Jaguar XJR-9
Andy Wallace relives 1988 Le Mans victory as UK street racing returns after 28 years
Nearly 30 years to the day since Jaguar made a victorious comeback to the Le Mans 24-hours, the winning XJR-9 Group C car was reunited with one of its original drivers, Andy Wallace (pictured left), for hot laps of the Coventry ringroad circuit. The spectacle came ahead of the MAC Motofest Sprint, the first timed UK closed-road motor sport event since 1990. Elsewhere in the city, public squares became display areas as classic cars arrived in their hundreds.
Jaguar XJR-9
Speaking exclusively to Classic Cars, Wallace recalled the remarkable race win 30 years on and the extraordinary events that led to his drive.
‘Driving on a street circuit brings back fond memories,’ he said. ‘I contested the 1987 Birmingham Superprix when I was doing Formula 3000, but unfortunately I was still on a Formula Three budget. My team of mechanics was the same one I’d used to win the British F3 Championship the previous year, but I knew we just couldn’t carry on and I was mentally preparing to pull out of F3000 and do something else.
‘Then, out of the blue, I got a call from a chap at Jaguar. They were doing testing at Paul Ricard, needed another driver, and would I be interested? Of course I was, but I’d actually never driven a sports car before – all of a sudden I was doing 200mph for the first time! Without the help of Johnny Dumfries and Jan Lammers it would’ve been difficult to make the jump.
‘It turned out Lammers was the reason they’d asked me. British F3 used to visit the Macau Grand Prix as a season finale to take on the top drivers from Italy, Spain, France, the US and so on. Lammers was a guest driver in 1986, and we had a really good tussle. On the last lap he was out in front but lost control. He was about to hit the
barriers and I saw my chance to get past on the inside. Yet funnily enough, my overtaking move bumped him round, so he regained traction and missed the wall. I finished first, he came second, and he never forgot how I saved his podium finish.
‘It was partly about the importance of teamwork. Driving this Jaguar was the first time I wasn’t out fighting on my own. Single-seater racing is very selfish, whereas the three of us would have to work together to win the race. It’s the same with the pit crew too – I suddenly had to place absolute trust in their decisions.
‘I first raced the XJR-9 at Jerez, then in the Castrol-sponsored IMSA version at Road Atlanta. It was just to get experience really. You can walk and cycle the track all you like, but nothing prepares you for Le Mans. To make matters worse, there was no test day at Le Mans in 1988. I think the track had been resurfaced and it wasn’t quite ready in time, so as a result the first time I drove there was in qualifying.
‘Thanks to the Mulsanne straight, racing at Le Mans isn’t like other circuits. The XJR-9 only has a five-speed H-pattern gearbox – you wouldn’t put something like that in a 240mph car nowadays. But as a result you’re doing 200mph in fourth. When you change up to fifth, the sound just doesn’t match the speed, especially when you’re used to F3000. After a while, the sound starts to catch up in corners, and then you realise quite how fast you can go. It took just 50 seconds to do the whole Mulsanne Straight – 50 seconds at full throttle in a racing car is very unusual. I sat at 200mph and thought I was going fast, then another Jag and a Sauber-mercedes came past and made me feel like I was tied to a post! Next time the Mulsanne came round I was flat-out, and we were soon averaging over 200mph per lap.
‘It helps to be in your 20s when you do this sort of thing, when you’re still fearless. The biggest concern was that the tyres would blow out. For Jerez and Atlanta we’d run radials, good for 250mph, but Dunlop refused to supply them for Le Mans. Their crossplies were good for 260mph, the car was geared for 238 and tyre growth due to heat would have the effect of gearing it up to 245 – perilously close to the radial’s limit.
‘The problem is, when a crossply goes bang, it flies up and takes the rear wing off, which will flip the car over. It’s what caused Win Percy’s accident in 1987, and ultimately the reason why a chicane was put on the Mulsanne Straight. The thing you fear most is a slow puncture – the heat will keep the tyre feeling more inflated than it actually is and you’ll only notice when it’s too late.
‘Jaguar didn’t issue any team orders other than “go fast, but bring it home.” The XJR-9S were all mechanically identical, but Lammers, Dumfries and I arrived at a different set-up on the morning of the race that would ultimately hand us the advantage – softer suspension on the rear, which flattened the profile of the rear wing and cut drag. It was too late to inform the other Jaguar teams, because they’d have ended up having to change their driving style.
‘It worked though. We didn’t qualify well – we never did, we had a normally-aspirated engine and the Porsche teams would wind their turbo boost up massively for qualifying – but once the race started we began to make up places.
‘A massive battle broke out between our car and the works Porsche 962 of Hans-joachim Stuck, Derek Bell and Klaus Ludwig. What sticks in my mind is how much more power they had – 50bhp, and they were more fuel-efficient – yet how our adjusted aerodynamics were working. Lap after lap they’d be on our tail and would slingshot past coming out of Tertre Rouge, but then they’d hit a wall of drag and we’d pass them. Then it’d happen again coming out of Mulsanne Corner. If we could keep this up, we’d win the race.
‘But the thing most likely to fail back then was the gearbox. To preserve that H-pattern ‘box we realised we needed to eliminate some gearshifts. By taking the Esses in fourth, we could eliminate one downshift and one upshift per lap. Over the course of 400 laps, that’s a lot of gearchanges. We decided that no matter who we were racing, it was a rule we’d keep to. And it worked – we stayed ahead and we won, by just 90 seconds from the Porsche!
‘But the fans kept us going too. It’s probably the largest British sporting event outside of the UK, and even with the helmet on and the door shut you can still see the flags waving, and sense the party atmosphere at Arnage at night. That’s when you also start imagining things too – odd clonking noises, things like that. But in truth things are more likely to go wrong if you lift off and lose control.
‘Jaguar could go back to Le Mans I suppose, either in the GT or Prototype class. But it’d have to be an all-or-nothing attempt, with the right technical partners, sponsorship and budget. Anything less than the effort we went to in 1988 would be pointless.’