How Kristensen showed his enduring class on long-awaited Porsche return

The last time Tom Kristensen raced a Porsche, he put down a marker in the sand. His performance at the 1997 Le Mans 24 Hours aboard Joest Racing’s WSC95 LMP on the way to a debut victory with Michele Alboreto and Stefan Johansson gave more than a hint of what was to come over a stellar career at the Circuit de la Sarthe.

A string of fastest laps culminating in a new lap record, during what at the time was an unprecedented quadruple stint in the night, made the world sit up and take notice. Now he’s behind the wheel of a very different kind of Porsche but, 10 years on from the end of his contemporary racing career, he shows the old magic is still there. 

This particular German machine isn’t a prototype and is loosely based on a 911 road car. And the thing has a roof and an engine that’s slung out the back. It’s a Porsche 935 IMSA GTX class racer, the tubeframe JLP-3 commissioned in 1981 by John Paul Sr, the car in which his namesake son anchored victory in the 1982 IMSA Camel GT Championship. The car is owned by McLaren Racing CEO Zak Brown, who is Kristensen’s team-mate at the Peter Auto-run Estoril Classics weekend earlier this month. 

Kristensen is strapped into the Porsche, run by the historic arm of the United Autosports team that Brown co-owns with Richard Dean, and about to leave for the dummy grid for the Classic Endurance Racing II event when there’s a return of the rain from a qualifying session in which the car had ended up only 15th in the aggregate times: the 935 wasn’t out on the circuit when conditions are at their driest.

“It looked like it could dry out and I immediately felt staying on slicks was the right thing to do,” says Kristensen. What follows proves him right.

At the end of the opening lap of the race for GT cars built between 1975 and 1981 and prototypes from 1972 to 1981, Kristensen is up to 11th. Three laps later, he’s fourth.

Le Mans legend Kristensen enjoyed his historics cameo with United Autosports at Estoril

Photo by: Emidio Copeto

Progress is halted by a safety car before it’s time for Brown to take his turn. Our famous duo ended up 13th and third in the GT2 class, their trip onto the podium aided by a late retirement ahead of them. A bit more green-flag running and without the penalty that comes with having a multiple Le Mans winner in your car, and they would be further up the order. The United Porsche has to sit stationary for 20 seconds at its stop for having what is termed an elite driver. 

“I’d never driven a car like that before,” says Kristensen, whose historic exploits date back beyond his Goodwood Revival debut in 2010 – he raced a Mini Cooper in the Copenhagen Historic Grand Prix as long ago as 1998. “You have to nail it on the brakes and then turn in as you trail brake into the corner.

“If you come off the brakes before you start thinking about turning in, it picks up a bit of understeer. The car definitely worked in those conditions with the weight out over the rear axle – we know 911s like it when it rains. I was able to pass quite a few prototypes that were struggling a bit more than me on slicks.”

"Tom did an amazing job to hang on in those first laps. It was definitely a wet track at the start and he was one of about three drivers of 30 to go for slicks" Zak Brown

This is an away day for Kristensen, who in current times is variously president of the FIA Drivers’ Commission and a member of the governing body’s World Motor Sport Council, a Formula 1 TV commentator and an ambassador for Audi, the manufacturer with which he notched up seven of his record-breaking nine victories at Le Mans.

The Dane, now 57, is not just driving the Porsche, he’s also turning out in another of the machines from Brown’s mouthwatering collection looked after by United. He gets to drive a Ford ‘Cologne’ Capri RS3100 in the Heritage Touring Cup. Double the joy, he thinks.

“They’re both such great cars,” says Kristensen. “Just proper, and so much fun to drive.”

Kristensen stars, too, in the tin-top race in one of Ford’s Group 4 homologation specials built for the 1974 European Touring Car Championship. He again makes rapid progress through the field from a lowly grid position: the team has been saving its new set of wet-weather tyres for the race. Only Kristensen isn’t using them: slicks, he reckons, are the better option, an opinion not shared by the majority of the field in the race for touring cars built between 1966 and 1984.

After impressing in the 935, Kristensen also showed his skills in Brown's Capri RS3100

Photo by: Walter Branco

Kristensen again finishes the opening lap in 11th position from 18th on the grid and the upward progress continues despite having to pump the brakes. The Capri is third when it pits, though it goes no further. A front calliper seal has popped: it’s game over.

“It was one of the classic cases of a one-quid part failing,” groans Brown. “It’s a shame because Tom did an amazing job to hang on in those first laps. It was definitely a wet track at the start and he was one of about three drivers of 30 to go for slicks.”

Kristensen and Brown go back a long way, but not quite as far as Kristensen and Dean: they were contemporaries on the Japanese racing scene in the early 1990s. The Le Mans legend has driven cars from the Brown stable in the past, but never raced them.

He’s been up the hill at the Goodwood Festival in a Cosworth-powered Lotus 79 that Mario Andretti used on the way to taking the 1978 F1 drivers’ title, when he shared the seat with its former occupant in 2021. They took alternate runs that weekend in the Lotus and the Lola-Chevrolet T332 Formula 5000 in which Andretti scored seven wins across 1974 and 1975 in North America.

The opportunity to actually race a couple of Brown’s cars came up at the Imola World Endurance Championship round in April. Kristensen was suggesting to old mucker Dean that he had the “perfect life”: running a top-line sportscar team competing on multiple fronts around the world, and getting the chance on his weekends off to race some wonderful machinery with Brown.  

“Deany said he wasn’t so sure,” recalls Kristensen. “He explained he’s working flat-out, perhaps a bit too much now he’s running the McLarens in LMGT3 in the WEC. Then he said, ‘You should come and drive some of Zak’s cars. Estoril is right before Petit Le Mans [last weekend’s final round of the IMSA SportsCar Championship in which United competes in LMP2], so I’m going to be pretty busy.’

“He dropped a line to Zak with the idea there and then, and he came straight back: the message read ‘Make it happen!’”

Kristensen agreed the plan to race after a chat with United co-owner Dean in the WEC paddock

Photo by: Emidio Copeto

That explains how Kristensen has ended up at Estoril. But it may not be the last time we see him in a United-run car. Despite his storied career, he never got to race at the Daytona International Speedway in the big North American 24-hour enduro. Brown and United have already discussed putting that right next year in the end-of-season historic extravaganza.

“Tom and I talked about doing the Daytona Classic because he’s never raced at that track,” says Brown. “We could pop up together there depending on our schedules.”

And Brown’s weapon of choice? It would almost certainly be his 1989 Jaguar XJR-10 twin-turbo IMSA GTP racer.

Kristensen and Brown took a class podium with the 935 - and could race together again

Photo by: Emidio Copeto

Former top tester back in an F1 car

Tom Kristensen’s Estoril foray wasn’t the first opportunity he got this year to sample one of Zak Brown’s cars. The first came a few weeks earlier at the Red Bull Ring aboard something a bit more up to date and not from Brown’s personal fleet, when he got back behind the wheel of a contemporary Formula 1 car after an absence of a quarter of a century.

The opportunity of a short run in a 2022 McLaren-Mercedes MCL36 came as part of the British team’s Testing for Previous Cars programme that more usually allows it to give young drivers experience of near-contemporary F1 machinery outside the strict rules on testing. The outing at the Red Bull Ring came at Brown’s suggestion after a random interjection at the end of last year when Kristensen was interviewing in his F1 TV role.

“All of a sudden Zak interrupts me, and asks, ‘Tom, when was the last time you tested a modern F1 car?’ It stopped me in my tracks a little bit. I said it was a long time ago, 23 years to be exact. Straight away he said, ‘We need to change that’.”

Kristensen never raced in F1, but he did accrue as many as 10,000km for Michelin as it geared up for its return to grand prix racing in 2001, first in a Williams and then a Stewart. Brown stuck to his word, and then some.

“It was a proper test,” smiles Kristensen. “I went to Woking to have a go in the simulator and have a proper seat fitting.” And, of his runs in the car, “they were enough to get me out of breath”.

Chats with Brown also led to a run in a modern F1 car before memorable encounter with 935 at Estoril

Photo by: Emidio Copeto