BATTLE AT THE TOP
CAN GLICKENHAUS CHALLENGE TOYOTA? The rise of a new marque and why it believes there's a chance against the big manufacturers
Jim Glickenhaus doesn’t mind being called a privateer. In fact, he revels in that description and his underdog status. Yes, the American is a car manufacturer, or at least is well on the way to becoming a fully fledged one, but he’s in the tradition of a line of independents to take on the challenge of the Le Mans 24 Hours. The difference between his organisation and so many of the specialist builders that preceded him – think de Cadenet, WM and Panoz – is he’s pitching up with a genuine chance of victory. That’s what he thinks, and that’s what the new Le Mans Hypercar regulations were conceived to allow.
Glickenhaus Racing will be on the grid with a pair of new LMHS for the 89th running of the great race courtesy of those rules. They have facilitated the ambition of this retired film director with a handful of cult classics behind him to go to Le Mans with a car bearing his name, and to do it with much more than just a faint hope of winning. But for LMH, there would be no Glickenhaus-pipo 007 LMHS competing at the Circuit de la Sarthe this month.
The new rules, devised to slash costs and level the playing field between the big and the little guys, opened the door to Glickenhaus, and then held it ajar for him to have a shot at overall victory. “That’s what I’m doing this for: to try to win Le Mans,” he says. “Why would I build a car and not believe I’m going there to win? But I wouldn’t be here if it was still LMP1. We couldn’t afford it, and if we could, we wouldn’t have a chance against the factories anyway.”
There’s another reason why Glickenhaus is participating at the very pinnacle of sportscar racing after a decade taking on the challenge of the Nurburgring 24 Hours with cars of his own construction. And he can thank LMH for this one, too.
“These rules allowed me to build something that looks like the cars I remember racing at Le Mans in the 1960s and 1970s,” he says. “A car that looks good.”
A desire to build something good-looking is where the Glickenhaus racing story begins. Back in 2005 he commissioned Italian styling house Pininfarina to produce what he calls a “homage” to the majestic Ferrari 330 P3/4 that won the 1967 Daytona 24 Hours with Chris Amon and Lorenzo Bandini and now sits in his collection in Sleepy Hollow, New York. This reimagination of a classic was based on a Ferrari Enzo chassis, as well as its powertrain, and became known as the Ferrari P4/5 by Pininfarina after the Italian manufacturer gave the car full blessing. When it was unveiled at the 2006 Pebble Beach concours in California, the obvious question was what to do next. The answer was obvious for a man who also owns an ex-penske Lola-chevrolet MKII Can-am – to go racing with the thing.
The Le Mans ambition was already in the back of Glickenhaus’s mind. He admits that he approached race organiser the Automobile Club de l’ouest about whether he could use the P4/5 as the basis of some kind of GT contender for the 24 Hours. It was quietly pointed out to him that there wasn’t a place in the 24 Hours for one-off specials, so he took his ideas to the promoter of the Nurburgring enduro. It did, and still does, welcome one-offs in its SPX class.
Five years after the launch of the P4/5, he was on the grid for the Nordschleife classic with the first car to carry the Scuderia Cameron Glickenhaus name. It wasn’t the P4/5, but a lookalike thereof. Underneath it wasn’t an Enzo, but a 430 Stradale upgraded for racing with components from the GT2 version of the car.
“I would love to have raced a car with the Enzo’s V12,” he says, “but the reality was that it wasn’t going to work. It was way too inefficient on fuel; those days had passed.”
A car known as the SCG P4/5 Competizione was followed in 2012 by the P4/5 Modificata, a hybrid version of the original. This was an important step on the road to Le Mans because Glickenhaus forged his first links with Podium Advanced Technologies, a then-new company set up by a group of friends who’d studied for their doctorates at Turin University. The company was brought in by N-technology, which masterminded the P4/5 race project, for its hybrid expertise. The company based in Pont-saint-martin an hour north of Turin has gone on to become the centre of Glickenhaus technical operations. “I stayed with them because they’re the brightest of young guys,” he says. “They understood hybrids, but they also understood racing and the road stuff.
Podium was able to do everything for us.”
Podium was responsible for the first bespoke Glickenhaus, or rather SCG: the 003C that came on stream for the marque’s Nurburgring campaign in 2015. Two years later, it claimed pole position for the 24 Hours. By the time the next racer – the Glickenhaus (not SCG) 004 that also forms the basis of the marque’s first bona fide road car – arrived at the Nurburgring in 2020, the marque was already working on plans to step up to sportscar racing’s big time.
Glickenhaus announced its intention to build an LMH in November 2018, a month ahead of the publication of the regulations. It beat Toyota to the punch in that respect, though Podium technical director Luca Ciancetti insists that the programme didn’t get going in earnest until much later the following year.
“Jim and I had been working on the idea in the months before,” says Ciancetti, “but once we got the first draft of the regulations we understood that they were pitched at the right level for us. The philosophy allows a privateer to do a car at a reasonable budget and try to fight with the bigger manufacturer teams.”
Podium, as a young company, brought in what Ciancetti calls “people from Formula 1” to bolster its team for the LMH programme. Among their number is
“These rules allowed me to build a car that looks like those that raced at Le Mans in the 1960s and ’70s”
ex-toro Rosso chief designer Mark Tatham, who has worked as a consultant on the 007.
Podium was also responsible for Pipo Moteurs, another unfashionable choice of partner given its lack of Le Mans track record, being chosen to produce the 007’s engine. Ciancetti asked the Lyon-based company with a proven pedigree in both rallying and rallycross to put forward a proposal for the engine concept.
Pipo managing director Frederic Barozier, whose organisation developed the engines that took three World Rally Championship manufacturers’ titles with Peugeot and two with Ford, was coincidently already evaluating the LMH concept. “I was looking at the regulations, but wondering who I could sell an engine to because big manufacturers want to promote their own technology,” he says. “Then Luca approached me in December 2019.”
Barozier makes no secret that the 3.5-litre twin-turbo V8 his organisation designed for the Glickenhaus builds on Pipo’s experience with four-cylinder turbo engines in the off-road
“I’m in this for the long haul. I wasn’t going to race the car until it was ready and it was reliable”
disciplines. “The cylinder head is based on the rallycross engine,” he explains. “The bore is close to the rallycross engine, but the stroke closer to the WRC motor. Because we were developing an endurance engine with a lower turbo, we increased the capacity from 3.2 litres [two times the 1.6 litres of a WRC engine].”
Not all the choices of partners by Glickenhaus have been quite so left field. It has brought in Joest Racing to bolster its Podium-based racing operations. The winner of 16 Le Mans, if you include the 2003 victory when its crew ran the winning Bentley, had no programme after the end of its relationship with Mazda in the IMSA Sportscar Championship in North America was brought to an early conclusion at the beginning of 2020.
“Running two cars was always going to be a bit stressful in terms of the resources we have at Podium,” says Glickenhaus. “Joest have the people, they have the equipment and they have the experience. Why wouldn’t we have gone with them?”
The Glickenhaus 007 ran for the first time in February, which explains why the team never intended to race in the originally scheduled 2021 WEC opener the following month at Sebring, the 1000-mile fixture on the undercard of IMSA’S 12 Hours. The team also scratched from what, after Sebring’s cancellation, became the first race of the season at Spa.
Glickenhaus points out that once an LMH is homologated ahead of its race debut, its specification is effectively fixed for five seasons. Development is limited to five so-called tokens that need to be applied for to the organisers. “I’m in this for the long haul,” he says. “We were always playing catch-up; there were delays in our programme caused by COVID and
Brexit among other things. I wasn’t gonna race the car until it was ready, until I knew it was reliable.”
The team believed that was the case after a 30-hour test at Motorland Aragon in Spain at the end of April. With that hurdle cleared, it fielded a solo 007 in round two of this year’s WEC at the Portimao 8 Hours in June. That was followed by a full two-car entry at Monza in July, the final race before Le Mans.
There were flashes of promise on the car’s debut in the Algarve, a circuit that the team insisted would not suit its contender. Yet the new car might have won at Monza. The #709 entry shared by Romain Dumas, Richard Westbrook and Franck Mailleux briefly led and ended up finishing fourth.
Dumas took the lead when the Toyota that eventually won suffered an electronic glitch. The Frenchman was on an in-lap at the time and, when he stopped, the team opted to change the front brakes. But for that, the team would have finished at the very least in second position.
“Now no one can say Glickenhaus is a joke,” said Ciancetti after the race. “It was a great race for us. We have some issues to sort, but you cannot say we are lost.” Glickenhaus put it slightly differently: “Some people were saying we were going to be worse than…” It would probably be uncharitable to name the team he went on to mention.
There is a confidence in the camp that the team has a fundamentally reliable race car. Ryan Briscoe overrevved the Pipo engine when he burnt out the clutch in Portugal, but it managed to complete another six hours after a change of the transmission part. “That engine is one tough bitch,” says Glickenhaus.
The team remains hopeful that it doesn’t have an inherent braking problem. It identified an assembly issue with the brake ducts that limited the flow of cooling air at Monza, which it was still investigating in the lead-up to the test day on the full Circuit de la Sarthe that kicks off Le Mans week this Sunday. The engine and gearbox problems on the sister car that Pipo Derani had qualified fourth at Monza, less than eight tenths off the pace, have been traced to a faulty wiring loom.
“I don’t see us having any issues that are going to cause any problems moving forward into Le Mans,” says Glickenhaus.
“Of course we have had our problems, but so has Toyota.
These are new cars. You have problems and then you overcome them. That’s racing.”
Glickenhaus believes that the 007 will move closer to the pace at Le Mans with its two cars and a reshuffled driver line-up that features Dumas, Westbrook and Briscoe in one car and Derani,
Mailleux and Olivier Pla in the other.
“We took a step forward from Portimao to Monza and according to the billion numbers we’ve crunched we’re gonna do it again at Le Mans,” he says. “We know that we are faster on vmax [maximum velocity] than Toyota. That’s by design, because we wanna be quick at Le Mans.
“We’re gonna try to win this year and we’re gonna keep on trying when Peugeot arrive next year, and then when Ferrari and everyone else comes along in 2023.”