24h in September – the last time
This weekend won’t be the latest the 24 Hours has been held, and the 1968 event was one of the wettest in the event’s history
The weather hit hard 52 years ago, and created some memorable stories
“We had to drive the whole race on parking lights and without wipers. It was terrible, but it was what it was”
The tear gas hanging over the streets of Paris at the back end of May 1968 was a foretaste of what was to come at the Le Mans 24 Hours that year. Rain, mist and fog swirled around the Circuit de la Sarthe for much of a race that was pushed back to September as a result of civil unrest in France at the beginning of the summer.
An autumn date for the French enduro, the first and only until this year, resulted in one of the wettest editions of the race on record. It began raining shortly before the 3pm start – an hour earlier the traditional 4pm kick-off – and didn’t stop until some time after dawn. And sunrise on the last Sunday of September was only shortly before 8am.
So bad were the conditions over the weekend of 28-29 September that some drivers really didn’t want to go out on track, and at least one got out of his car and walked away. The rain was hard at times and just plain persistent at others, before it finally started to dry up with two thirds of the race already run.
Porsche factory driver Jochen Neerpasch remembers some atrocious conditions. “It was the final race of my career and also the most challenging,” recalls Neerpasch, who was in the process of setting up a new competitions department for Ford Germany. “The rain was terrible. It was unbelievable. It was so heavy that on the Mulsanne Straight the smaller-capacity cars were passing us because they were cutting through the water on their narrower tyres. There was so much aquaplaning, you couldn’t go flat.”
It didn’t help that the latest langheck bodywork on the 908 was conceived for maximum straightline speed down the Mulsanne. Downforce wasn’t so much as an afterthought. Even in the dry, a car that could hit nearly 190mph down the long chute needed all the road to get through the Kink at full throttle. “If you ended up at the wrong point of the road as you approached the Kink, it wasn’t flat,” he explains. “The car was moving around a lot all the time; it was very difficult to drive even in the dry.”
Just to compound the problems for Neerpasch and team-mate Rolf Stommelen, an alternator problem afflicted all four of the 908LH Group 6 prototypes. It robbed them of the use of windscreen wipers and headlights. “We had to drive the whole race on parking lights and without wipers because we had to use as little charge from the battery as possible,” he says. “It was terrible. Today we’d say such conditions are too dangerous, but it was what it was back then.”
Problems with the windscreen wipers also hit the solo Formula 1-engined Matra MS630. They needed attention almost right away, Johnny Servoz-gavin ducking into the pits at the end of the opening lap. When they packed up altogether in the night, he decided he’d had enough and refused to drive. That required the team to haul his team-mate, a young Henri Pescarolo, from his bed to take over. The Le Mans rookie began a comeback that hauled the delayed car as high as second, wipers or no.
Looking back, Pescarolo is perplexed by how he managed to propel the hampered prototype up the order. Drafted in late to drive the latest Matra, he admits that he was frightened during practice and qualifying, the only time he ever felt fear at the wheel of a racing car. “I have no idea how I managed to do what I did,” he recalls. “It was almost as if something became free in my mind. I thought that even if I have a big crash, Matra will thank me for trying. Every time I passed the pits, I was thinking, ‘This is my last lap, I am going to crash.’ I was overtaking cars all the time in the spray and I had to decide whether to overtake on the
left or the right. Through that night, I always chose the correct side. It was a miracle.”
Richard Attwood also needed some persuading to get into the Ferrari 250LM he was sharing with car owner David Piper. He admits that he’d lost interest in the race courtesy of the conditions and an early delay.
Attwood was staying in a billet provided by personal sponsor Shell in the paddock and wasn’t minded to get out of bed when Piper’s right-hand man and chief mechanic, Fairfax Dunn, woke him shortly before it was time to take over from the car owner. “We’d had some kind of problem, though neither David nor
I can remember what it was, and the weather was atrocious,” remembers Attwood. “I was in a foul mood, because I didn’t think we were going to get anywhere, so I didn’t see the point of getting back in the car.
“David was doing what I remember as a triple stint and about 15 minutes before he was due in Fax tried to get me out of bed. I must have told him that I really wasn’t interested anymore.
The next knock on the door was David: he’d got out of the car and left it on the pitroad to come and get me. After some haggling, he persuaded me to do the honourable thing.”
Piper went back to the car to do another couple of laps while Attwood readied himself for a task he wasn’t savouring. “We did the swap and to be honest I still wasn’t very interested,” he continues. “It was still pouring with rain and unbeknown to me there was a giant puddle at the end of the pitlane.
“Racing cars back then leaked like sieves and all this water went straight over me. It was probably a good job, because to be honest I was still half asleep. It shocked me into readiness.”
British tin-top racer Alec Poole was driving one of the cars from the minor classes that had the potential to splash past the bigger-engined machinery when the rain was at its worst.
The Irishman recalls becoming slightly irritated by the ‘faster’ machines outgunning his little works Austin-healey Sprite
Le Mans out of the slowest corners only to then hold him up.
“We were able to at the very least keep up with some of the bigger cars,” recalls Poole, who shared the up-to-1300cc class Sprite with Roger Enever. “The problem was they would outdrag us out of Mulsanne Corner and then hold us up. I reverted to some pretty blatant blocking to keep them behind until I was up to speed.”
Poole and Enever had problems of their own into the slow corners, Mulsanne in particular: “There was about four inches of water sitting in the floor. The car wasn’t watertight by any means; I remember there was sometimes as much water running down the inside of the screen as the outside. When you jumped on the brakes, a tidal wave of water came gushing over your feet.”
It hadn’t been the tsunami of public discontent that resulted in Le Mans being pushed back into the clutches of autumn. It was president Charles de Gaulle’s efforts to regain control of France. The catalyst for the unrest was a series of student protests that began at the end of the previous year. Police repression of the demonstration that followed precipitated a national strike.
It was de Gaulle’s ‘back-me-or-sack-me’ referendum that did for the traditional mid-june date of the 24 Hours. The national plebiscite was set for 15 June, the Saturday of the race, and the call the vote made on police resources meant the race couldn’t go ahead as scheduled. There was talk of it being delayed by a couple of weekends, though that would have pushed it back to just a week before the French Grand Prix at Rouen. There was also speculation of a rescheduling to Bastille Weekend on 13-14 July. That, however, was the date of the Watkins Glen 6 Hours, like Le Mans a round of the World Championship for Makes.
Two weeks after the initial decision for a delay, race organiser Automobile Club de l’ouest and the FFSA, the French sporting authority, settled for a date beyond the end of the holiday season. The 24 Hours would be the final round of the world championship right at the end of September.
Porsche and Ford took a win apiece in the two races between the old and the new dates to set up a-winner-takes-all finale between the new 908 and the ageing GT40 run by the Gulf-sponsored JW Automotive squad. The three-litre 908 was coming on strong and was the faster car by Le Mans. Neerpasch reckons that Porsche lost the race – and the championship – rather than Ford winning it.
A vibration resulted in the alternator issue, which was compounded by an ACO rule that didn’t allow for the generator’s replacement. It was also the catalyst for a cooling-fan failure on the Neerpasch/stommelen entry that cost the car nearly an hour.
Stommelen’s recovery drive that year helped put him on the map. “Rolf was unbelievable; he did a fantastic job,” says Neerpasch. “He made up so much time in the night when the conditions were really bad.”
It wasn’t enough, however, for the only surviving 908 to make up the lost ground. The car finished third and was still six laps down on the winning JWA Ford shared by Pedro Rodriguez and Lucien Bianchi, and one down on the Scuderia Tartaruga 2.2-litre Porsche 907 driven by Rico Steinemann and Dieter Spoerry. “We lost that race,” reckons Neerpasch. “In normal conditions we would have won.”
Pescarolo didn’t see the finish, despite his heroics. A puncture with just under three hours to go took out the electrics and sparked a brief fire. Attwood and Piper made it home in a creditable seventh after what the former reckons was “almost certainly my best ever drive” at Le Mans. “The thing was going incredibly well, absolutely flying,” he says.
His pace upset Piper, however. “David was convinced there was an issue with the gearbox, but I could tell in the car that there was nothing wrong with it,” recalls Attwood. “The team was telling me to slow down, and I was starting to go faster. Fax was a bull of a guy, and the team had a spare LM gearbox. He walked out onto the track – there was no pitwall back then – with the thing held on his shoulder by one arm and pointed to it with the other.”
Poole and Enever, meanwhile, finished 15th overall and third in class, which won them The Motor Trophy for the first British car home. What he and Enever didn’t know at the time was just how far from new was the set of tyres that they completed the race on.
“I asked why we weren’t starting the race on new tyres given how wet it was, and Geoff Healey said something about the previous year,” recalls Poole. “It was only a week later sitting in a pub in Dublin that I realised what he’d said. That the tyres had also done the previous year’s race.”
“He walked out onto the track with the gearbox held on his shoulder with one arm, pointing at it with the other”