The Dutch oddity that was too niche for its own good

They're the three letters that have come to dominate sportscar racing in the past decade. But in the time before BOP (or Balance of Performance), the mechanism used by governing bodies the world over to incentivise participation by as many manufacturers as possible, there were no leg-ups for smaller manufacturers looking to take on the might of Porsche and Ferrari.

That's not to say that the minnows didn't have their day on occasion. Blackpool manufacturer TVR experienced fleeting success in the Le Mans Series in 2005, while Panoz caused a major upset by winning the GT2 class at the Le Mans 24 Hours in 2006.

But the Spyker marque that was a stalwart of GT2 competition in the 2000s until 2010 with its family of C8 cars - when financial woes turned an intended sabbatical to develop its new C8 Aileron model into something more permanent - never managed an outright win in ACO-approved competition.

Most widely known for its short-lived spell owning the Formula 1 team now known as Racing Point from late 2006 until the end of the 2007 season, the Dutch marque's bread and butter was niche supercars, with the C8 its flagship model. An unmistakably quirky-looking car that underwent several facelifts but always retained the two-digit nomenclature, Spyker's idiosyncrasy was a key part of its appeal, but actually counted against it in competition.

Always unlikely to attract the type of sales figures as its OEM rivals, Spyker had access to a smaller sales pot to invest in car production which in turn meant it took longer to weed out problems, and bring developments year on year. This contributed in a lack of success that wouldn't have done much good for car sales, resulting in a self-perpetuating cycle of short funds.

"It's all driven by car sales and Spyker was such a niche manufacturer," says Peter Dumbreck, who raced the C8 Spyder and C8 Laviolette models for the Spyker Squadron works team between 2006 and 2010. "A rich individual who collects cars is going to have one or two Ferraris, a couple of Porsches, a [Bugatti] Veyron or whatever, but he's not necessarily going to have a Spyker in his collection."

"We had little niggly problems, but it didn't often seem to be the same," recalls Jonny Kane, another Spyker C8 Spyder regular in 2006 and 07. "They were the only two cars of that type racing anywhere in the world, up against Ferrari, Porsche, where there's hundreds of the things racing all over the place.

"I would say all it really needed was another 10 of them out there racing somewhere to run through the gremlins a bit quicker and iron out those little problems.

"There was no lack of effort or lack of will to achieve from anybody at Spyker, we just didn't have quite the budget or the numbers of cars out there to really compete against much bigger factory efforts."

Having acquired the rights for the name last used by the Dutch car and WW1 aircraft-manufacturer in 1925, Spyker was relaunched by Victor Muller in 2000 and revealed its first offering, the C8 Spyder, at that year's Birmingham Motor Show. Muller soon set about making a splash in endurance racing, and the Peter Van Erp-led team first developed the C8 Double 12R: so named in deference to the average speed record during two 12-hour periods of 74.5 mph set by a Spyker C4 driven by Selwyn Edge in 1922.

"We had a lot of fun together but they were running off a fraction of the budget that was needed" Peter Dumbreck

The first racing iteration of the C8, run initially by Reiter Engineering, debuted at Sebring 2002 with a four-litre V8 BMW engine for Peter Kox, Derek Hill and Hans Hugenholtz Jr., and Spyker made two appearances with the car at Le Mans in 2002 and 2003 (pictured below) that were hindered by mechanical problems. It was to become something of a theme in the years to come.

The Double 12R's replacement, the C8 Spyder GT2-R, was introduced for the 2005 LMS season, this time with an Audi 3.8-litre powerplant, and Jeroen Bleekemolen and Donny Crevels scored a surprise second place on only the car's second appearance at the Nurburgring.

It suggested there was plenty more to come as the Squadron expanded to a full campaign with two cars in 2006, but despite the addition of British aces Kane and Dumbreck - reunited for the first time since their season as team-mates at Paul Stewart Racing in British Formula 3 in 1997 - that would be as good a result as a Spyker would achieve in the LMS.

After racing an MG Lola prototype at Le Mans, Kane had gained his first GT experience in the unwieldy TVR Tuscan in 2004 and one year later, joined the Aston Martin works team at Petit Le Mans. There, he'd been team-mates with Kox, who put the Northern Irishman forward for a drive with Spyker in 2006.

"Peter drove for Spyker at Sebring but then he had a GT1 race programme [with the Convers MenX Team in a Ferrari 550] which meant he couldn't do any more Le Mans Series rounds for Spyker," recalls Kane.

"He mentioned to me that I should get in touch and I literally turned up for the first race at Istanbul having not met anyone and never sat in the car before. I walked into the garage and introduced myself as 'Jonny, your new driver', so that was quite interesting!"

Dumbreck meanwhile had won the Japanese F3 title and Macau GP in 1998, his launchpad to a plum drive at Le Mans with Mercedes in 1999 that would become something of a poisoned chalice...

Five years in the DTM had yielded one win before Opel's decision to downsize prompted a move back to Japan in Super GT for 2005. But eager to keep his options open in Europe, Dumbreck was happy to accept when Spyker regular Tom Coronel - who had raced against Dumbreck in Formula Nippon in 1999 - made an introduction.

"It was a great bunch of guys, like a family, and we had a lot of fun together but they were running off a fraction of the budget that was needed," says Dumbreck. "It was also in a time in GT2 racing that you could get away with running on a lower budget because, let's face it, that same year Panoz won at Le Mans by just driving around slowly and getting to the end. That car should never have won, but it did.

"At that time it was all about GT1, but gradually GT2 became the focus and we just couldn't get away with the results we'd been getting in the Le Mans Series in the Spyker."

One of its major problems was poor reliability, a by-product of having a small team doing everything in-house at its Zeewolde HQ - Kane estimates "there were probably 20 guys in total, and they made everything themselves". This included a trick device attached to the gear-lever that blipped the throttle on downshifts, but Spyker could never hope to be a match for the major OEMs it was up against, with their unrivalled capacity for quality control and testing.

It wasn't until 2009 that a Spyker actually finished Le Mans, with Coronel, Bleekemolen and Jarek Janis' C8 Laviolette finishing 10 laps down on the GT2 class-winning Risi Ferrari in fifth.

"It could last four hours or 1000km, just about, but not always," says Dumbreck. "We just could not go the distance at Le Mans. If we tried to run any kind of race pace at all, it lasted at best four to six hours and then it was game over.

"It was just a case of needing more mileage on the car and figuring out what need to be beefed up a little bit and what needed to be changed slightly" Jonny Kane

"When you're going into a race knowing that the chances of you seeing the finish are very slim and you're thinking 'I'm going to get my car ready and loaded before I go so I can just f**k off home', that's not a good way to go into a race."

"They were a fantastic group of people, they really worked hard to do the best we could with what we had," adds Kane. "We came very close to having a third at the Spa 24 Hours in 2006, which would have been a massive achievement, but unfortunately we had a gear linkage problem which we'd not had before.

"It was just a case of needing more mileage on the car and figuring out what need to be beefed up a little bit or what needed to be changed slightly."

An evolution of the Spyder, the Laviolette GT2-R, came along for 2008 with improved handling but the same power complaints - despite increasing engine capacity to a four-litre Audi V8. In 2010, the fastest GT2 race lap at Le Mans was a 3m59.152s set by the venerable Ferrari F430, which was some 3.88s faster than the fastest Spyker time.

"With Tom and Jeroen in the same car, we should have been mega, but we were reliant on an old four-litre Audi road engine engine which for a start was really down on power and hadn't seen any development for a long time," says Dumbreck (below centre).

"On the straights we were absolutely nowhere - at Le Mans you've got to be reasonably decent on the straights, or else you're in trouble.

"We weren't a million miles away in the corners and aero-wise and everything like that, we just had no power. If you try and run as little wing as possible to get the straight-line speed, then you compromise in the corners and then you're just continually having these little issues. But if you could have stuck a decent powerplant in it and had the car as it was, it might have been okay."

'It might have been okay' isn't exactly a ringing endorsement, but then the Spyker was never the easiest of cars to drive, particularly in the early days of the Spyder GT2-R when it didn't have a conventional roof...

"It was a little bit of a handful if I'm honest!" remembers Kane. "Not having a roof really messed with the aerodynamics a lot and meant a lot of turbulence over the rear wing, so it wasn't nearly as effective as it should have been.

"But they ended up putting a roof on the car and it made a huge difference, it went about 20 km/h quicker through Eau Rouge because the airflow stayed connected to the roof and went onto the rear-wing which just made everything more stable."

"The car had a very short wheel-base so the handling was kind of snappy," adds Dumbreck. "Once you got your head around it, it was okay but we lacked so much in straight-line performance that we were running the engine full gas and it just couldn't last."

Despite a badly cracked windscreen, the British pair's C8 Spyder was promoted to the podium at Jarama in 2006 - a race eventually won by Geordies Rob Bell and Warren Hughes in the giant-killing Panoz - when on-the-road winner, the GPC Ferrari 430 of Fabrizio de Simone, Luca Drudi and Gabri Rosa was disqualified.

"But we'd already all left for the airport by that stage because we had flights to catch, so we didn't actually get to enjoy the podium," recalls Kane.

Dumbreck would at least get to stand on a podium proper at Silverstone the following year with Mike Hezemans - who had continued Spyker's strong record at the Nurburgring by finishing third with Bleekemolen in 2006 - albeit two laps adrift.

But as GT1 wound down and the competition level in GT2 continued to improve, Spyker's podium visits would become increasingly rare, with back-to-back second places in 2009 - again at the Nurburgring and Silverstone - for Coronel and Janis the final hurrah.

In fact, it's a little-known event in Lithuania in 2008 that provided the crowning glory of Dumbreck's time with Spyker. In a C8 Spyder he shared with Ralf Kelleners, Aleksey Vasilyev and local driver Jonas Gelzinis, Dumbreck won the Omnitel 1000, a race around a dual carriage-way near the Polanga beach resort - "it's a pretty short track, so 1,000km around there took absolutely ages!" - that Spyker had attended at the behest of major backers, the Lithuanian-based Snoras Bank.

"I remember carrying around loads of weight in lead in the car to bring us up to weight and thinking 'how are we so far off the pace yet we've still got to carry this? It's outrageous!'" Peter Dumbreck

Snoras was an asset of Spyker's one-time largest single shareholder, wealthy Russian Vladimir Antonov, who had been forced to give up his shares in 2010 as part of the terms laid down by General Motors for the proposed sale of struggling car-maker Saab to Spyker. The deal would prove a disaster for Spyker, as the change of ownership failed to avert Saab's slide towards administration.

Antonov, who had acquired Portsmouth FC in June 2011, was determined to buy back into the company in a deal that would have moved the manufacture of Spykers to Coventry, but in November 2011 was arrested for embezzlement - resulting in Snoras' collapse and Portsmouth heading into administration. After several years of extradition hearings, Antonov was jailed in Russia last year.

Saab's woes dragged Spyker into the mire too, forcing its plans to develop the new C8 Aileron into a GTE car for 2012 to be parked. It was declared bankrupt by a Dutch court in 2014, although the ruling was successfully overturned on appeal in 2015. The company continues to trade, and released a new model - the C8 Preliator - as recently as 2016, but has shown no signs of a return to motorsport.

The landscape it left behind in 2010 is much-altered, with BOP now an accepted - if still not widely popular - part of sportscar racing. While Dumbreck concedes that "it probably wouldn't have changed the car company as a whole", he reckons certain concessions from organisers "certainly would have helped" Spyker to become more competitive and increase its chances of attracting new investment.

"I remember carrying around loads of weight in lead in the car to bring us up to weight and thinking 'how are we so far off the pace yet we've still got to carry this? It's outrageous!'" says Dumbreck. "Lo and behold, two or three years later we wouldn't have had to carry that anymore.

"They would have said, 'We can see that your straightline speeds are at least 10km/h down so you can make a bigger restrictor and take this weight off'. But at the time, we weren't allowed to do that."

Today, the C8 family of cars are remembered as something of an oddity that brought a splash of colour and intrigue to sportscar racing amid the sea of 911s and F430s of the time. Due to the costs involved in running a GTE car today, and the economic implications of the coronavirus yet to be understood, it's unlikely that we'll get to see the likes of Spyker mixing it on the big stage anytime soon. And for all its lack of success, that's a shame.

"That whole team was running hand-to-mouth and actually what they achieved on such a small budget was pretty impressive," adds Dumbreck.

"Through the years, you can pull out little names like Spyker who try and do things differently, plucky little underdogs and as time goes on, it might be a case where there's less manufacturer money and you need more of these guys. Motorsport is a cyclical thing."