There are no short phone calls with Andy Wallace, and the one that produced this interview also produced two others, of which more on DSC in due course.
For the purposes of this offering we asked Andy for his reminiscences of the GT1 era, a time when he had drives in three very different machines:
“At the beginning of ’95 I didn’t actually have a drive for the whole year, but I was driving the ADA engineering De Tomaso Pantera, Chris Crawford’s team.
“It was a great car. I did a couple of British GT races and we did the first BPR race of the year, Chris was a brilliant engineer and they did a fantastic job, but the team didn’t have much money to sustain the effort.
“But then Moody Fayed got in contact about a drive with Dave Price Racing. And although they were going to start the season late, they were looking for somebody else in their team. So I got a call from Dave Price, and kind of slotted into that which was brilliant because we wouldn’t have had enough money to do the whole season anyway with the ADA car.
“So suddenly I found myself in a McLaren F1. And actually I did do some work with McLaren with customers, a bit like I’m doing with Bugatti now. And of course, I ended up doing the world speed record with them in a roadgoing F1, and did the same again with Bugatti and the Chiron more recently!
McLaren probably put a good word in with Dave Price for me and it all came together.”
So how did the Mclaren compare?
“Apart from half a season of DTM and one British Touring Car race, everything else I’d done was either single-seaters or prototype sportscars. So I really didn’t have that much experience in something like a GT car.
“It didn’t have the downforce, it’s higher off the ground, it’s heavier, it moves around more. And in this case, it’s a converted road car, sort of, because in McLaren’s case it was a proper supercar. But even so, I had very little experience with that kind of car. So it was a bit of a learning curve for me.
“Our first race was Jarama. Dave Price knew me from F3 days and I’d had some great results and won Le Mans and Daytona so it’s not like I didn’t know what I was doing, but when the car was delivered there were one or two issues with it, which we were not aware of.
“So when we were going through the practice session, we were nowhere, we were so far off the pace it was crazy. And you start to question yourself, I don’t drive this kind of car so maybe it’s me? You always question yourself!
“Luckily, as I happened, the night before the race, we found some issues with the shocks. That was repaired for race morning, I went out the warm-up and suddenly the car was mega.
“We finished fourth in that first race? And then suddenly, OK, Now we know what we’re doing. And from that, you get a massive amount of confidence.”
“We won all three of the last three races in 1995, Silverstone, Nogaro and Zhuhai in China.”
In 1996 you had an incident with a ball of rubber at Anderstorp?
“Yes, I was following the Ferrari of 40 of Anders Olofsson right. I was chasing him, going in and out of traffic and then on to the main straight is the runway, where they land planes when we aren’t racing.
“It’s really wide and Anders was overtaking a Porsche tucked in front of the 911 and got a tow off the Porsche. And just as I was about to pull out from behind the Porsche to get back in the tow of the F40, a big bit of rubber, I don’t know if he ran it over or something, flicked up off the F40 bounced a second time on the Porsche which spun it up even faster, and then it literally hit the window right between my eyes.
“Of course it hit the window, and on the McLaren., it wasn’t a perspex screen, it was a proper laminated screen.
“It got jammed in the laminate layer of the screen luckily because I didn’t have my visor down as it was a stinking hot day, but it flaked all the glass off the inside layer of glass which went straight into my eyes while I’m doing something like 300km/h!
“The first thing was that I thought – “Don’t blink”.
“So of course, as soon as you tell yourself not to blink you blink loads of times. And then I put my glove upon my face and it came back glove was covered in blood.
“So I’m on the radio to Pricey and said “listen, mate, we’re going to need a driver change and a new window and I’ll give them their due, by the time I got to the pit they were ready with both and I jumped out and went to the medical centre!
“I had around a year and a half with the team and the car before the money ran out before the end of 1996 unfortunately.
“It was a great team and a very good car.
“It was brilliant to be there with those guys and whenever you drive for a really good team, it’s mega because you see everything’s all in order. And it was a nice place to be and I was learning really fast to be quick without the downforce and I actually quite got into it, it was a really good car.
“It had around 640 horsepower with the restrictor, so it wasn’t stupidly light on power but it was quite a heavy car.
“Interestingly, we were running Goodyears, and our main opposition in the McLarens were running the Michelin tyres. A lot of the time in terms of actual out and out speed, there wasn’t a big difference, but where you always got hammered against the Michelins was in terms of durability.”
You then stayed with Pricey but with a very different beast. Tell us a bit about the Panoz adventure?
“Don Panoz was very successful in business, he was successful in lots of things that he touched. And he was kind of new to racing.
“And he applied the logic to racing that he applied to his normal business life. He would ask somebody “Okay, why don’t you do this?” To see what the objections were to some basic questions and to sport the opportunities from that.”
He was a disrupter?
“Yes, exactly that! So that was the question he asked when he started getting involved in racing. He said, “Well, why don’t you put the engine in the front?”
“We can’t do that! You just can’t do it! “Well, I think you can. So let’s do it!”
“So Reynard built the car and did a really good job with it. But we had an awful lot of engine problems, it wasn’t all down to that but we did have a lot of issues so it was difficult to get the running we needed to develop the car as quickly as we’d have liked.
“It meant that if you tried to turn up the engine it wasn’t reliable if you turned it down it wasn’t fast enough.
“But eventually, I think the car got pretty good. It was mighty under braking with the engine in front of the driver but it was really seriously noisy with your left ear only one metre from the exhaust exit.
“And there’s a lot of vertical movement as well in a front mid-engine car and also when the car goes sideways, you’re sitting further back and so you feel it more than if you were sitting further forward.
“So that feels a bit odd. But conversely, if you’re in a mid-engine car with the engine behind you, they tend to be very, very snappy, more like a pendulum effect. So with the Panoz, it was very easy to drive in terms of that because it would step out and you’d feel it because you were at the backstepping out, but it was very, very easy to control.
Before you got to experience all of that though you had to get the car into the race at Le Mans in 1997?
“That was a close one. That was an engine problem, I had to put the time in because we were out at that point.
“The reason that we were out of pre-qualifying was that we’d had an engine problem earlier. But we were in at that point. And then, of course, everybody’s driving around and getting quicker and then bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, you’re out of pre-qualifying.
“So we were like, “Okay, well you’re going to have to just drag it around for a lap”
“So I said – how are we going to do that because we were leaking water at the head gasket for starters. So we got a whole bunch of dry ice and packed it into the V, got the thing as cold as we could find and I did the slowest out lap I could to try not to put too much energy into the water, and then came out of the Ford Chicane and just went for it.
“By the end of it every gauge was off the clock but it was a pretty good lap I thought. Obviously the engine was getting a bit tight towards the end of the lap but it was OK in the end!
“It was one lap to go to Le Mans – or not!! So no pressure!!!”
