AUGUST 2001 (ISSUE 89)

Three years later, in August 2001, we were still majoring on the perhaps traditional mid-summer subject of Le Mans, but this time with a slight twist. There had been no official works entry this season, but a 996 GT3RS prepared by the German Seikel Motorsport team took a well-deserved win – in what we described as ‘atrocious’ weather – in the GT3 class. The front cover, too, featured a determined-looking Mike Youles at the wheel of the PK Motorsport GT3RS, his own 996 clearly bearing the taped-up battle scars of a highspeed coming-together with the Armco – thanks to that famously torrential French rain again.

Elsewhere, a detailed press pack from the Porsche PR department in Stuttgart had gifted us the basis of a 10-page analysis of the company’s then half-century at Le Mans, beginning with Auguste Veuillet’s and Edmond Mouche’s class win in June 1951, in an alloybodied 356. And the motorsport theme continued with a fascinating examination of the flawed V12 that Porsche had developed in the early 1990s for the Footwork Arrows F1 car. ‘The wrong project at the wrong time,’ wrote Peter Morgan. Isn’t that so often the way in life?