The Spa 24 Hours at 100: The milestone moments that shaped a legend

2021 - Nothing ventured nothing gained

An inspired wet tyre call almost landed WRT a stunning victory in 2021, but Pier Guidi's intervention swung the race back to Iron Lynx

Photo by: SRO

The Iron Lynx Ferrari team looked home and dry in 2021 as the Spa 24 Hours entered the final hour. Its AF Corse-run 488 GT3 Evo driven by Alessandro Pier Guidi, Nicklas Nielsen and Come Ledogar had been on top for much of the race and had a clear margin over the second-placed WRT Audi R8 LMS GT3 Evo shared by Dries Vanthoor, Kelvin van der Linde and Charles Weerts. But with rain in the air, WRT boss Vincent Vosse made what appeared to be an outrageous gamble.

With 50 minutes left on the clock, Vanthoor came in for the car’s final pitstop and was sent out on wet-weather tyres - on a bone-dry track! It wasn’t raining anywhere around the 4.35-mile length of the Circuit de Spa Francorchamps.

WRT had an army of spotters on bikes circling the track in contact with the pits by radio. Vosse was getting reports that it was raining “200 metres from the circuit” and the Belgian team, whose high command of Vosse, Thierry Tassin and Pierre Dieudonne had seven Spa 24 wins between them, knew exactly “where the weather was coming from and where it was going”. Hence why Vanthoor was sent out on grooved rubber that came into its own when heavy rain started to fall halfway around his out-lap.

The gamble, reckons Vosse, panicked the Ferrari team. That explains why it waited for a lap to bring in Pier Guidi, which resulted in a 20s advantage turning into a deficit of just over a minute. The rain inevitably triggered a safety car and the misfortune for WRT was that there were only a handful of cars between the Vanthoor and Pier Guidi when the race went green with 27 minutes remaining. The Italian driver hunted down the leader and took the lead with a breath-taking around the outside manoeuvre at Blanchimont with 10 minutes to go.

Vosse insists he wasn’t disappointed: “It was one of those races where you do everything right and you’ve tried everything, but you aren’t fast enough. It was a fun call to make at the end. No regrets.”

It might have changed its guise but the Spa 24 Hours has gone risen to new heights over its century

Photo by: Porsche Motorsport

1924 - How it all began

The Spa endurance classic might be regarded as a copycat race, its inauguration following one year on from the first running of the Le Mans 24 Hours in 1923. Yet there had been an enduro on the new Circuit de Spa-Francorchamps in 1922. A 40-lap event on the 9.31-mile road track established with a motorcycle race the previous year attracted 12 cars, all with four seats and a riding mechanic as per the regulations.

Spa, however, never quite emulated its French cousin. The economic crisis of the 1930s meant that it didn’t take place in either 1935 or ’37 - it alternated with the Belgian Grand Prix in that period. Reborn a year before Le Mans after World War Two, the race lapsed after the 1948 and ’49 editions before a revival in 1953 as part of the inaugural World SportsCar Championship.

A total of 60 cars took the start at Le Mans, just 39 at Spa. Sharing the grid with the Jaguar C-types and Ferrari 375MMs were a smattering of touring cars, some Fiat 1100s and Borgward 1800s. The crowd was disappointing and the 24 Hours disappeared from the international calendar.

1984 - Jaguar finally does it

After some nighttime scares, Jaguar and TWR charged to victory in the 60th anniversary

Photo by: Motorsport Images

Jaguar and TWR had been trying to win the Spa 24 Hours as part of its assault on the European Touring Car Championship (known simply as the ETC) since 1982 to no avail. The pressure was on in 1984 and the XJ-S finally delivered victory in the big one — and in its 60th anniversary running — with team boss Tom Walkinshaw, Win Percy and Hans Heyer.

The Big Cat claimed the historic win by three laps from the Juma Racing BMW 635CSi shared by Thierry Tassin, Alain Cudini and Dany Snoebeck. It wasn’t all plain sailing, however. Walkinshaw twice lost time in the dreadful conditions that marred the nighttime running. First he was held by a red light at the end of the pitlane and then when only 20s behind the Juma car it was he who was picked up by the safety car and not the leader!

The fury of the irascible Scotsman doesn’t bear thinking about!

2001 - A race reborn with FIA GTs

Saloon cars were replaced by GT chargers to breathe new life into the event

Photo by: Motorsport Images

The Spa 24 Hours had a problem after its 1980s and early-90s glory years in the touring car era. Tin-top racing was changing, and in a direction not favourable to arguably its biggest race. What became Super Touring, the made-in-Britain two-litre formula that sounded the death knell for the homologation special, resulted in a breed of cars that were neither designed nor suitable for endurance racing. It took a while but it resulted in a seismic shift that took the Belgian enduro back to its sportscar origins.

“Those cars were designed for sprint racing and the manufacturers were reluctant to do Spa,” recalls Pierre Dieudonne, a two-time winner at Spa who worked for race organiser the Royal Automobile Club de Belgique as a consultant in 1994-2000.

Among the ideas he came up with an experimental class dubbed the EcoTech Challenge: its importance lies in bringing diesel machinery back into sportscar racing rather than saving Spa as a touring fixture. By the turn of the century, the promoters of the event Jean-Francois Chaumont and Josse Dekens had decided to knock on the door of Stephane Ratel. From 2001, the 24 Hours would be a round of the FIA GT Championship.

“It was like a dream come true: we were being offered a major event with a big crowd, even if it was artificial because of all the tickets the race sponsors gave away,” explains Ratel, who was still in the process of relaunching his series following its near-collapse after the end of the GT1 era in 1998. “Every series needs a big event. FIA GTs was starting to grow again, but we didn’t have that.”

FIA GTs ran to a three-hour format for the GT and N-GT classes that would soon be renamed GT1 and GT2, but there were few concerns about adding a race of eight times the duration. “The manufacturers thought it was good news and so did the teams,” says Ratel. “There was certainly no doubt in my mind that it was the right thing to do.”

And so began a new era for Spa as a double-points FIA GT round. Chrysler, Ferrari, Maserati and Porsche (with a secondary class N-GT car) would all triumph during this period. There was, however, a concession to the format of the regular races. The quarter points awarded at six and 12 hours, which remain to this day, resulted from early fears over the reliability of the cars.

2004 - Bryner makes history in Ferrari duel

Lilian Bryner creates history in an all-Ferrari fight at the 80th anniversary

Photo by: Motorsport Images

Lilian Bryner posted a major achievement at the Spa classic in 2004: she became the first woman to win a major sportscar 24-hour race. The Swiss amateur, a stalwart of the GT racing scene alongside partner Enzo Calderari, triumphed in a BMS Scuderia Italia Ferrari 550 Maranello GTS shared with Fabrizio Gollin and Luca Cappellari.

Bryner and her team-mates came out on top in an all-Ferrari battle, though not between two of the Prodrive-built 550s that were so important in the resurgence of FIA GTs at the start of the new century. Spa 2004 turned into a fight between the ‘British’ Ferrari and its factory-sanctioned equivalent, the 575GTC. The GPC Squadra Corse entry with Mika Salo, Fabio Babini, Vincent Vosse and Philipp Peter driving was the quicker car, but the Spa gods didn’t smile on them that weekend.

A broken diffuser did for their chances. Five minutes lost to pro temps repairs cost them a one-lap lead and then some, and the hobbled car, with the rear wing jacked up to regain some rear downforce, eventually finished that margin behind at the finish. Ferrari still took its first Spa 24 Hours victory since 1953 and Bryner achieved something that has yet to be emulated.

1987 - A Spa legend is born

Van de Poele was on double duty racing in DTM and the Spa 24 Hours on the same weekend - taking a podium in one and winning the other!

Photo by: BMW

Eric van de Poele made his mark on touring car racing on the first weekend of August in 1987. Not only did he notch up a podium in the DTM at Wunstorf that gave his ultimately successful title bid a timely boost, but he claimed victory at the Spa 24 Hours. Not that he got to celebrate properly at his home race in Belgium. The weather saw to that.

The future Formula 1 driver, part of BMW’s junior programme, pulled double duty that weekend, racing for Zakspeed as usual in the DTM and CiBiEmme in the Spa fixture, which 27 years ago was part of the one-off original iteration of the World Touring Car Championship. The escapade involved van de Poele hopping by air between the Ardennes and the German airfield circuit near Hannover.

Inclement weather nearly did for van de Poele’s attempt to make it back to Wunstorf on the Sunday after he’d fulfilled his duties in the CiBiEmme BMW M3 shared with Didier Theys and Jean-Michel Martin, a four-hour stint straddling midnight included. Low cloud meant the helicopter in which he was meant to make the trip was grounded, forcing him into a plane. The vital minutes lost meant he didn’t arrive at Wunstorf until the time the DTM race as scheduled to start.

“When I got there the team was looking up in the air for a helicopter,” recalls van de Poele. “There were motorbikes out on track as I arrived, so it was all running late. I already had my helmet on and just jumped in the car.”

Van de Poele went on to finish third in the 40-minute race. The podium celebrations in Germany meant he didn’t make the perhaps more pressing ones back home. While he was away, his Bimmer had inherited the lead on the retirement of the last of the Eggenberger Ford Sierra Cosworth RS500s that had led the way for much of the race.

He wouldn’t make it in time, despite having his company M3 parked at Liege-Bierset airport. Van de Poele had to run the last half kilometre as he battled the traffic leaving the circuit: “I arrived just as Didier and Jean-Michel were coming out of the winners’ press conference.”

What he didn’t know at the time was that he would get plenty more opportunities to celebrate Spa 24 Hours glory. Van de Poele would go on to become the most successful driver in its history with five victories.

2006 - The best of the first GT era

It was a thriller where the Pirelli-shod Maserati triumphed in changing conditions

Photo by: Alastair Staley / Motorsport Images

A repeat of its 1948 victory the first post-war running of the Spa enduro still eludes Aston Martin, something it’s aiming to put right this time around. Yet back in 2006, it should by rights have won the Belgian classic. The Phoenix Racing squad led for the pretty much whole way with its solo DBR9, though ultimately lost out by less than two minutes.

The race turned against the Aston shared by Andrea Piccini, Marcel Fassler, Jean-Denis Deletraz and, very briefly, Stephane Lemeret in the closing stages of its battle with the ultimately victorious Vitaphone Maserati MC12 driven by Michael Bartels and Andrea Bertolini and Spa ringer Eric van de Poele.

The Aston, with a broken lambda sensor on the exhaust, lost a handy advantage in the closing hours when Spa specialist van de Poele, who was on the way to victory number four in the 24 Hours, went up against Piccini on Michelins. The track was damp, but not quite wet enough for grooved rubber. The home hero absolutely destroyed his Michelin-shod rival on track using his Pirellis.

“It was drizzling and the Maserati was flying,” recalls Piccini. “I knew van de Poele was quick in the wet, but I couldn’t understand how he could be so much quicker than me. There was no chance to fight with him and he passed me like I was standing still.”

Piccini would come to understand what had happened a few years later when he too was on Pirellis during a stint in LMP2 driving a Racing Box Lola. “We were the only team on Pirellis and I was overtaking LMP1s on a damp track,” he recalls. “There was something about the Pirelli tyre in those conditions.”

Phoenix might yet have still prevailed by the exhaust issue. The broken lambda had a negative impact on the car’s fuel consumption and it was this, insists Piccini, that “cost us the race”. The two cars were just seconds apart at the end when the Aston had to make a last-minute splash, which explained the unrepresentative 100s margin of victory at the chequered flag.

“That was a disappointing race because we did a mega job, Marcel and I driving for something like 10 hours each,” says the Italian, who would finally get his name on the Spa honour’s board in 2011 driving a Phoenix-run Audi. “I believe we deserved that one.”

It wasn’t all bad for Piccini, however. Not long after the race he got a call from Maserati technical director Giorgio Asinelli. A deal was done and he went on to notch up a victory and a couple more podiums with Vitaphone the following season.

1964 - Touring car recharge

The touring car era enabled a Morris Mini Cooper S to take on a Mercedes 300 SE

Photo by: Motorsport Images

Paul Frere is rightly regarded as the father of the Spa 24 Hours in its touring car iteration. He came up with the idea of reviving the race and communicated his ideas to RACB. The result was a tin-top race on the traditional end-of-July weekend in 1964.

He had opted to retire from racing after winning Le Mans with fellow countryman Olivier Gendebien at the wheel of a Ferrari 250 Testa Rosa. That didn’t stop him from turning out in the odd event, the 1962 and ’63 editions of the Nurburgring 12 Hours tin-top events included. These may or may not have sown the seed of what might be possible at Spa.

As a journalist, however, he had close links with the motor industry and was testing all the new sporty saloons rolling of the production line in the boom years that followed the post-war slump.

“Paul understood the needs of the automotive industry and was testing all these new cars,” says Pierre Dieudonne, whose involvement in the race continues to this day with his role as sporting director of the WRT BMW squad. “It was perhaps natural that he should propose a kind of big race for these cars.”

His ideas coincided with the launch of the European Touring Car Championship, which also came on stream in 1964. The history of Spa and the series known simply as the ETC would be intertwined until deep into the 1980s.

1992 - The greatest finish?

Soper (far left) was fired up by the team to catch and pass van der Poele to win by 0.49s

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Showered and shaved, suited and booted, Steve Soper announced to the Rafanelli team that he was off home. There were still a handful of hours to go and the BMW M3 Evo he was sharing with Christian Danner and Jean-Michel Martin was firmly in second place, and he had to get back home to London to see his newborn daughter. Team boss Gabriele Rafanelli had other ideas: he wanted his star driver back in harness. What followed led to one of the most dramatic finishes in the history of the Spa 24 Hours.

“I wanted someone angry enough to drive like crazy and get the car to the front to win the 24 Hours,” recalls Rafanelli. “Steve was that man. I told him he was getting back in the f****** car!”

Soper had to overcome a deficit of approaching two laps to the leading Schnitzer M3 shared by Eric van de Poele, Joachim Winkelhock and Altfrid Heger when he climbed aboard the M3. One of those laps was clawed back when the leading Bimmer needed a new driveshaft with just under two hours remaining. Van de Poele had stopped just before he could go to the end without the need for a splash, Schnitzer instructing its driver to eke out his fuel.

It gave Soper the scent of victory, his heated discussion with Rafanelli probably helping his charge: “When I did get in I was probably more hyped up and aggressive than I normally would have been. At the start of my stint I was probably taking two or three seconds a lap out of the leader, then all of a sudden it was five, six or more.”

“The team were telling me to stick to 7,500rpm, which was nothing,” recalls van de Poele. “But I had no choice; the team would have killed me if I had run out of fuel.”

Van de Poele’s cause wasn’t helped by the failure of the pits-to-car radio. The information he was getting came from the pit board and was therefore “a lap out of date”. With a radio, the most successful driver in the history of the 24 Hours with five victories is insistent that he could have held on to win.

Soper caught the Schnitzer car at the old Bus Stop chicane on the penultimate lap, gave him the slightest of nerfs and got a run down to La Source. Van de Poele had got an ‘ATTACK’ board as he passed the pits and trailed him across the finish line by 0.49s. His pace - he remembers setting the car’s second fastest race lap at the death — belies the idea that the car was about to run out of fuel and that its driver was shot.

Van de Poele collapsed after trying to get out of the car and missed the podium. He hadn’t been given a drinks bottle when he got in, but he says that had no effect on his driving. “I think,” he says, “I proved that on the last lap.”

2011 - A new era arrives with GT3

The GT3 era started off slowly, but quickly boomed into the success story it is today

Photo by: Audi AG

The Spa 24 Hours boomed - and continues to boom more than a dozen years later, witness the centenary edition’s 67-car field — after what might seem like an obvious decision ahead of 2011. Yet making the enduro GT3-only wasn’t initially in the plan when Stephane Ratel restructured his realm of GT racing in 2010.

That was the year of the launch of what turned out to be the short-lived FIA GT1 World Championship. Alongside a series based on the format of two one-hour sprints he’d pioneered in GT3, his eponymous organisation started a new series for the GT2 machinery that had been part of the grid in FIA GTs. The Belgian enduro would be the one and only round of a ‘championship’ that was downgraded to cup status, won by a Scuderia Italia Porsche 911 GT3-RSR driven by Romain Dumas, Joerg Bergmeister, Wolf Henzler and Martin Ragginger.

“It didn’t work because all the GT2 competitors wanted to race with the Automobile Club de l’Ouest in the Le Mans Series,” explains Ratel. “I think maybe at one point we had six or eight cars ready to sign up, but everyone else was looking at the LMS.”

Ratel had to think again and his mind turned to GT3, a category he’d never envisaged for endurance racing when he’d created it with the FIA for 2006. But it had been part of the grid from year two of its existence, initially in a bizarre manifestation. GT3 machinery would take part in three-car relay teams competing for the Coupe du Roi manufacturer’s prize.

There were only two takers, but a year later there were multiple entries and a further 12 months down the line an Audi R8 LMS GT3 run by the Phoenix team took third. GT3 machinery could go the distance. Ratel credits Michelotto Engineering which was just launching the first officially-sanctioned Ferrari GT3 car, the 458 Italia GT3, for sowing the seeds of the idea of a swap of category.

“I remember Luigi Dindo [Michelotto’s technical director] coming to me and saying, ‘but you don’t do endurance any more. That’s what our clients like’. It all happened very quickly, and everyone was up for it.”

SRO launched the Blancpain Endurance Series with Spa at its centre without FIA sanction (it had done an exclusivity deal with the ACO ahead of the relaunch of the World Endurance Championship for 2012). The series took off immediately. There were 30-plus cars for the series opener at Monza in April and three months later 54 of the 62 cars on the grid at Spa were GT3s. It really was the obvious thing to do.

What does the future hold for the Spa 24 Hours?

Photo by: SRO