The Porsche Le Mans legends - the cars and men in pictures

By Ben Pulman

Motoring Issues

14 June 2014 16:11

Between 1970 and 1998 Porsche won Le Mans 16 times. As Porsche returns to La Sarthe this weekend for the famous Le Mans 24 hours, we look back at the most famous cars, race directors and drivers who helped create the Porsche legend.

We interviewed the team's most famous drivers and engineers ahead of Le Mans in the June 2014 issue of CAR magazine. Here we reproduce a selection of their memories.

'Fresh from university I made an air-cooling system for the 917’s gearbox. Then, after we won Le Mans, my boss told me to take the car into the wind tunnel and I increased the downforce.

'We developed the 936 in parallel with the 935 – I mainly worked on the 935, but I took over the 936 the first time it came out of the museum in ’79. And when we took it out of the museum for the second time in ’81, the rules allowed for a bigger engine: we took the 2.6-litre from an old Indy project that never raced, plus the gearbox from the 917 Can-Am, and Ickx won.

'When Group C arrived in 1982 we had a reliable engine, but everything else was new. I am most proud of the 956. It was our first monocoque, we’d never done one before, and we had absolutely no idea. We knew ground effects were in F1 with Lotus and it looked easy, but we quickly realised it wasn’t. And yet we never changed the monocoque, we found the aero balance within weeks, and it was just nine months between starting work on the car and its first race. These new LMP guys have been working for over two years…

'The 962 was not much different to the 956, just a longer wheelbase, and the TWR project was stopped when it was 2-3 seconds off the pace at the official test. Reinhold Joest raced it in 1996 and beat our GT car, and won again in 1997.

'For the GT car the FIA said you Germans are doing funny things with your TÜV department and getting cars homologated for the road which aren't really allowed. So with the GT1-98 we decided to build just one road car, but get full type-approval, like any 911, so there could be no discussion about ‘funny things’.

'Then I developed the LMP2000 for the new regulations, but four weeks from the end of the project it was stopped. Only two years ago did I find out why – it was because Porsche needed the money to develop the Cayenne. As a racer you don’t want that, but now it’s the backbone of Porsche and we’re going back to Le Mans.’

‘In 1969 the 917 was totally unsorted. After a double-stint I was deaf from the exhausts, had a blinding headache, my neck ached and I was already resting my head on the bulkhead. At 180km/h it was all over the place, and it would do 235km/h. It was the worst time I ever had in a race car, and when it broke with three hours to go it was total relief.

'In February 1970 [motorsport boss] Helmut Bott asked what configuration I wanted for Le Mans. I asked for a short-tail and the 4.5-litre engine, which were proven, and Hans because he’s a steady driver.

'Come the race the 5.0-litre was proven, our four-speed ’box meant we were losing three seconds in each corner and I’d made the biggest mistake of my life. But after 10 hours, ridiculously, unbelievably, we were in the lead. It was a totally uneventful race, which was how you won Le Mans.’

‘Two years ago I was in the Porsche Museum in Stuttgart, and when I saw how fragile the whole construction was I can’t believe we did 400km/h at Le Mans.  There was an internal rivalry – we were the Martini team and the other was the Gulf team, and we were racing each other. We were both miles ahead of the Ferrari, and I asked Ferdinand Piëch [now VW Group overlord] about team orders, but he said no, the best car will win. I think it was Dick Attwood in the other car and we were racing until the very last lap.’

‘I knew from my friend Stefan Bellof that in 1985 he would have a Formula One contract that would prevent him racing for Porsche, so I phoned Helmut Bott and said I could make myself available. We met the next morning at Weissach and within half an hour I had a three-year contract. Mr Bott asked who I should race with: Ickx, Mass or Bell? We agreed on Derek because he was more experienced than I was, and it was the best decision because we had so much success together.

'At Le Mans our car was close to perfection – at Porsche everything worked and I was amazed at how easy it was. We had a special version for Le Mans with a longer tail, different wishbones so it was more stable on the straights, and a synchro gearbox – it was a slow ’change but you didn’t have to nurse it. It was a huge pleasure to drive. And Norbert Singer knew exactly what we were doing – I came into a perfectly working team.

'In 1987 it was a totally different target: I wanted to get pole position and I got it – that was cool. The race was more relaxed, we had a great team and it was definitely less exciting. But before the race it was the other way around. I was the only driver who lived closed to the factory so I did the shakedown work. I had a crash at Weissach because I was going too fast, so for Le Mans we had to use an older car that had done a few races. Derek didn’t say anything when I told him, yet you could see it on his face that he wasn’t a happy man. But the old car didn’t have a problem.’

By Ben Pulman