The return of Porsche's Le Mans winner that never was

The future looked as bright as the Swabian day for Allan McNish. It was early November 1999. Already a Le Mans 24 Hours winner, he’d just completed the first test of the new car he believed he’d be racing at the French enduro the following year. It was clearly a step forward on the machine in which he had triumphed in 1998 and, with a three-year contract in his briefcase, sportscar superstardom beckoned. 

McNish did go on to become an all-time sportscar great, but he never got to race the car he tested that day at Porsche’s Weissach test track after a brief shakedown the previous evening. For him there would be only one more race in a car built by the marque with which he had been victorious at the Circuit de la Sarthe the previous year.

The highs of his career in endurance racing – a further two Le Mans crowns and a World Endurance Championship title – were achieved with another German marque, Audi, either side of a brief and belated foray into Formula 1. 

PLUS: The single F1 season of a British sportscar great

The car the Scot sampled all too briefly at Weissach would be rolled into storage straight after little more than a day of running with McNish and Porsche veteran Bob Wollek at the wheel. Which was always the plan, though neither driver was aware of it at the time. McNish could have had no idea that he would have to wait a quarter of a century before climbing into the cockpit of the car again, or of the twists and turns in his career that lay ahead.

McNish was reunited with a car generally referred to as the LMP2000 late last year in the run-up to the 25th anniversary of its one and only test. It had been recommissioned over the previous six months, and who better to pedal it in front of a select gathering than the driver who would, in 2000, have led Porsche’s push to add to its tally of Le Mans wins with a V10-engined prototype, built for what became LMP900? And the car was just how he remembered it. 

“It all came back to me like it was yesterday,” says McNish. “But one thing I’d forgotten was the engine note: when you open up the throttle, it sounds really nice, really throaty. Something else was the layout of the cockpit, with everything in exactly the right place. It’s easy to get romantic about these things, but it is quite special to have another run in it after all these years.”

McNish was delighted to be reunited with the Porsche LMP2000 that he tested but never raced

Photo by: Deniz Calagan

McNish may be forever associated with Audi after his 11 seasons racing its machinery, and the ongoing relationship he has enjoyed with the marque since hanging up his helmet at the end of his championship year in 2013 – these days he’s part of its F1 set-up. But it was Porsche that set him on the path to greatness, rescuing him from obscurity when it invited him onto its sportscar programme in 1997 as a test driver.

“They believed in me,” he reminisces, “when others thought I was a washed-up single-seater driver.”

McNish had signed a new three-year contract with Porsche for 2000 through to 2002 as the LMP2000, known internally as the 9R3, got going. But the reality was that the car was never likely to see action. And definitely not by the time he and the late Wollek got to try it. 

"Wiedeking said, ‘The project is stopped immediately.’ I asked him what he meant by immediately. ‘Right now!’ he replied"
Norbert Singer

The axe had fallen on the car a couple of months before, but stalwart Porsche senior engineer Norbert Singer, who led development of the LMP2000, and his team had been allowed to complete the first chassis for what was no more than a ceremonial run. In keeping with Porsche tradition, a bottle of champagne was cracked open over the nose of the car before Wollek eased the machine onto the daunting Weissach asphalt.

Singer remembers the meeting with Porsche chairman Wendelin Wiedeking at which the curtain was pulled on Porsche’s aspirations to add to its record tally of 16 outright Le Mans victories.

“It was in our little meeting room down at Flacht [the village to which Porsche’s motorsport headquarters is closest on the Weissach campus],” he recalls. “Wiedeking said, ‘The project is stopped immediately.’ I asked him what he meant by immediately. ‘Right now!’ he replied.

“I told him that in one week we would have the first chassis, the engine was already running on the dyno and the gearbox was nearly ready. The suspension parts were ordered and some were already in house. So I asked him if we could complete the car. He asked how much it would cost. We gave him a figure and told him how many people we would need. He said, ‘OK, this you get, not more.’”

Singer was taken by surprise when Wiedeking elected to can the LMP2000

Photo by: Porsche

Yet it would be wrong to say that the LMP2000 was cancelled at this point: a return to Le Mans with the car was never signed off by the board. Porsche had sprung the news that it wouldn’t be defending its Le Mans crown, retained with the carbon-chassis 911 GT1-98, at its annual Night of Champions awards at Weissach in December 1998.

The drivers, McNish included, had been gathered together to be told shortly beforehand, though late arrivals like Yannick Dalmas learned of the bombshell with the rest of us there that night. But it revealed during the glitzy proceedings that there was a new car under development for 2000. 

But the group developing the LMP2000 knew that the likelihood was the car would never make it into competition. Porsche Motorsport boss Herbert Ampferer was pretty sure of it, while Singer concedes that he chose not to believe it.

“I had to believe that we were going to race the car,” he recounts. “If you have doubts, you don’t push hard enough. For me it was clear we would be going to Le Mans in 2000.”

Ampferer, however, reveals that he had been told by Wiedeking early in the programme that “you won’t be going back to Le Mans”. When he asked why not, the reply was: “I will tell you later.”

Porsche’s racing chief, who had taken the reins in 1995, remembers a conversation with the big boss of Porsche indicating that he had another project in mind for the brains of the racing department. It makes sense that this came some time after development of the LMP2000 was set in motion in autumn 1998, though Ampferer has recounted the same story in the past suggesting that it came prior to its commencement.   

“Wiedeking came to me and asked me, ‘Do you know who is the best and biggest producer of sportscars in the world?’ I said, ‘For sure, it is us.’ His reply was, ‘Then prove it.’ I thought how should I prove that? Then he told me we were going to do a new super-sportscar.”

That car became the Carrera GT, the 600bhp roadster launched in concept form with a run down the Champs-Elysees in October 2000.

McNish won Le Mans in 1998 with Aiello and Ortelli, but Porsche did not defend its title as the Scot shifted to Toyota

Photo by: LAT Photographic

Whether or not Wiedeking had mapped out a future for this super-sportscar in the immediate aftermath of Porsche’s 1998 Le Mans victory isn’t clear. But Porsche Motorsport did start thinking about what came next after the 911 GT1-98, which completed a 1-2 with McNish, Stephane Ortelli and Laurent Aiello driving the winning car. And it got the approval to push on in a new direction.

“Like normal, you start that process on the drive home from Le Mans – you think what to do next,” explains Ampferer. “In September at the latest I went back to the board to ask to make a new car, but this wasn’t the only permission I got. I also got permission to take freedom for the concept of the car.”

That meant Porsche was able to abandon the GT1 ruleset, about to become LM-GTP for 1999, under which it had mounted its most recent Le Mans campaigns. It was a big decision, recalls Ampferer: “Years before I had been told by our head of sales and marketing Hans Riedel that our race cars must look like the 911.”

Porsche concluded that an open-top LMP offered key advantages. And it knew all about them from its experience with its WSC95

The original 911 GT1 of 1996 and subsequent Evo of 1997 were at least partly based on Porsche’s staple sportscar. The GT1-98, however, retained only the look: the structural parts carried from the road car of its immediate predecessors were abandoned in favour of a carbon-composite chassis. Now Ampferer and his team reckoned it was time to ditch the GT1 class in favour of a full-house switch to the prototype ranks. 

The rules at Le Mans were successfully framed to allow both types of car to win, but Porsche concluded that an open-top LMP offered key advantages. And it knew all about them from its experience with its WSC95, winner at Le Mans with Joest Racing in 1996 with factory support and in 1997 without it. The car had been brought under the factory umbrella for 1998 and given an aerodynamic makeover, and the GT1-98 rear end.

Ampferer made his thoughts clear to the company hierarchy: “I told them if we went back to Le Mans with a GT1 car I wasn’t sure if we could do it again and win. We had a hurdle to overcome in the minds of the sales and marketing people, but by the autumn we got everything together: we had the concept and the agreement from sales and marketing.”

Everything pointed to an LMP as the way to go, explains Singer.

“We made a lot of simulations and quickly it became clear that the prototypes could do the same lap times as the GT1s,” he says. “But they could run triple rather than double stints on the tyres – and could go a little longer on their fuel.” A lighter LMP afforded wider wheels and tyres than a GT1 and was, says Singer, “obviously the best solution”.

Porsche reckoned the LMP route offered greater potential than the GT1, which would also mean a move away from the 911 ethos

Photo by: LAT Photographic

Porsche took another big decision with the LMP2000: it abandoned the flat-six turbocharged engine concept that powered each of its Le Mans winners since the first victory by the 936 Group 6 car in 1976. A relatively small capacity six-cylinder boxer engine, insists Singer, was “fundamentally inefficient”.

It wasn’t helped by the air-restrictor rules of the time, while a larger multi-cylinder, normally aspirated powerplant offered advantages in terms of driveability and fuel economy. Furthermore, Ampferer, who before getting the top job at Porsche Motorsport had overseen the engine department, favoured the non-turbo route. 

Singer remembers being told about “something suitable in stock” by Ampferer. His boss knew all about the engine that in modified form would power the LMP2000 – because he had led the design of what was a top-secret project in the middle of the decade.

Ampferer had been tasked with proving that Porsche had the technology to produce a Formula 1 engine after the debacle of its short-lived deal with Footwork in 1991 for a supply of V12s that were overweight and uncompetitive. Ampferer’s engine, which was never intended to race, was a V10 and, he recalls, the result of a lot of hard work through 1994 and 1995.

“A very small group of us, just four or five people, put every small piece of our brains into that engine,” he says. “I was sure that if we pumped it up a bit [from three to 5.5 litres] it would be good enough for the job.”

The question that can never be answered is whether the LMP2000 and its engine would have been good enough to stop Audi and the R8, its second stab at an LMP, from beginning a sequence of Audi Le Mans victories in 2000 that would remain unbroken, save for sister marque Bentley’s 2003 triumph, until 2009.

McNish, who was quickly recruited by Audi after deciding that racing real road-based GT machinery with Porsche wasn’t going to be his thing, reckons it’s an impossible one to call. But his first and fleeting impressions of the LMP2000 suggested that it was the superior machine at the get-go.

“Definitely out of the box the Porsche was the better car,” he recalls. “It was really on its nose, which was good and one of the things that the GT1 wasn’t. The LMP2000 was a couple of seconds a lap quicker just on the little Weissach track. You can’t say that the R8 wasn’t a brilliant car, but in 2000 it wasn’t an easy car to drive; it wasn’t the complete car that it became. 

“Would the LMP2000 have beaten the R8? I don’t know, but it would definitely have been an intense battle: the Porsche wasn’t designed to finish second and neither was the Audi. It would have been a real clash of the titans.”

Porsche LMP2000 also moved away from the engine philosophy of the marque's previous winners - McNish reckoned it had a higher ceiling than the R8

Photo by: Deniz Calagan