How Ferrari could have won Le Mans outright in its factory absence

Ferrari is back and gunning for victory at the Le Mans 24 Hours after half a century. That statement needs to be qualified, twice over in fact. It’s back with a prototype and as a factory entrant. That’s what is new for 2023. Beyond the inevitable fanfare of the arrival of the 499P Le Mans Hypercar, it’s important to remember that the Italian manufacturer’s history at the French enduro and in the wider sportscar racing realm didn’t abruptly stop at the end of 1973.

The Prancing Horse has been active and successful on the hallowed asphalt of the Circuit de la Sarthe in the 50 years since. In the 49 editions of the great race since Ferrari’s fleet of 312PB three-litre prototypes ran Matra close for victory, a car bearing the marque’s famous shield has taken part at the French enduro on 37 occasions, a figure that includes a withdrawal and a did not start.

That history is rich and varied and encompasses both prototype and GT machinery, a car the factory really didn’t want on the grid, and another developed in the UK. There have been a quartet of top-six finishes and an impressive 14 class wins. That’s not to forget the obscurities, largely forgotten specials, that were in days of old always part of the Ferrari story.

Ferrari might have added to its nine outright wins in the years when the factory was absent from the front of the grid. There were some serious shots at making it 10, by privateers running the marque’s machinery. The 333SP, developed as a customer car for the North American IMSA GT Championship’s World Sports Car class, was a genuine contender at least once.

The 333SP years, 1995-99, weren’t the only time that Ferrari was represented in a category that could have yielded an overall winner. The F40, in its LM and GTE iterations, competed in GT1, which in theory at least was the equal of the LMP prototype division in the eyes of race organiser the Automobile Club de l’Ouest.

The one that truly got away while the factory was in absentia came in 1996. Team Scandia turned up at Le Mans with two cars, one entered under the Racing for Belgium banner and paid for by a group of 1001 companies and individuals. The car showed its pace in the preliminaries and had the speed if not the reliability to secure a first Ferrari outright win since the 1965 victory by another privateer, the North American Racing Team with a 250LM driven by Jochen Rindt and Masten Gregory.

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“We definitely had the car to win that year,” remembers Eric van de Poele, the star driver in the Belgian car. “The car was one of the fastest that year, no discussion.”

Gearbox problems plagued the 333 SP that van de Poele shared with Goossens and Bachelart in 1996

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That much he proved at the pre-qualifying weekend at the end of April. The ex-Modena-Lamborghini, Brabham and Fondmetal Formula 1 driver was credited with the top two positions in the times. He went quickest in his own car fitted with regular IMSA-spec bodywork, then found more than three seconds in the sister machine. That was running a new low-drag aero package developed for Scandia by Tony Southgate, the designer of the line of V12 TWR Jaguars who’d been employed by Ferrari as a consultant on the 333SP project.

By race week, the Racing for Belgium car had the new bodywork too, and van der Poele claimed the overnight pole in the car he shared with Marc Goossens and Eric Bachelart. The team didn’t bother going for a time on Thursday and was knocked off the top spot, though remained within a couple of tenths of the pole.

Van de Poele acknowledges today that he and the team always had reservations about the gearbox. A change of the complete rear was required after the car had worked its way up to fifth through dawn on Sunday morning after some early, niggly delays had kept it from the sharp end.

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“We lost one gear and then another,” says van de Poele, who ended up with the race’s fastest lap. “That’s when we decided we had to change the ’box. We didn’t really have a choice at that point. It was a shame because I think we still had a chance.”

"The factory didn’t want us racing that car at Le Mans. Initially they tried to stop us" Antonio Ferrari

The car didn’t last much longer after dropping down to 10th with a half-hour delay. Bachelart turned sharp right accelerating down the hill from the Dunlop Chicane in hour 16. The team ascribed the accident to a mechanical issue, though the exact problem never seems to have been ascertained.

Scandia faced initial reticence from Ferrari towards its Le Mans campaign. The aero update to hone a car designed for the rough and tumble of North American circuits was instigated by the team rather than the factory. Twelve months earlier, it looked for a while as though the Euromotorsport squad would be prevented from taking up its entry with a 333SP.

“The factory didn’t want us racing that car at Le Mans,” says (unrelated) team boss Antonio Ferrari, the first team owner to take the new Italian prototype to Le Mans. “Initially they tried to stop us.”

Ferrari explains that driver Massimo Sigala, a key player in the Euromotorsport Le Mans project, managed to pull some strings over at Maranello. He was well connected with Piero Lardi Ferrari, the son of Enzo and who, along with stalwart sportscar owner/driver Gianpiero Moretti, should be regarded as the architect of the 333SP. Opposition from Jean Todt, who’d been installed as boss of the F1 team the previous year, was overcome, Euromotorsport got the endurance-spec engine it required and pitched up with a line-up completed by former Ferrari F1 driver Rene Arnoux and Jay Cochran.

The Euromotorsport Racing 333 SP should have been a factor in 1995 but retired early

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Euromotorsport, which had given the 333SP a debut victory at Road Atlanta the previous year, had the package to win, insists Ferrari. He maintains that today, even though the car completed just seven laps of the race. In that time, Sigala hinted at what might have been by storming from 17th on the grid to third inside seven laps.

The lone Ferrari in the race had been hamstrung in qualifying by a down-on-power sprint engine and the rev limiter that the ACO had forced the team to run. The maximum rpm in IMSA was enforced via a download from the car’s ECU. The French body wanted a hard limit for the lower maximum it applied and came up with an electro-mechanical system that its recipient suggests wasn’t fit for purpose. The Heath Robinson arrangement made up of a wheel-speed sensor mounted on the clutch and an off-the-shelf rev limiter would spell the end of the car’s race.

“They made a bracket to support the sensor,” explains Ferrari. “It broke after seven laps and hit the ignition trigger on the flywheel. The engine just stopped and we had no idea why at the time. That same engine did all the rest of the IMSA season without a problem…

“What we showed in those first seven laps proved that we could have dominated the race. Of course, it started raining like crazy afterwards, so you never know what is going to happen, but we had special wet tyres from Goodyear that we’d tested in America.”

Ferrari is still angry today: “We put a lot of effort into that race. I still have that piece that broke on my desk. That could have been our race.”

The 333SP remained a regular at Le Mans through to 1999. It was perhaps fitting that a car entered by Moretti scored the best result for the model with sixth in 1997 when the veteran shared with Max Papis and Didier Theys. A year later, a car entered by Risi Competizione took eighth, and first in class as the leading LMP1 car home behind seven GT1s.

The F40 had long since disappeared from the GT1 ranks by then, the arms race in the class rendering a car conceived in the late 1980s increasingly uncompetitive. The LM designation of the original version of the car offers a clue as to what Ferrari was planning when it commissioned Michelotto Engineering to develop its new supercar for competition. The F40 raced for the first time in 1989, but it wouldn’t be until 1994 that it made it to Le Mans.

Best result for the 333 SP came in 1997 with Theys Moretti and Papis in sixth

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The return of GT cars to world championship sportscar racing was revealed in October 1987, an announcement lost amid the news that the Group C fuel formula would be abandoned in favour of a new version of the category with 3.5-litre engines. Ferrari’s interest was piqued and was persuaded by Daniel Marin, boss of Ferrari France, that it needed a presence in the new category.

The only problem was there were no other takers. The new category didn’t happen, and Marin took the two cars he’d ordered over the Pond to compete in IMSA’s GTO class. Jean Alesi made his Ferrari debut, more than a year before joining the F1 squad, at Laguna Seca in October 1989. Other drivers to race the cars before the stop-start programme ground to a halt included van der Poele, Jean-Pierre Jabouille and Hurley Haywood.

An F40 LM — not a real one but a road car converted by the Swedish Strandell team – turned up at Le Mans in 1994 in a programme bankrolled by gentleman driver Luciano della Noce. A year later a true LM (actually the US homologation car converted to that spec by Michelotto and owned by GT racing boss Stephane Ratel!) turned up in the hands of the Le Mans-based Pilot Racing squad. Della Noce entered a further two upgraded cars, with improved aerodynamics and a wide track, developed and run by Michelotto.

Ferrari had leaked a draft press release announcing the end of the project to BPR in an effort to prevent Porsche’s parts-bin special to be allowed to race on the following year in what eventually morphed into the FIA GT Championship

The three Ferraris outqualified a certain other GT1 car that would leave its mark on Le Mans 1995, ending up 6-7-8 on the grid. The new McLaren F1 GTRs that qualified behind them ended up scoring a 1-3-4-5 in the race. The Ferraris weren’t reliable, although the Pilot car came through to finish a delayed 12th with Michel Ferte, Olivier Thevenin and Carlos Palau. That would be the best result by an F40 in the three years the car was present at Le Mans.

There was a successor planned, as much to the 333SP as the F40. With GT racing booming in Europe under Ratel and his partners in the BPR Organisation that ran the Global Endurance GT Series, Lardi Ferrari reckoned the success of a customer racing car like the 333SP could be replicated in a new arena. Work began on the F50 GT project in the second half of 1995 under the technical leadership of Aldo Costa in his first job at Ferrari on the road to becoming F1 technical director.

The GT1 car developed in conjunction with Dallara ran at Fiorano in autumn 1996, first in the hands of road car development driver Dario Benuzzi and then F1 tester Nicola Larini. After that neither hide nor hair was heard of the car. Ferrari F1 team manager Claudio Berro, who helped run the programme, remembers the project coming to an end in the immediate aftermath of Larini’s test.

“He tested one day and the next it was all stopped,” he says. “There was no more testing after that, but honestly the car was really good, very quick.”

Berro suggests he doesn’t know why the project was stopped. He thinks the decision was made at the highest level of Fiat, then in control of Ferrari. The technical escalation in GT1 played a role at a time when the F1 team was in rebuild mode under Todt.

Best finish for the F40 was a delayed 12th in 1995 with a driver lineup led by Michel Ferte

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“The costs were almost doubling every year, and there was a desire to focus on F1,” he says. “This is probably the reason.”

The latter phases of the development of the F50 GT coincided with the arrival of Porsche’s 911 GT1, the first real goalpost mover during GT racing’s mid-1990s reboot. Your writer reported in October 1996 that Ferrari had leaked a draft press release announcing the end of the project to BPR in an effort to prevent Porsche’s parts-bin special to be allowed to race on the following year in what eventually morphed into the FIA GT Championship (it was ineligible for points in the three Global races it contested).

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There would be GT1 Ferraris in the future, though not racing for overall honours. GT2 became GTS, then GT1 as the sands of sportscar racing shifted. Prodrive took the 550 Maranello and turned it into a car good enough to win its class in 2003. It was more a successor to the 512 BB/LM of the late 1970s and early 1980s that took a class wins at La Sarthe in 1981 than the F40 LM. Ferrari cottoned on to its success and commissioned N.Technology to develop its own customer GT1 car, the 575 GTC.

By then Ferrari was a staple of the GT2 category. The British Simpson Engineering team had led the way, developing a 348 for racing and gaining an entry for the car in 1993, even if it didn’t start after team boss Robin Smith was punted off in the warm-up. A year later an official version, again developed by Michelotto and known as the 348 GT Competizione, was on the grid.

A line of Michelotto-developed machinery for a class known variously as GT, GT2 and GTE followed, and with these cars Ferrari continued to notch up class successes at Le Mans. Yes, it’s back at Le Mans going for gold as a factory after a long hiatus, but the Prancing Horse was never absent for very long.

Ferrari claimed its most recent GTE Pro spoils in 2021 with the AF Corse squad that now runs its 499P LMH

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