Looking back over the full life of popular Porsche racer, Derek Bell
Four-time winner of Le Mans, Derek Bell was one of the most successful of Porsche’s international works drivers and also probably its longest serving. He looks back on a remarkable innings
Derek Bell’s long career divides into two parts: the teenage marshall at Goodwood who graduated from a Lotus 7 to stardom in F3, a brief stint at Ferrari – Le Mans in a 512 and again in 1971 in John Wyer’s Porsche 917, yet whose F1 career resolutely failed to materialise. Indeed by 1974 after fruitless stints with also-ran teams like Surtees and Tecno his hopes of ever reaching motor racing’s top flight had evaporated. Like so many talented professional racers, he turned to sports cars, offering his services to whichever team would have him.
There were high points, notably winning at Le Mans in 1975 where he shared the John Wyer Mirage with Ickx. He drove for Renault Alpine for a couple of seasons, but teams came and went and successes were few. As Bell approached his fortieth birthday, he began to the think of retirement. Then in 1980 he was invited to drive a Reading-entered works 924GT at Le Mans.
He was never a production car enthusiast, so this prospect did not excite him but, as a professional, he could not turn the job down – a factory team would pay more than the privateer 935 he had intended to drive – ‘I had school fees and a mortgage to pay after all.’
This would prove the beginning of the second part of Bell’s career as, the following year, Porsche returned to Le Mans with the hastily assembled 936/81 and Bell, chosen as part of the squad, found himself sharing with Ickx. ‘In fact Porsche had asked me again about driving for them once more, but I turned them down. I didn’t want to go back to Le Mans to drive a 924 a second time. Then I bumped into Valentin Schaeffer at Monza and he said Porsche was going back to Le Mans with a sports car and there was a seat with my name written on it.’
Ickx and Bell duly repeated their 1975 (Gulf Mirage) victory prompting Porsche to make a committed return to sports car racing in the new Group C. The Briton would stay with the Porsche works team until it withdrew during 1987; his hunger for racing undiminished, he would continue for several more seasons in private Porsche squads.
It is that 1981 race that stays above all in Bell’s head: ‘It was a huge deal: I almost don’t where to begin to describe it – I was going to be racing a works car with Ickx who had specifically requested me as his team mate. The 24 hours then was an endurance race, but the 936/81 was tough and didn’t wilt. I remember driving for Renault-alpine in 1977 and a piston burned out while we were leading with six hours left. Afterwards Ralph Broad told me I should have lifted going down the straights. Apparently at high revs, pressure from the turbo pushes oil back from the top of the pistons. A periodic lift would have kept everything lubricated.’
Bell says he remembered Broad’s advice for the 1981 race and victory consolidated his reputation at Porsche as not only reliably fast, but a mature driver who would not break the car. Ickx was regarded in the same light and the pair would go on to win at La Sarthe a third time together, but subsequently Porsche tended to deploy Bell with other drivers. A case in point was Hans Stuck, ten years younger than Bell.
‘Hans could be wild in his early days – I’d raced him in F2 years before. I remember a race somewhere, it might have been Barcelona, and he stayed behind me, stayed behind me, stayed behind me, then at the very end he flashed past and afterwards he thanked me for showing him the way round! But in those days there was room to overtake or outbrake. Drivers had that sort of respect for each other.’
Later Stuck drove a variety of sports cars in Group C: ‘We always knew Stucky was fast, but his cars weren’t as competitive as the 956; when Porsche announced he was joining us, I thought “Oh my lord”, because he was always going off the road and he seemed a bit of a cowboy. But that was happening because he was trying to keep up with us in inferior cars. He certainly enjoyed a laugh, but he took his racing very seriously – of course, son of Germany’s pre-war champion, it was ingrained.
‘I was wrong to be concerned though: when he arrived at Porsche he did change, he calmed down and long afterwards he told me that Porsche had intended me to mentor him.’ Theirs would turn out to be an exceptional pairing which endured even after Porsche had officially withdrawn from
“I DIDN’T WANT TO GO BACK TO LE MANS TO DRIVE A 924…”
Group C in 1988, and they had to find sponsors and entrants off their own bat.
Another driver associated with Derek Bell was Stefan Bellof: ‘I’m sure had he lived he would have been among the greats. But he really needed nurturing to find his limits and I don’t think Bellof knew his. I’m not blaming anybody, but I think it’s a crying shame that his team managers didn’t do more to curb his enthusiasm. I thought Ken Tyrrell, who had this amazing way of bringing on young drivers, might have succeeded.’ (Bellof also drove for Ken Tyrrell in Formula 1 and Tyrrell had tried hard to persuade him to stay out of sports car racing which he thought was too dangerous.)
Bell dismisses the idea that the design of the 956 contributed to Bellof’s fatal crash at Spa. ‘He simply went off the track too hard: nothing would have stopped the car exploding. Later Porsche showed me the footage of the crash: Ickx could not have known he was coming especially as at those speeds nobody would ever attempt to overtake at Eau Rouge. It wasn’t the wisest move on Stefan’s part. I was very upset: it was his over exuberance. He had so much talent it wasn’t true, but he couldn’t harness that natural ability: he might even have made it to F1 champion, but I doubt whether he would ever have had the maturity to drive at nine-tenths when necessary.’
A driver Bell regarded as an equal was Rolf Stommelen. They were sharing a John Fitzpatrick 935 at Riverside in April 1983 when the German crashed fatally. ‘I didn’t race that often with Rolf,’ recalls Bell, ‘but we were friends and we always chatted. We had a great rapport. I first saw him at the Ollon
Villars hill climb in August 1967. He had the incredibly light Bergmeister and it was also the first time I had seen the Porsche team organisation (Stommelen was second fastest in the Porsche 910).
‘I saw a lot more of him in the next couple of seasons in F2. In 1970 I thought I had fixed up a place in the Surtees F1 team. Tom Wheatcroft would have helped with the costs. But then Rolf got my drive in the Surtees TS7: he came up with the money – it cost about £40,000 then – because he had backing from Eiffeland Caravans and Ford Germany. And he did bloody well, but it was frustrating for me because I knew I could do bloody well, too!’
“NOBODY WOULD EVER ATTEMPT TO OVERTAKE AT EAU ROUGE…”
The archives show that the pair raced together only four times more: ‘We won the Lumbermen’s 500 in a 935 at Mid Ohio in August 1981,’ says Bell. ‘Rolf was a staggeringly good driver, one of the best in the world in a 935, and in this field which included Can-am cars – everything except single seaters, in fact – he qualified third. Rolf had such amazing car control. I would never say he was dangerous, but he drove everything to the limit. I was among the best in 935s. He was hard, like a dobermann. He never gave up. And we came first! We had a wonderful night out together afterwards. He was great fun.’
In his autobiography, Bell says he wept when Stommelen was killed in the 935 K3 at Riverside: ‘I had just handed over to him. Initially we knew only that he had crashed. John Fitzpatrick asked me to continue in his 935 which I was sharing with Tim Schenken so that he could accompany Rolf to hospital. It was only after the race that Fitz came and broke the news.
‘I did break down: drivers of Rolf’s calibre didn’t have accidents unless the car went wrong, which of course is what happened. The bodywork got damaged somewhere – he’d gone off the track on new tyres and the run-offs were rock hard sand,and badly rutted. There was almost no suspension travel and something must have got broken because as soon as he accelerated the bodywork lifted and pitched him at the wall at 190mph.’
Over the years Bell’s own ‘offs’ were mercifully harmless and indeed he says that from 1971 to the end of his career, he never crashed a car during a race. Nevertheless being a car-conserver did not prevent him being critical of his machinery at times. Porsche’s penchant during the 956-962 era for pioneering new technology on the race track as well as the test track exercised him on several occasions. ABS was bad enough and more than once Bell says he successfully persuaded Porsche to remove it from his 962 for a race.
With PDK the official line could be more insistent. A case in point was the 1986 Fuji 1000km where Stuck and Bell had striven during an up and down season to keep the increasingly effective Jaguar of Martin Brundle at bay: now even with a thirteen point lead they really needed to win this final race to be certain of the championship.
‘We had to use the spare 962C because our regular car hadn't been repaired in time. This was 100kg heavier because of ABS and PDK. I wanted Porsche to take them off. Normally we dealt with Norbert Singer, who was the engineer in charge and managed the squad, but it was team director Peter Falk who made the decisions so I went to him
“BELL’S OWN ‘OFFS’ WERE MERCIFULLY HARMLESS…”
to persuade him this stuff was blunting our competitiveness. He agreed to removing the ABS, but not the PDK, despite the fact that we knew it wouldn’t last 1000km. It was all the more frustrating as Porsche had brought a trailer full of manual gearboxes anyway.’
While the pair was leading the transmission expired, just as Stuck was about to begin his stint. Bell, already in a black mood and standing beside the 962 in the pits, had just been approached by a TV reporter he knew well. As the Porsche clunked to halt, Bell displayed the strength of his feelings embellished with one or two short Anglo Saxon phrases to the TV man. Almost unedited the interview appeared a few hours later on Eurosport.
Bell meanwhile was discovering from Norbert Singer that despite his and Stuck’s retirement, he had won the championship: he was alas too late to find the Eurosport fellow who had already left. In fact Bell’s victory was not even a joint win: unbeknown to him he held fractional point advantage over his co-driver Stuck. ‘After everything I’d said about lack of support, I wanted the ground to open up and swallow me.’
At the annual prize giving at Weissach in December, Bell found himself seated at a table for two with Porsche engineering director Helmuth Bott. He had always liked Bott, admiring ‘the sheer scale of the operation and the incredible burden he shouldered.’ After the usual pleasantries and congratulations, Bott suddenly became serious: he was very unhappy about Bell’s critical remarks on Eurosport.
‘I was just about to put my spoon in my mouth and froze. Bott repeated the usual mantra about how Porsche had to justify racing to the board. Every race had to contribute to the development of components. I had heard it all before, but I didn’t interrupt. When he’d finished, I offered to spend three weeks testing at Paul Ricard or somewhere so that we didn’t have to be development jockeys at every race…after all racing drivers are racing drivers – we want to win. I think he took my point.’
In the aftermath of his win, Bell noted that Hans Stuck ‘must have been unhappy about not being champion (the Germans had yet to field an international motorsport champion). He didn’t say much, but I’m sure he felt more strongly about it than he showed.’
1987 was the Porsche works team’s last complete season, for in 1988 it would contest only the Le Mans 24 hours. Although Porsche’s decision was a shock, Bell could see the competitive forces gathering observing that both Sauber and Jaguar under TWR were proving faster than the 962C on some circuits during 1986.
‘In fact I did get an approach from Jaguar the previous year and I was tempted: a Briton driving for Jaguar had a patriotic appeal, but then I thought, I’d spent years developing racing cars for Alfa Romeo, Gulf Mirage,
Renault Alpine and Porsche: at 43 did I want to drive all those test miles again? I was racing in championships in America and Europe and I really couldn’t face more weeks at Paul Ricard on top of that to prove another car. Besides,
Jaguar had Martin Brundle and Martin was twenty years younger than I was, so I was never going to be as quick. So I turned them down.’
Bell continued to receive invitations to race in America well into his forties: ‘The Americans said I could drive anything and get it home on three wheels. It was nice to have a reputation like that.”
It was lucrative, too, but nothing compared with today’s motorsport incomes. ‘At that time, the mid-eighties, I was getting quite decent money, but I was working my arse off to earn it. We didn’t earn a fortune: Jackie Ickx told me that Bott didn’t believe that any of his works drivers should be paid more than he, as director of Porsche engineering was. I believed it – Jackie wasn’t one to make up that sort of thing.’
Eventually, it came to an end. By 1994 the Porsche 962C was completely out of date even for the second division teams still offering Bell, by then 53, a place. It is clear that even a quarter of a century on, he still misses it:
‘People used to say to me, “didn’t you lose concentration, didn’t your reflexes slow down?” and I would say, no, there’s no reason if you continue to race, continue to work those reflexes that you should be slower at sixty rather than fifty. I might not have recorded the fastest laps, but Porsche always told me I was absolutely consistent – my times never dropped off during endurance races. Concentration has never been a problem for me. I always see the next bend as a fresh challenge: I’m always looking to brake deeper into the corner. I’d race regularly now, but of course no one’s going to make that kind of offer.’
He is of course talking about endurance racing, not three lap demonstrations of cars around Goodwood. But very occasionally, events do occur which enable him to prove to himself that the fire still burns: ‘I always get invitations to Rennsport and 2018’s was particularly special as it was Porsche’s seventieth anniversary. They got out the Lowenbraü 962 – I won so many races with that, and I was able to drive over twenty laps (at Laguna Seca) and really get into the rhythm.
‘Afterwards they told me my times were on the edge of what I used to do in that car thirty years ago!’