THE GREATEST SPARS OF SPA
The 70th running of the Spa 24 Hours takes place this weekend. Autosport picks out some of the classic encounters of the past
1978 CAPRI WINS A SPICEY ONE
Gordon Spice finally got a Spa 24 Hours win on the board in 1978, the last race on the old 8.76-mile Circuit de Spa-francorchamps – Burnenville, Masta Kink and all. Yet his victory together with local hero Teddy Pilette aboard a Ford Capri 3.0S wasn’t plain sailing – time and time again they had to come from behind.
Spice led from the front row, but at the end of the first hour the Capri had tumbled down the order after slowing on track.
By the time he’d trundled back to the pits and had fuel pick-up problems rectified, the Capri was 22nd.
The car, run out of Gordon Spice Racing’s Silverstone workshops, was back in contention by midnight, into the lead around 1.30am and two laps clear at 9am when problems struck again. This time it was the car striking the Blanchimont barriers – at 140mph – after a puncture. Remarkably light damage was repaired in just seven minutes, and Spice moved back to the front when the
BMW 3.0CSI shared by Claude Bourgoignie and Reine Wisell blew up. Even now Spice and Pilette weren’t home and dry.
More time went west when a broken fan coupling forced team manager Keith Greene to cannibalise his company car.
That wasn’t the Ford squad’s only issue. Spice had fallen out with Pilette mid-race and the team boss didn’t want to entrust the run to the finish to his team-mate. The problem was that Spice had already hit the 14-hour maximum drive time.“my wife, Mandy, managed to persuade the officials, who she’d kept fed and ‘coffeed’ through the race, that there had been an error,” recalls the Brit. “I was quicker than Teddy anyway, so I probably needed to be in the car.”
Spice was also quicker, substantially so, than new leader Dirk Vermeersch in the Juma BMW 530i he shared with Eddy Joosen and Raijmond van Hove. With an hour to go, he was a minute behind, but erased that in a matter of four laps on the way to a narrow victory.
“We were bloody fast, but always coming from behind,” remembers Spice. “It was remarkable really, because the car finished with a great big dirty crease down the side after my off.”
1981 ROTARY CLUB BEATS BMW
Tom Walkinshaw was never one to mince his words. He gave co-driver Pierre Dieudonne some clear instructions as he strapped him into their Mazda RX-7 at the end of the night in 1981. The Belgian had been suggesting that the second place they were holding at the time wasn’t bad for a car that already had suspicious noises coming from its gearbox, but the boss was having none of it.
“He said he was only interested in winning and told me to go flat-out,” recalls Dieudonne. “He allowed me an extra 500rpm and said ‘push, push, push’.”
And that’s what the last two-driver line-up to win the 24 Hours did for the remainder of the race. Dieudonne reckons it proved crucial in their eventual victory, the first for a Japanese manufacturer in the Spa enduro.
The rotary-engined Mazda, with Dieudonne at the wheel, got back on the same lap as the leading Juma BMW 530i shared by Eddy Joosen and Jean-claude Andruet around 8am. By lunchtime the two cars were on a par, then it was cat-and-mouse until the BMW broke a camshaft rocker with 90 minutes to go.
“I’m convinced that Tom’s decision to increase the pace was crucial,” reckons Dieudonne. “It put them under pressure and that’s why they had the engine problem.”
Schnitzer appeared to be home and dry in a battle of the BMWS between the German team and its opposite number from Italy: Gabriele Rafanelli’s Bigazzi squad. Even Steve Soper, who shared the second-placed Bigazzi BMW M3 with Christian Danner and Jean-michel Martin, was happy to settle for runner-up spot.
The Briton had showered and changed, and was ready to head back to the UK – only Rafanelli had other ideas. Danner had been due to complete the race, but the team boss wanted his star driver in the car. “I wanted someone angry enough to drive like crazy and get the car to the front,” explains Rafanelli. “Steve was that man.”
Bigazzi got a sniff of victory when the Schnitzer car – driven by Eric van de Poele, Joachim Winkelhock and Altfrid Heger – lost one of the two laps by which it led shortly before the end of the 22nd hour, and that scent became stronger when the leader made its final pitstop ahead of the chasing car. The Italian team’s suspicion that van de Poele might be marginal on fuel was confirmed by the ‘7500’ scrawled on a bit of paper being waved from the pitwall.
The Belgian driver had to cut his revs, which explains the rate at which Soper closed. The pits-to-car radio had failed, making communication difficult. Van de Poele only received the ‘ATTACK’ signal from his pitcrew after Soper had passed him at the end of the penultimate lap. Van de Poele came back at Soper over the final lap, finishing a shade under half a second down in what remains the closest ever finish to the Spa 24 Hours.
Porsche and Freisinger Motorsport scored a David-v-goliath win with its N-GT class 911 GT3-RS against the top-division GT cars. Everyone remembers the rain – the greatest leveller of them all – but the victory for Stephane Ortelli, Marc Lieb and Romain Dumas owed just as much to the tactical nous of the team and famed Porsche engineer Norbert Singer.
The Porsche was quick thanks to its Dunlop tyres and tractionenhancing rear-engined layout. But Freisinger played some strategic masterstrokes that gained it fistfuls of time. Ortelli put the Porsche into the lead early in hour two. He wasn’t even leading N-GT after a
cautious start when he saw the clouds gathering. He went into fuelsave mode and was able to go longer on his first tank than his rivals – and straight onto wet-weather tyres when the heavens opened.
“Everyone else had changed onto new slicks, so had to come back in for wets,” says Ortelli, “and suddenly we were leading by a lap.”
The Freisinger Porsche gained more time in the night during a protracted safety car. Singer realised that the barrier repairs were going to take some time and radioed to Ortelli that he didn’t want to see him back in the pits any time soon. The Frenchman’s fuel-save strategy in the crocodile was both extreme and ingenious.
“I would accelerate out of Les Combes, turn off the engine and lights and coast until Pif-paf,” he recalls. “Then I’d bump-start the car in fifth gear. I did that for two hours and gained a pitstop on everyone.”
There was a high rate of attrition that year among the GT cars, but Ortelli points out that Freisinger had finished third in 2002 and would do so again in ’04. “We were always competitive at that time,” he says. “The rain turned us from a team capable of finishing on the podium to a contender for outright victory.”
The German Phoenix team pretty much dominated the 24 Hours in 2006 with its Aston Martin DBR9. But it ultimately fell short in a thrilling finish as the Vitaphone Maserati squad swept through to its second consecutive victory.
Andrea Piccini had put the Aston on pole, established a lead through his opening double-stint and then held it – together with Marcel Fassler, Jean-denis Deletraz and Stephane Lemeret – more or less for 22 hours. Then it rained. Eric van de Poele, who shared the Maserati MC12 with Michael Bartels and Andrea Bertolini, started to make giant inroads into Piccini’s advantage as both stayed out on slicks. He gained the better part of a minute on the Italian in the penultimate hour.
“I knew van de Poele was a Spa expert, but I couldn’t understand how he could be so much quicker than me, like five seconds some laps,” recalls Piccini, whose DBR9 was on Michelin tyres to the MC12’S Pirellis. “I understood some years later when I was racing an LMP2 car at Spa on Pirellis and was faster than everyone at one point when it started to rain and we all stayed on slicks.”
The Maserati jumped the Aston in the final round of pitstops, and Bartels was able to edge away from Fassler. A late splash for the Phoenix car, thanks to an exhaust lambda-sensor failure that increased the car’s fuel consumption, put the result beyond doubt.
2014 – IT’S ULTRA-CLOSE FOR R8
“When you win the Spa 24 Hours by seven seconds, you know it’s been a tough one and will be something you remember as a bit special.” So says WRT boss Vincent Vosse of his team’s win in 2014.
The lead factory-supported WRT Audi R8 LMS ultra shared by Rene Rast, Laurens Vanthoor and Markus Winkelhock came out on top in a back-and-forth battle with the Marc VDS BMW Z4 GT3 of Lucas Luhr, Dirk Werner and Markus Palttala.
The problem WRT and its number-one crew had was that the BMW was going further on its fuel. WRT couldn’t get a full dump into the car without losing vital seconds, so opted to short-fuel the car. That meant the BMW was going to save a stop and win the race.
The balance changed when the BMW ran into an electronic glitch – the ABS and traction control switched themselves off – and the Audi retook the lead in the 21st hour. The pendulum swung back in the penultimate hour when the Audi needed new discs and pads for a third time. But the Audi had the pace to regain the lead with Rast at the wheel, and then do it all over again when Marc VDS rolled the dice at the final stops and opted to leave Werner on old tyres.