For 10 days in the build-up to the 2023 running of the Le Mans 24 Hours, DSC is reflecting on some of the best, worst and wacky moments from its time covering the event since the turn of the century.
Today is the third day of DSC’s 100 moments feature, the previous parts can be found below:
PART 1 – PART 2
21. Rocky’s horror crash (2011)
Another horrifying moment in the 2011 race was Mike Rockenfeller’s huge shunt on the run down to Indianapolis, his Audi running wide and off-track at close to V-Max as he tried to negotiate Rob Kaufman’s GTE Am Ferrari. The American was later excluded from the race for his part in the incident which saw Rockenfeller go to the inside, lose control and trigger a shunt of aircraft crash proportions.
In the media room there was an audible gasp as the Audi reduced itself at high speed to its constituent parts, the faces in the Audi garage told the story too – everybody was worried over the fate of the Audi driver.
When the intervention teams reached the wreck there was no sign of Rockenfeller and in the pitch darkness of the highly forested area it was some time before a track marshal literally stumbled over him, Rocky had climbed out of the wreck immediately after the crash and had managed to get himself to a place of safety over the barriers before losing consciousness!
22. WRT’s bitter-sweet finish (2021)
Five years on from Toyota’s tragedy, amazingly, it happened again, this time though, two things were different. It was the actual final lap, and it wasn’t for the overall win. Instead, it decided the result in LMP2.
Yifei Ye was stranded with a broken throttle sensor, possibly caused by a leaky drinks bottle.
WRT’s only succour was that the sister car went on to win the class, the battle going to the line as Tom Blomqvist closed the gap dramatically on Robin Frijns, the pair jostling their way through GT traffic, Frijns having to take avoiding action as Clerk of the Corse Patrick Morriseau chose to show the checkered flag on track at the finish line.
Disaster was avoided – just, and WRT at least got to celebrate the win in a race that really should have been a famous 1-2 finish for the Belgian team on its Le Mans debut.
23. Sausset finishes the race (2016)
Frederic Sausset holds a unique place in Le Mans history, the quadruple amputee headed up a Garage 56 effort with his SRT 41 by OAK racing effort attracting major and widespread motorsport industry backing to prove that racers with disabilities could take on the biggest challenges.
With an LMP2 Morgan adapted to his unique needs, and with driver changes for Fred achieved by him either being lowered into the car (in the pit garage) or lifted out by having onto a long steel bar held across the car, this was something else on the courage scale. The effort finished the race, the first Garage 56 effort to do so.
But Sausset wasn’t done with Le Mans – he was back in 2021, this time in a management role with an Oreca 07 car crewed by two wheelchair-bound racers, part of an academy set up by Sausset to encourage others to follow his lead. They finished again!
24. Corvette eliminated after contact from Francois Perrodo (2022)
Drama at Le Mans is predictably unpredictable and never more so in 2021 when, with the race coming into Sunday morning Corvette had been through the mill, but looked set for strong chance of a first win for their C8.R in the last Le Mans for GTE Pro .
Alexander Sims was closing on the class-leading GTE Pro Ferrari in the #64 but just as the DSC Editor was reading out the bulletin from the team on TV confirming the retirement of the sister #63 car after accident damage, there was drama of the most unwelcome sort for the American squad.
Sims moved to the outside of the track to allow a pair of battling LMP2s by on the exit of the Daytona Chicane but as the pair went three wide with the Corvette, John Falb moved slightly to the right on the inside in his Algarve Pro Oreca, Francois Perrodo reacted to the move by jinking hard, too hard to his left and collected the Corvette, Sims hard into the barrier and out of the race.
The Frenchman classily went to the Vette garage immediately after his stint to apologise, along with Team boss Amato Ferrari, and was distraught afterwards over his error, but the damage was done. Corvette will have one more chance for the C8.R to win, this time in GTE Am!
25. Rebellion disqualified from the podium (2017)
Another drama that actually happened post-race, with the LMP1 Hybrids all suffering delay and/or retirement in 2017, a flurry of very rapid LMP2s came to the fore.
In amongst them was the #13 Valiante Rebellion Oreca, which had toughed its way into class contention, and onto the overall podium behind the class winning Jackie Chan DC Racing car despite issues later in the race in the pits with the car refusing to fire.
That though would lead to post-race disqualification for the team after they opted to drill a hole in the rear deck to allow access to the starter motor for restarts, the dagger finally plunged into the effort when a team member, huge unwisely, opted to try to cover the offending hole with a patch of race tape when the car was in parc ferme!
26. George Howard Chapell’s DB9 rebranded (2007)
Test Day in 2007 saw the #63 Corvette fastest in GT1 with a big advantage over the fastest of the Aston Martins.
To add to Aston’s woes, team Principal George Howard Chappell pulled his back over the weekend and was unable to drive hom, leaving his company-supplied DB9 at the track where oit was found the following day by the Corvette Racing crew.
Suffice it to say that by the time George got back to retrieve his ‘baby’ it had a more confused identity than when he had left it!
27. The Nissan meltdown (2015)
The 2015 Nissan GT-R LM arrived on the scene in 2015 with plenty of hype and bluster, it looked the part too, a radical concept with a front mounted engine paying tribute to the iconic GT-R road car.
The promise to take the fight to Porsche, Audi and Toyota was a compelling storyline but the programme would stutter, victim to over-ambition, broken promises and corporate deadlines that proved to be too tight and too challenging.
Three cars would be entered for Le mans but the effort was doomed before they turned up, victims of the decision to run without the promised Torotrak hybrid system that had proved to be monstrously unreliable in testing.
As Harry Tincknell, who had tested the rival Audi R18 etron quattro told DSC ‘The hybrid was amazing, and under braking the car was way better – I’d say 10% better than the Audi, which was already very, very impressive. The problem was that it could fail with no warning, and if it did that under braking, taking into account the efficiency it had when it worked, by the time you realised it had failed you were off, and off at very high speed.
That left the team to run a car designed to race with a high capacity hybrid to run without, and into the mix the car needed to stay off the kerbs too – The fastest of the trio was 20 seconds off pole and in the race, without the hybrid system to harvest the kinetic energy, the brakes were cooking themselves – Two of the three would retire, the third would come home unclassified 153 laps behind the winning car. A programme to upgrade the csr went into the winter with no other races run before Nissan pulled the plug.
Oddly enough though, for a car that was so far off the pace, it still ranks for many as one of the great ‘Could have been’ concepts – We will, very literally, never know!
28. Narain Karthikeyan’s DNS! (2009)
Indian F1 racer Narain Karthikeyan was set to make his Le Mans 24 Hours debut in 2009 in a Kolles-run ex-factory Audi R10 TDI alongside Charles Zwolsman Jr and Andre Lotterer.
All was going well until the pre-race grid presentation when Narain decided to go to his car via the pit wall rather than the longer route walking around and through the open safety gate.
Unfortunately a slip as he climbed through the gap left him with a dislocated shoulder and unable to drive!
That saw the #14 car race with just two drivers, Zwolsman and Lotterer would finish an astonishing 7th overall, Lotterer in particular turned heads that day – but for a slip from his team-mate it’s possible that this breakthrough drive might not have happened!
29. Toyota wins its first Le Mans (2018)
It’s very easy (if a little boring) to join a chorus of “Toyota have had it easy!”. The reality is that Toyota have had anything but.
The brand invested substantially in Group C from 1985 but was luckless at Le Mans until the start of the 3.5 litre Group C era when, in 1992, the Toyota TS010 came home second. That was the start of a run of five second place finishes through to 2016, the year that victory was snatched cruelly from Toyota with a turbo pipe failure on the penultimate lap.
So by 2018, and that first win, Toyota had raced, and invested, in winning Le Mans for a third of a Century and had learned the lesson that however advanced the car, however star-studded the line-up, the race decides.
Add in their loyalty to the endurance racing code and to the FIA WEC, which would have struggled to get traction without their stepping up a year earlier than planned with the TS030 and you start to get some minor insight into the level of achievement that the first win, in 2018, meant to Toyota, their team, and their fans.
The fact that they kept coming, kept investing, did so on a brand new platform (Hypercar) and then kept investing again should convince any reasonable observer that the passion still burns!
30. Rocketsports’ transporter ejected (2010)
The last decade and more has seen rapid polishing of the way in which the paddock a the Le Mans 24 Hours operates and is presented, with recent years seeing team structures at the rear of the garages emerge as multi-floor, multi-purpose, temporary buildings.
Even as far back as 2010 though, there were standards to be maintained. One team that came nowhere close to hitting that standard was the Jaguar RSR effort, the team arriving in the paddock in a race transporter that was described to the DSC editor, actually quite accurately, as looking like “a second-hand removal van.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the famously detail-driven ACO event management noticed too. A French colleague told DSC that the team had been told quite forcibly that the offending pantechnicon was to be removed and replaced by mid-week. A very bright white, and unbranded, transporter was in place, leaving the team to focus on its Jaguar.
As things would turn out, there would be very little success there too, the car would last just four laps. Electrical troubles would put an end to the famous brand’s latest Le Mans effort to date.”
