Why Cadillac can make amends for its previous Le Mans failures

Cadillac is back at the Le Mans 24 Hours in 2023 after an absence of 21 years. It arrives on a wave of success in North American sportscar racing that began on its return to the prototype ranks in 2017 and is continuing into the new era with its latest V-Series.R LMDh. Comparisons with the Northstar LMP campaigns of 2000-02 somehow look fatuous.

The Northstar programme was disjointed and yielded merely a ninth-place finish at Le Mans and a handful of podiums in the American Le Mans Series. The current endeavour, by contrast, is built on stability and has been successful since the get-go. 

It is already into its seventh season on the race track and has achieved a trio of drivers’ and manufacturers’ title doubles in the IMSA SportsCar Championship and four victories in the Daytona 24 Hours. Those successes were garnered with the V-R.DPi. Its successor, the new-for-2023 Caddy LMDh, has already notched up a victory in the Sebring 12 Hours. It was Cadillac’s fifth since the introduction of its Daytona Prototype international.

Now the General Motors marque has the chance to make amends for its failures at Le Mans at the turn of the century. And it’s serious about it. Until Porsche decided to field a third official Penske-run car at the French enduro, Cadillac was set to have the biggest presence on the Hypercar grid.

Cadillac is only running one LMDh full-time in the World Endurance Championship with the Chip Ganassi Racing-run Cadillac Racing squad, but its entire fleet will be on hand at the big one in France. Ganassi will field a second entry for its regular IMSA crew, while Action Express Racing, winner at Sebring in March and a key component of its DPi era, will travel to Le Mans for the first time with its IMSA line-up. 

It won’t be the biggest Cadillac entry at Le Mans, however. There were four Northstar LMPs on the grid in 2000: two full works cars run by Riley & Scott and two on a semi-works basis by DAMS. Which was all part of the problem. The marque spread its limited resources too thinly in year one of the programme. Put simply, Cadillac underestimated what was required when its name graced the Le Mans entry list for the first time since 1950, when US entrant Briggs Cunningham fielded two Caddys, including a machine dubbed ‘Le Monstre’ by locals for its outrageous looks. 

Cadillac’s first official participation yielded less than that achieved by the wealthy socialite with pockets to match his aspirations 50 years before. The three Northstars that saw the chequered flag filled out positions 19, 21 and 22. 

Cadillac Northstar LMP struggled for pace in the 2000 edition of the 24 Hours as it arguably overstretched its limited resources

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The Northstar programme that started a quarter of a century ago was more three projects than one. That goes a long way to explaining its lack of success. Not only did Cadillac underestimate the size of the task, but it dithered when faced with the failings of the first car and, when the project was coming good, it was stopped in its tracks.

The twin-turbo V8 powerplant developed by McLaren Engines in Detroit in the back of all three iterations of the Northstar wasn’t a match for the best engines. It was generally reckoned that Cadillac and its engine partner were too conservative. 

Cadillac subsequently admitted that it got it wrong ahead of year one in 2000 with the original Northstar LMP, developed by Riley & Scott in North America. There was “a fairly significant misunderstanding of the culture and nature of European racing, particularly Le Mans”, said long-time GM Racing boss Herb Fishel in an interview with this author early in 2003.

Cadillac pitched up at Le Mans in 2000 with a car that was behind the times. Riley concedes that he made a mistake in not attending Le Mans in 1998, but also insists that he was given a bum steer by race organiser the Automobile Club de l’Ouest

“Another thing was a failure to stand back and fully understand the competitive nature of that [sportscar] industry,” continued the architect of Cadillac’s Le Mans entry.

Bill Riley, who led the programme, has admitted that he underestimated what was required. His team had taken one of its R&S MkIII World Sports Cars to Le Mans in 1996 in pursuit of the triple crown of endurance racing after winning at Daytona and Sebring. The programme with an Oldsmobile-badged V8 was the starting point for the Northstar project.

Within a year, Riley was in discussions with Fishel about taking Cadillac to Le Mans. The technical level of what became the Northstar LMP900 class contender and the budget were essentially set at 1997 levels. Le Mans, then as now, was entering a new era with increased manufacturer participation. The bar moved upwards, and then some when Audi produced the R8 LMP900 for 2000. 

The reality was that Cadillac pitched up at Le Mans in 2000 with a car that was behind the times. Riley concedes that he made a mistake in not attending Le Mans in 1998, but also insists that he was given a bum steer by race organiser the Automobile Club de l’Ouest. 

Riley was told that he couldn’t run a raised front section of the monocoque a la Formula 1, yet by the time he went back to Le Mans in 1999, it was de rigueur on the frontrunning cars. There was neither time nor money to react: the Caddy tubs were already in construction for the following year. 

Expertise of DAMS couldn't redeem what was an essentially flawed design from the outset

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Fishel was casting his net far and wide as he reviewed the future of the project even before the 2000 race: he visited Prodrive on the way to the race and there were approaches to other organisations. Cadillac ended up going with a new group put together by driver Wayne Taylor, who had long-standing links with GM, and his former boss at the Spice Engineering Group C squad, Jeff Hazell. The third member of the new set-up was designer Nigel Stroud, who was responsible for the 1991 Le Mans-winning Mazda 787B. 

PLUS: Nigel Stroud on his racing career

Hazell is almost certainly joking when he says he went to Tesco in Brackley to find a designer after his original first choice proved unavailable: “If you want an engineer you go to Tesco at lunchtime and that’s where I collared Nigel.”

Yet Hazell had been frank in the extreme in his discussions with Fishel. He admits today that he warned the GM big wig that the chances of beating Audi were slim.

“I told him, ‘I probably can’t get you first and second, but I could get you third and fourth,’”
he recalls. “Audi had taken a much higher view of it.”

Hazell also suggested that Cadillac take a year out from Le Mans to regroup for 2002. That wasn’t an option, according to the GM Racing boss.

“I have learned over the years that if you get out of a programme it is extremely difficult to re-engage,” he explained in his Autosport interview 20 years ago. “The landscape changes too quickly.”

The contract with the new organisation, named 3GR, wasn’t in place until November 2000. Producing an all-new car for the following June wasn’t an option, so it reworked the Riley car, keeping little apart from the tub, the twin-turbo V8 and the Xtrac gearbox, while looking ahead to 2002 to produce an all-new contender.

“We had one hand tied behind our backs from the beginning,” says Hazell. “We were compromised because we couldn’t get on with it [the new design]. We had 80% of the design team on the old car until March.”

The Northstar was outdated prior to its arrival, and attempts to reconfigure it for 2001 were hampered by boardroom dawdling

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The hurried nature of the programme meant 3GR contracted DAMS to run the cars at Le Mans. Its own race operation headquartered in Atlanta wouldn’t begin running the cars until after Le Mans when a short programme in the ALMS began. The revised car, the LMP-01, wasn’t on the pace, though one of them was running fifth in the closing stages when clutch problems hit. A best result of 15th at Le Mans only proved that Cadillac was treading water. 

The all-new machine, the LMP-02 conceived by Stroud, wasn’t ready to test until January. Though a major step forward, it took time to show its promise. The Le Mans Test Day, then held the better part of two months before the race, was a disaster for Cadillac. The team would find a whopping 6.5 seconds between the test and the race as it overcame aerodynamic issues. Finally, in the late-season ALMS races Cadillac began to challenge Audi; there was a run of four podiums post-Le Mans.

Cadillac’s Le Mans adventure had been signed off for three seasons, so it’s not quite right to say that the axe fell on the programme. But there was an intent to extend it; Fishel had talked about that as early as Le Mans 2001. There were any number of options on the table to continue, including an ALMS-only campaign, the cars running on a privateer basis, and the Northstar engines going in the back of a Dallara chassis to be run by ORECA.

It wasn’t Cadillac’s first approach to Dallara, nor would it be the last. Caddy driver Max Angelelli, whose links with the Italian manufacturer stretched back to 1989 and the start of his marathon career in Formula 3, initiated a dialogue with the constructor on GM’s behalf. It had a new LMP on the stocks, the SP1, but the design would become a Chrysler, not a Cadillac. 

"The whole mission of the programme is to spread the Cadillac message and showcase the performance credentials of the brand" Laura Wontrop Klauser

ORECA had stepped up to the prototype ranks with Reynard on the back of its successes with Chrysler’s Dodge Viper. It had already announced plans to build its own car when it changed tack and company boss Hugues de Chaunac sealed a partnership with Dallara, just beating Cadillac to the punch.

“The plan was to go with Dallara and I arranged that meeting,” recalls Angelelli. “When we went there Mr [Giampaolo] Dallara had already shaken hands with de Chaunac. He told us, ‘When I shake hands it means more than a contract.’”

Fast forward 15 years, and Cadillac and Dallara finally got together on the DPi programme, with Angelelli the man in the middle. IMSA had bought into the new ACO/FIA LMP2 concept and came up with a formula for its premier class whereby manufacturers would use their own engines rather than the one-make Gibson V8 and produce their own bodywork. 

The 2002 Northstar was an improvement, but didn't get the time to show it at Le Mans

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GM, incumbent in IMSA’s top class with its Chevrolet Corvette-bodied Daytona Prototypes, was an early adopter. It was the first manufacturer to have a car up and running. Angelelli reveals that Dallara schemed different designs with different engines while it awaited a decision on which route would be chosen for the programme. That included staying with Chevrolet.

“We didn’t know what the engine configuration was going to be and we didn’t want to lose time,” explains Angelelli. “That meant we were ready to go when the decision was made.”

Cadillac hadn’t stopped racing after the Northstar programme. It moved into the Sports Car Club of America’s Pirelli World Challenge, first with the four-door CTS-V, then the GT3-spec ATS-V.R. But DPi presented “the right moment” for the marque to return to the prototype ranks, according to Laura Wontrop Klauser, GM’s sportscar racing boss. 

“The decision was made to give Cadillac a chance to shine and we wanted to do it at the absolute pinnacle,” she says. “We’d been racing in GT, but it was time to take the next step.”

The rationale behind Cadillac’s programme remains unchanged today; or rather it was strengthened with the creation of a global category with the convergence process that allows a manufacturer to race the same machinery in the WEC and IMSA. 

“The whole mission of the programme is to spread the Cadillac message and showcase the performance credentials of the brand,” explains Klauser. “Now we can do that globally. It really strengthened the opportunity and the desire to go with Cadillac. I’m not saying the programme wouldn’t have continued if there hadn’t been a wider platform because North America is where we sell the majority of our cars, but the global side of LMDh is what really made it appealing.” 

The latest Caddy has already proved its credentials. A 3-4 finish first time out for the Chip Ganassi Racing squad at Daytona in January was followed up by victory for Action Express Racing at Sebring six weeks later. Over in the WEC, Cadillac hasn’t collected any silverware as yet, but it was close in the opening two rounds. 

In 2020 Cadillac took its fourth straight Daytona 24 Hours victory of the DPi era, which also featured three IMSA DPi drivers' titles

Photo by: Richard Dole / Motorsport Images

A late penalty didn’t help the cause of Earl Bamber in his efforts to catch the third-placed Ferrari at the Sebring 1000 Miles in March. Bamber and team-mates Alex Lynn and Richard Westbrook ended up fourth again at the Portimao 6 Hours this month on the first run for the V-Series.R on European asphalt – the car had not so much as tested on this side of the Pond.

A safety-car interlude with an hour to go undid a strategy enforced on the Ganassi team after Westbrook flat-spotted a tyre locking up as he braked to avoid a dawdling Peugeot. The solo Caddy would most likely have been the first LMDh home ahead of Porsche but for the late caution. 

Caddy’s focus was on racking up the miles in North America prior to Daytona, but now it is ramping up its European-based campaign. Action Express is joining Ganassi at the Spa WEC round this weekend, and then there will finally be some European testing when Ganassi returns to the Algarve circuit in the wake of the final pre-Le Mans WEC round. 

Cadillac knows there is work to do between now and Le Mans, but it also knows where there are gains to be made in the weeks ahead of the big one. Says Bamber: “There’s plenty of low-hanging fruit.”

Cadillac's new V-Series.R LMDh challenger is geared for success on both sides of the pond in WEC and IMSA

Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images