Podcast: Monsters of Motorsport with Mark Blundell

For the latest episode of the podcast, we're joined by special guest Mark Blundell, beamed in from the USA, where he’s been taking a little break. It was Blundell who set the sensational pole position time for the 1990 Le Mans 24 Hours in the hairy Nissan R90CK by over six seconds, a story that he tells in the Monsters of Motorsport issue.

The Briton expands on this in the podcast, revealing the worries over reliability, and that he had to fake a radio problem to proceed with a lap that went down in history – and for which he is perhaps even better known than his 1992 Le Mans victory with Peugeot.

Seeing as it’s Blundell, he’s in the States and we’re talking about powerful, turbocharged racing cars, we also download him on his Indycar experience of the late 1990s. He’s on fascinating form, especially when discussing the dark art of racing on ovals – no one who has never tried it is anywhere near qualified enough to discuss it, he argues.

Another Nissan featured in the ‘Monsters’ issue is the famed Skyline GT-R R32 Group A touring car, nicknamed ‘Godzilla’. We couldn’t remember Blundell ever trying one, so we had a surprise answer to that question…

As well as Blundell and host Martyn Lee, grizzled Autosport veterans Gary Watkins and Marcus Simmons join the podcast – Watkins wrote about the sportscar monsters including the Nissan R90CK, plus the Brabham-BMW project that resulted in Nelson Piquet claiming the 1983 Formula 1 World Championship, while Simmons had the pleasure of putting the features and photography all together for the issue.

PLUS: When BMW added F1 'rocket fuel' to ignite Brabham's 1983 title push

Among other things, the duo discuss the Brabhams, the mystique of the Pikes Peak hillclimb (about which people in Europe knew little before the manufacturers began sending Group B-derived leviathans over), and the Can-Am cars that invaded the UK’s Thundersports series in the 1980s. They also speculate how many times they walked past each other as teenagers at British racing circuits, and compare programme collections...