The plug in and play stand-ins who got their timing just right

Marc Gene - 2003 Italian Grand Prix

The Williams Monza prelude to de Vries

When Nyck de Vries was called up by Williams on the Saturday morning to race at this year’s Italian Grand Prix, he was already at the circuit. Nineteen years ago, Marc Gene was in bed when he received his call from the British team — and didn’t answer first time! But on second ring, he was up and on the go at the beginning of a whirlwind ride that took him to his best Formula 1 finish and, albeit very briefly, the lead of a grand prix.

There’s another key difference between de Vries’s and Gene’s experiences as Monza stand-ins with Williams. The Dutchman took part in practice on Friday, admittedly in an Aston Martin; the Spaniard wasn’t even at the circuit for much of the first day. Rather, he’d been out and about in nearby Milan with his wife “doing a bit of tourism”.

The Williams test driver travelled to Italy knowing there was a chance he might have to replace Ralf Schumacher after the German had crashed heavily in testing at Monza in the lead-up to the event. But the chances of a race outing in the Williams-BMW FW25 looked unlikely on the Friday.

“There was no sign that Ralf was feeling unwell,” recalls the former Minardi F1 driver. “If I’d thought there was a chance I was going to race, I obviously wouldn’t have gone into Milan.

“Maybe at seven the next morning, the phone rings, but I thought it was my alarm. Basically, I turned it off. Three minutes later it rings again. I looked at the screen and saw +44 and thought, ‘That’s the team calling me’. It was Sam Michael [then senior operations engineer], who told me to come straight to the circuit.”

That wasn’t as straightforward as it might sound: “At Monza there’s always traffic, but when they called me again I was already in the park, so they sent a moped to come and get me to gain a few minutes. There was so much happening that I didn’t have time to be nervous. The following year when I replaced Ralf [at Magny-Cours and Silverstone after he crashed at the US GP], I was much more nervous because I had time to think about it.”

Gene finished fifth and led the only laps of his 36-race F1 career

Photo by: James Moy

Gene was happy with his performance at Monza. He qualified fifth, eight tenths behind team-mate Juan Pablo Montoya in second position after having to run first in the old one-shot qualifying procedure.

“Track evolution was against me; there were probably four or five tenths in that,” he says. “So I think it was a hell of a lap looking back; it was just one lap with no room for error.

"The phone rings, but I thought it was my alarm. Basically, I turned it off. Three minutes later it rings again. I looked at the screen and saw +44 and thought, 'That’s the team calling me'" Marc Gene

“I finished in my position really – fifth was probably where I should have been,” adds Gene, who finished 28s down on race winner Michael Schumacher. “I felt I was competitive. I was fit and did thousands of kilometres of testing for Williams.

“I don’t have many mementos of my racing career at home, but I do have a photo of me leading the race with Michael [Schumacher] behind. I stopped later than him and Juan Pablo, so I can say that I led a grand prix, even if it was just for a little bit.”

Tiff Needell - 1981 Formula 2 Donington

French find a Needell in a haystack

Needell jumped in for Dallest at Donington, but found the cockpit a tight fit

Photo by: Motorsport Images

Tiff Needell may have made his grand prix debut with Ensign the previous year, but he was on his uppers in 1981. He’d raced only a handful of times and never in a single-seater at Donington Park when he pitched up for the European Formula 2 Championship round. He didn’t have a drive, but he came fully prepared just in case.

“That was in the period where I didn’t go to a race track without my helmet and overalls,” recalls Needell. “You never knew what might happen.”

Needell can’t remember the exact circumstances of how the tiny French AGS squad came to call on his services when a slipped disc ruled the team’s regular driver Richard Dallest out of the weekend.

“I think someone told me to get up to their pit because he’d heard they might be looking for a driver,” Needell recalls.

Derby Royal Infirmary couldn’t do anything for Dallest, so Needell was strapped into the AGS-BMW JH18 and got 20 minutes in second qualifying aboard the unfamiliar car. After a bit of work to get the set-up more to his liking, he matched his best time on full tanks in the race morning warm-up.

Needell doesn’t remember that he finished a respectable 11th. In fact, he only recalls the scrapes and bruises on his shins resulting from the tight fit in a car he wasn’t meant to be driving.

AJ Foyt - 1983 Daytona 24 Hours 

Old fox in a Henn house

Foyt was a late addition to the Swap Shop Porsche, but went on to win the 1983 Daytona 24 Hours

Photo by: Motorsport Images

AJ Foyt’s return to sportscar racing would probably have been short-lived but for a showman by the name of Preston Henn. The Indianapolis 500 legend had been lured back for the first time since his Le Mans-winning year of 1967 to contest the 1983 Daytona 24 Hours in a car backed by race sponsor Pepsi-Cola. The unfancied Aston Martin-Nimrod went out of the race early, but Henn spotted a mid-race opportunity.

The late owner of the Swap Shop flea market in Fort Lauderdale invited Foyt to join the crew in his Porsche 935, the rather special 935L built in the famed Andial workshops. More to the point, it was the car that Bob Wollek had put on pole and was now shooting up the order in his and Claude Ballot-Lena’s hands after early turbocharger problems.

“Preston asked me about putting AJ in the car,” says Kevin Jeannette, who prepared the 935. “I told him that we had a chance of winning the thing and that AJ had never driven a Porsche before. He looked at me as though I was from another planet. To him it didn’t matter if we didn’t win because he’d still have had AJ Foyt in his Swap Shop Porsche.”

Foyt’s preparation for taking the controls of the Porsche stretched to sitting in another 935 that was already out of the race.

The question from the pitlane reporter was obvious: “So Bob, what do you think of AJ Foyt joining the team?” The response was less so: “Who the f*** is AJ Foyt?”

“AJ said, ‘Can I ask a stupid question? What’s the shift pattern?’” recalls Jeannette. “I said, ‘It’s just like a Volkswagen, except that reverse is over and forward’. His reply was, ‘First of all, do you think I’ve ever driven a Volkswagen? And second, why would I need reverse?’ I thought, ‘You’ve got a point there Mr Foyt’.”

What happened when Foyt was strapped into the Porsche on Sunday morning has gone down in history, and not just motor racing history. One story suggests that the late Wollek knew exactly what was happening when he came into the pits for the handover and tried to keep the door closed. Another claims that he had no idea that the team had brought in a fourth driver. Whatever, the events that followed are indisputable because they were captured live on television.

PLUS: How 'Brilliant' Bob Wollek lived up to his nickname

The question from the pitlane reporter was obvious: “So Bob, what do you think of AJ Foyt joining the team?” The response was less so: “Who the f*** is AJ Foyt?” It is generally reckoned to be the first time the f-word was uttered on network TV in the USA.

Wollek, Ballot-Lena, Foyt and Henn went on to claim victory by six laps. It was the start of a second sportscar career for Foyt, who would go on to do the Daytona-Sebring double in 1985. And despite Wollek’s comments, it was also the start of a long friendship between two legends of different branches of the sport.

Max Angelelli - 1997 Macau Grand Prix 

Angelelli is no angel

Angelelli stepped in for Heidfeld at BSR in 1997, but was booted out of the results

Photo by: Motorsport Images

Max Angelelli was finally done with Formula 3 in 1997. The Italian had gone back to the Macau Grand Prix as a ringer the year before and finished second, but now he was focusing on the sportscar career that would ultimately encompass two victories at the Daytona 24 Hours and a pair of Grand-Am titles in North America. Yet he still fancied a trip to his old stamping ground that November.

That explained the call a few months before to the late Barry Bland, whose Motor Race Consultants organisation put together the grid for the F3 extravaganza. Angelelli only wanted a pass so he could spectate, but Bland reckoned he should be driving and insisted he bring his helmet.

It turned out to be a prescient move when Nick Heidfeld fell ill with food poisoning. He’d meant to be competing for Bertram Schafer Racing, the team with which Angelelli had been a regular in F3 in 1993-96. The team had its replacement when Schafer spotted his old driver wandering up the pitlane.

“So they gave me Nick’s overalls, and you know how short he is,” explains Angelelli. “I looked ridiculous and it was so painful in my balls!”

Angelelli might have been in Macau ostensibly on holiday, but his competitive instincts quickly kicked in. He qualified second to eventual winner Soheil Ayari and won the first heat aboard ‘his’ BSR Dallara-Opel F396 courtesy of a touch of gamesmanship that ultimately resulted in his exclusion from the event.

The late stand-in had been hit up the rear at Mandarin Corner by Ayari’s Graff Racing entry when race leader Tom Coronel had crashed at the restart. The damage was significant, so Angelelli deliberately brought the car to a halt at Lisboa to get the race stopped. He won the restarted heat in the repaired car and went on to finish fourth on aggregate across the two races, before his name was expunged from the results.

“They called me to race control and I lied and lied, telling them my differential had locked,” says Angelelli. “What I didn’t know was that they had downloaded all the data from my car, so they knew exactly what I had done.”

Rene Rast - 2016 DTM Zandvoort

A birthday party – and then a present

Rast was a last-minute stand-in for Tambay, and impressed enough to earn another shot which he would parlay into three titles

Photo by: Audi Sport

Rene Rast got lucky twice over in July 2016. His biggest stroke of fortune was that he was not at home when the call came from Audi to see if he could replace Adrien Tambay for the second of the two races at the Zandvoort DTM round. The next was that he wasn’t drunk!

Rast was with his girlfriend’s (now wife’s) parents in Hannover rather than at home in Austria on the Saturday evening after Team Rosberg driver Tambay was ruled out of the following day’s event by a hand injury. That meant that the German was only four or so hours away from Zandvoort rather than 10. His problem was that he couldn’t drive himself to the track – the reason for his and Diana’s presence in Hannover was to celebrate her 30th birthday.

“I’d had a couple of glasses of wine or so, not too much that I couldn’t race the following day, but certainly too much to drive myself to Zandvoort,” says Rast. “Luckily my manager Dennis [Rostek] didn’t live too far away and he could take me. The other lucky thing was that I had my helmet in the car. I’m not sure why, because I didn’t have anything else. I had to borrow a pair of overalls from Edoardo Mortara and boots, gloves and underwear from the mechanics.”

"I didn’t know how to engage first gear, so a mechanic had to open the door to explain it to me. The result in the race [19th] wasn’t so good, but the important thing was that I was getting faster and faster all the time" Rene Rast

Rast, who’d been on Audi’s books since 2012, had never driven the 2016 RS5 DTM, only the previous-generation Audi with a sequential ’box. That caused an embarrassing moment when he tried to go out at the start of free practice on Sunday: “I didn’t know how to engage first gear, so a mechanic had to open the door to explain it to me. The result in the race [19th] wasn’t so good, but the important thing was that I was getting faster and faster all the time.”

That resulted in an invite to return for the DTM finale at Hockenheim when Mattias Eskstrom was on World Rallycross Championship duty. This time Rast got to test, and impressed again over the course of a weekend that yielded sixth place in the opening encounter. The following year he was a full-time DTM driver, and three titles in the German-based tin-top series followed.

“That’s motor racing,” says Rast. “You have to be in the right place at the right time.” Which in his case meant not being at home.

Marc Gene/Oliver Turvey - 2014 Le Mans 24 Hours 

Merry-go-round goes all topsy-Turvey

Gene was again at the centre of a late switch in 2014 when he was called up by Audi to replace Duval, leaving a seat vacant at the Jota LMP2 squad

Photo by: Eric Gilbert

Le Mans 2014 was the year of the last-minute stand-in. But the back story to two late replacements putting in starring performances began a couple of years earlier.

Marc Gene had joined the Audi LMP1 line-up in place of the injured Timo Bernhard ahead of the Spa World Endurance round in 2012. He helped secure a victory in the Belgian six-hour race, so he kept his seat alongside Romain Dumas and Loic Duval for Le Mans that year and drove the third car the next.

But he was just a reserve after youngsters Marco Bonanomi and Filipe Albuquerque came into the additional entry in 2014. Albuquerque was also racing in the European Le Mans Series in Jota’s LMP2 Zytek and, due to the Portuguese’s commitment to Audi, Gene was slotted into the British team’s line-up for the 24 Hours.

The Spaniard practised the Zytek on Wednesday but, when he saw the aftermath of Duval’s horrific shunt in the Porsche Curves during that evening’s practice sessions, he knew Audi would be on the phone imminently. His crash at the same place six years earlier told him that.

“That was where I had the biggest accident of my career,” he says of his flip during the Le Mans test day in 2008. “I knew whoever the driver was wouldn’t be able to race: the forces from the deceleration are just too big.”

Call Audi did, so Gene had to swap his Jota race suit for his Audi overalls and move down the pitlane to share the R18 e-tron quattro with Tom Kristensen and Lucas di Grassi. That, of course, meant Jota was now in need of a stand-in. It turned to a driver who’d helped it to third place in the previous year’s ELMS.

The team’s luck was that Oliver Turvey didn’t have a Le Mans drive that year after the Delta/Millennium team’s withdrawal. Turvey had been fulfilling F1 simulator duties for McLaren on the Wednesday of Le Mans week, and was in the gym when the call came from Jota boss Sam Hignett.

Turvey replaced Gene and won the LMP2 class with Tincknell and Dolan

Photo by: Eric Gilbert

“I was asked if I was available, then it was all confirmed about 10pm,” recalls Turvey. “They had a plane going from Southend airport, I think it was, at 6am the next day, so I ended up getting something like three hours’ sleep.”

Turvey ended up winning the class with Jota regulars Harry Tincknell and Simon Dolan. That’s despite their Zytek Z11SN going three laps down in the early hours thanks to a series of misjudged calls on tyres in changing conditions and the need to change the illuminated number on the side of the car.

"To do my last Le Mans with a legend like Tom was amazing; to have shared a victory with him would have been even more amazing" Marc Gene

“After that it was a qualifying push every lap,” remembers Turvey. “I loved that car, it gave me so much confidence and was always a joy to drive.”

Gene finished runner-up with Kristensen and di Grassi, though he might have been rewarded with a second Le Mans victory on another day. They led what was an old-school race of attrition late on Sunday morning before, like the winning car of Andre Lotterer, Benoit Treluyer and Marcel Fassler, their R18 required a change of turbo.

“I’d only tested that year’s car two or three times, and the original plan for the race was that I wasn’t going to get so much time in the car, but when I showed I was competitive they extended my stints,” says Gene. “To do my last Le Mans with a legend like Tom was amazing; to have shared a victory with him would have been even more amazing.”

Gene ended up finishing second overall in 2014, and could have won alongside Di Grassi and Kristensen without a turbo problem on the Dane's swansong

Photo by: Eric Gilbert