McLaren’s customer support coordinator Jeff Hazell. ‘But they were glum indeed. They said, “We thought we were going to Le Mans to have a thrash and be back at our hotel in time for dinner. Now we are going to have to buy more spares, take more people and take it a lot more seriously.”’ That, clearly, wasn’t the McLaren way.
Crew chief Paul Lanzante, however, thought it all a joke – to begin with, at least: ‘We had put on a good show in BPR’s GT2 category with a Porsche 911 but, because we were new, we had not received an invitation to Le Mans. We had also done a lot of restoration work for McLaren
and so I knew Ron Dennis on a one-to-one basis. He said there’d be a bonus in it if we won. Yeah, right. I thought he was winding me up. ’
McLaren’s established privateer teams were not amused that Lanzante had been co-opted to run an extra GTR under the banner of Kokusai Kaihatsu Racing – despite the fact that its main sponsor was a circumcision specialist! There were murmurings about it being a works effort, which is something that Lanzante, a Le Mans novice, has always refuted: he had just six weeks to acclimatise to the refreshed test mule after his designated chassis was commandeered to replace the one crashed by GTC Gulf Racing at Jarama in April.
‘For the official photo after scrutineering at Le Mans we called in our catering staff and some mates to make the team look bigger,’ he says. ‘There were only half-a-dozen of us – but we were not understaffed. I had asked for – and got – the number one McLaren mechanic. Then there was Dermot Walsh, a friend of mine at McLaren; I wanted him because he knew the engineers and could act as go-between.
‘I copped some flak. The truth, however, is that we had neither more nor less than the customers. The mistake the others made was that they thought they could do better than the factory. They wanted the credit. There is a pride that comes with all racing teams, I suppose. Personally, not knowing the car as well as those teams, I took advice from the factory. Actually, though, there wasn’t much I wasn’t prepared for.’
Lanzante’s drivers were Frenchman Yannick Dalmas (a prototype Tom Kristensen with two wins and a second place from four starts since 1991); the experienced Japanese Masanori Sekiya (so in love with Le Mans that he got married in the city in 1987); and JJ Lehto (the potential loose cannon). The undeniably talented Finn not only had limited experience of endurance racing and low-downforce cars but also arrived on the back of a disappointing final season of F1, blighted by a serious neck injury.
Lanzante’s fears were exacerbated when an engine was buzzed and the lower rear wishbones bent over kerbs during qualifying; an agricultural stiffening mod was rushed through and flown over for the race – and only Kokusai Kaihatsu Racing fitted them.
Hazell was worried, too: ‘Yannick knew the race very well and is a very particular person. We needed that. I had not worked with him before but had got feedback about him from other engineers: that he was demanding – but right. In contrast, I wasn’t sure that JJ had the correct credentials.
‘As for the team, I was assured that it would have a full crew and we were simply to provide our normal level of service. But it arrived with fewer people than I had been led to believe. This didn’t make our other customers very happy because they could see more and more McLaren people in that garage as the weekend progressed.’
Those ‘works’ rumours were further fuelled by Lanzante’s decision to fit a new engine for the race: ‘I went to the support truck and there were two spares. One had done five
hours; the other was brand new. I took the latter. Because of that another team thought we had a special engine. But they’d had the same option. Yes, we were coming in a lap earlier for refuelling during the race, though that was only because I was terrified about running out of petrol.’
Dalmas undertook the opening stint even though Lehto had set the fastest McLaren time in qualifying – good enough for ninth on the grid behind the open-topped sports-prototypes. Outright victory was far from the team’s mind. But when it began to rain after an hour, the GTRs, with the smooth delivery from their large and torquey BMW V12s with variable valve timing, came into their own. That of John Nielsen/Jochen Mass/Dr Thomas Bscher took the lead on lap 16 – and a variety of McLarens would share that honour thereafter.
‘Our strategy was to push – but not like crazy,’ says Dalmas. ‘We were very careful with the gearbox; at every stop we added oil. We saved the car. I don’t want to be critical, but some of the others started very fast.’
Both Gulf GTRs were damaged – one survived to finish fourth, the other was sidelined on the spot – and the racefavourite Courage-Porsche wrecked its rear wing and right-rear suspension when Mario Andretti, while endeavouring to join Graham Hill as a winner of motor racing’s Triple Crown, was wrong-footed by a slower car.
The conditions during the night were as bad as had ever been endured by five-time winner Derek Bell, co-driving the Harrods-sponsored GTR. Yet they didn’t seem to bother Lehto in the slightest. More than 20 seconds per lap quicker than the next-fastest on occasion, he hauled the stealth-black Ueno Clinic car into contention.
‘JJ was a bit above the others,’ says Lanzante. ‘There was one moment that blew my mind. I could see on the TV monitor that he was hanging the rear end out. I radioed to tell him to take it easy. He was still drifting the car when he replied: “I said not to worry. It will be OK.”’
Says Hazell: ‘He was astonishing. We asked him to slow down and he said, “I have already. I’m having fun.” He was spinning wheels on the straight when shifting gears and was sideways rally-style in the chicanes. I didn’t think we needed to go that fast to win – but it was clear that this car would be a strong contender.’
Lanzante adds: ‘Having him was definitely in our favour. There is, however, a magnetism that draws engineers and mechanics to the quickest driver. Everybody wants to be a part of it. If a rival team saw this as us receiving beneficial treatment, I don’t blame them. But if there was going to be a disaster, I wanted it to be me causing it.
Pressure was beginning to build. The leading McLaren was delayed by clutch trouble – ‘We had provided full written
information about the correct set-up, but one team chose to ignore it,’ says Hazell – and it promptly crashed a few corners after its return to the track, Nielsen being caught out by cold tyres and brakes. The opportunity for victory then lay between the two dicing McLarens and the Courage-Porsche, which was closing relentlessly after its half-hour lost to repairs.
‘I thought Paul’s team had less chance than our others because its crew did not know the car as well,’ says Hazell. ‘He had lots of info coming at him: from the drivers, engineers, tyre people, BMW ’s technicians and McLaren. If you are not familiar with how to prioritise that correctly, you can make a mistake by becoming overloaded. We could see it going off the rails at one point.’
Explanations for the dropping of the car onto its brake discs at a pit stop differ, as does the apportioning of blame, depending on to whom you speak. Reasons for the enforced departure of McLaren personnel from the Lanzante garage are also at a variance. Given the team’s catholic composition and surprising competitiveness, such a mix-up was perhaps inevitable.
‘That’s when politics kicked in,’ says Lanzante. ‘Annoyed, I called Yannick and JJ in from our caravan – they were having a kip – sat them down and told them: “There’s a new plan: we are going to do everything we can to win.” Yannick was to do the last stint, as planned, but I explained that if we needed some extra pace then I would put JJ in for the final hour. It wasn’t a race for us until four hours before the end.’
Says Dalmas: ‘The motivation was strong. It was important for the drivers to feel that ambience, to feel this atmosphere. When you drive for a team, even if it is small, you must feel the positivity from the people. We pushed a little more – but again with a certain philosophy: all the time we protected the car. To win? That was difficult to say. But we worked hard and believed more and more that success will come.’
Michelin began to believe, too.
‘They started to really get behind us,’ says Hazell. ‘We had terrific support from BMW, but they were the people who sealed the win. The conditions were changing a lot, from full wets to intermediates to – almost – slicks, and they ensured that we always had the best tyres on the car.’
Meanwhile, the rival Goodyear-shod GTR began to suffer clutch problems. This came to a head at its final pit stop: no gear could be selected and three minutes were lost. So was the race.
‘We didn’t “win” Le Mans – but we could have lost it,’ says Lanzante. ‘It would have been easy to cock-up big-time. I’m not going to say that we did a better job than everybody else, or that we were quicker. No, it was just one of those things that clicked. It helped that we weren’t hungry to win
‘IT WASN’T A RACE FOR US UNTIL FOUR HOURS BEFORE THE END’ – PAUL LANZANTE
from the outset. We were enthusiasts rather than bountyhunters there for the money and the glory.
‘At the time, it was just another weekend’s racing. Absolutely. Monday morning, we were back at work preparing our GT2 car. It was only much later that I realised what had been done. Now I appreciate it more.
‘All the drivers did their bit but, if any single person deserved the credit for winning, it was JJ. Yannick was great, too. With his experience of Le Mans, he was our captain and was always telling JJ to be careful, waving his finger at him.’
Dalmas adds: ‘A team at Le Mans needs a leader with experience, with a vision of the race. But for success a team also needs three drivers that are very strong and who have a relationship that it is straightforward and friendly. JJ did a real good job during the night. We modified the tyres a little – cut more treads for the rain – and he was really good on those. There comes a point in every race when one of the three needs to push hard when given the green light.
‘I have had the opportunity to drive for Peugeot, Porsche, BMW and McLaren. Every Le Mans for me was different: different car, different people and different drivers. 1995 is a strong memory because of the conditions and because we had not been very optimistic about winning. That success was a very special feeling. McLaren is a big name and, while I don’t want to get a big head, when you win with that name I think you go in the history books.’
McLarens had finished a remarkable 1-3-4-5 on debut. ‘We did so well because so much of our car was a road car, with all the validation that brings,’ says Hazell. ‘It was waterproof, so it wasn’t going to misfire in the rain. We also had the right conditions – I am convinced that the synchromesh gearbox would not have lasted in the dry – and the right drivers for those conditions.
‘I vividly remember Gordon Murray walking towards me, hand outstretched: “You are a star!” I was in tears. We never expected to go there with a test car and a made-up team and win. It was a fairytale. Ron simply said “Well done”…’
As for Gordon Murray, it’s his belief that winning Le Mans is more difficult than winning an F1 championship. ‘It’s a whole season’s worth of races without stopping. It wasn’t just that we won, however, it was the way we won: on debut, and with a production GT car against prototypes. That was pretty bloody special. I had been dead against it, but now I’m glad that we raced and I’m proud of it.’
You know what’s coming… ‘My only regret is that we didn’t drive the winning car there and back. That would have been the ultimate.’
Of course, that wouldn’t have been possible. Or would it? Lanzante: ‘You wouldn’t have wanted to drive the car there because of the risk factor. But it certainly could have been driven back. No problem.’
‘THAT SUCCESS WAS A VERY SPECIAL FEELING. WHEN YOU WIN WITH McLAREN YOU GO IN THE HISTORY BOOKS’ – YANNICK DALMAS