Greatest drives of the sportscar legends

Endurance racing has provided some of the best and most remarkable driving performances of all time.

As Autosport celebrates its 70th birthday by looking at the greatest drivers, cars and events in motorsport history, we've picked out the top performances by sportscar racing's true aces.

Here is our selection, put together with the help of some of the drivers involved.

Stirling Moss, 1955 Mille Miglia

Car: Mercedes 300SLR
Finished: 1st

Moss put in some of the finest sportscar drives of all time, notably winning the Nurburgring 1000Km and Goodwood Tourist Trophy in 1959 for Aston Martin after early setbacks. But the epic nature of the 1000-mile Italian road race makes it a must for this list.

Home advantage was normally crucial - prior to 1955, the great German ace Rudolf Caracciola was the only non-Italian to have won a full edition - but Mercedes preparation helped counteract that. Practice runs and extensive notes were made so that legendary motorsport journalist Denis Jenkinson could warn Moss of what was ahead using a system of hand signals.

The 521 starters were released one at a time, beginning at 2100 on Saturday with the slowest classes. Moss and Jenkinson got going in their 300SLR, capable of around 175mph, at 0722 on Sunday morning.

They would have to survive several dramatic moments. They hit a straw bale in Padua, had a near miss with a petrol station in Pescara, smashed through another straw bale, and briefly slid into a ditch after a lock-up. Heading into Rome, the massed crowd also forced Moss to back off - "as moral insurance" - but still the Mercedes arrived in the Italian capital in the lead, having outpaced the bigger-engined Ferrari of Piero Taruffi on his home ground.

Moss then lost time with a spin, caused by a grabbing brake, and so pressed on. His already impressive endurance had been boosted by one of team-mate Juan Manuel Fangio's 'stamina pills' and he had faith in the machinery, as well as Jenkinson. "I can't remember a 300SLR breaking, certainly not with me," said Moss in 2016.

Many of the fast cars did hit trouble, including Fangio, who required attention to a broken injector pipe. Fellow Mercedes driver Karl Kling was taken to hospital with broken ribs after he crashed.

Just over 10 hours after setting off from Brescia, Moss and Jenkinson returned, having recorded a never-to-be-beaten Mille Miglia average of 97.9mph. They were over half an hour clear of Fangio, and 45 minutes ahead of the third-placed Ferrari.

PLUS: Stirling Moss' 10 greatest drives

"It is the finest achievement of his motor racing career so far," reckoned Autosport magazine. "Even without Fangio's trouble, it is doubtful he could have competed with Moss on this day.

"Almost all the best international adjectives could be heaped upon Moss for his fantastic display around the perilous circuit of the Mille Miglia, the most difficult and different of races."

Vic Elford, 1968 Targa Florio

Car: Porsche 907
Finished: 1st

One of the most versatile drivers ever, with successes ranging from rallying to endurance racing, Elford also has a fantastic memory. That helped him produce what he believes was the race of his life on the 45-mile Sicilian road circuit.

"I never liked artificial circuits - real tracks like the Targa Florio and Nurburgring Nordschleife were the best," Elford told Autosport in 2009.

"In my first Targa in 1967, I drove a Porsche 910 with Jochen Neerpasch and we finished third. I was used to long special stages and had a good memory for roads. By 1968 you could have blindfolded me, put me into a helicopter and dropped me anywhere on the Targa and I'd have known where I was."

Elford, sharing a 2.2-litre Porsche 907 with veteran Umberto Maglioli, started the 1968 race as one of the favourites. But he almost immediately hit a problem, being forced to get out and tighten a centre-locking wheelnut that had come undone. He got to the halfway pits, but they didn't have any spare nuts - a few miles down the road the right-rear wheel came off, Elford hit a kerb and got a puncture.

Elford managed to get back to the main pits using the spare wheel for proper repairs but, by the time he finally started his second lap, he was around 18 minutes behind. Now Elford really began to charge and on lap three smashed the lap record by almost a whole minute, recording 36m02.3s, 45s faster than his pole time! By the time he handed over to Maglioli at the end of lap four of 10, he had risen to seventh.

With the other Porsches hitting problems, Elford/Maglioli suddenly became the team's only hope of defeating Alfa Romeo.

"Maglioli was going to do laps five to eight, with me doing the last two," recalled Elford, who had already won the Monte Carlo Rally and Daytona 24 Hours that year. "But, after I got out, I was looking at the lap time and I said that if I could do the last three laps we could win."

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The team agreed. Maglioli came in at the end of lap seven and Elford continued the recovery, remarkably taking the lead on the penultimate tour, beating Alfa Romeo into second and third.

"Porsche development boss Helmut Bott said to me, 'We didn't win it, you did'," added Elford, who would go on to be one of the stars of the Porsche 917 era. "That was the greatest race of my life."

Pedro Rodriguez, 1970 BOAC 1000Km, Brands Hatch

Car: Porsche 917K
Finished: 1st

The JW Automotive team was one of the legendary endurance racing operations and the Porsche 917 only narrowly missed out on being voted Autosport's greatest sportscar of all time. And perhaps the best exponent of the Gulf JWA Porsche team was Pedro Rodriguez.

The Mexican tended to have a marginal advantage over his intra-team rival Jo Siffert and, along with Jackie Stewart and Jacky Ickx, was one of the top wet-weather drivers of his era. At Brands Hatch in 1970, he combined his mastery of the rain and the 550bhp short-tailed 917K to pull off a famous victory.

Ferrari had qualified 1-2 in the dry thanks to Chris Amon and Ickx, with Rodriguez down in seventh. The race started in diabolical conditions and Lola driver Barrie Smith brought out yellow flags when he crashed on the start/finish straight. Rodriguez, who later claimed not to have seen the yellows, overtook cars in the spray and was hauled in for a ticking off by clerk of the course Nick Syrett.

When Rodriguez angrily charged back into the race he was almost a lap down, but from then on he was on a different level to everyone else. "The black-flag incident had made Rodriguez drive all the faster," reported Autosport. "He was tackling the treacherous track, the poor visibility and the troublesome traffic with incredible panache."

Having swiftly dealt with the slower runners, Rodriguez passed Siffert, Amon and Elford to take the lead. Ickx was delayed by windscreen-wiper issues and Rodriguez probably had a tyre advantage over fellow 917 ace Elford, but still his pace was relentless. He handed a two-lap lead to co-driver Leo Kinnunen after three and a half hours of dancing the 917 around the Kent venue.

Kinnunen tested Rodriguez's nerves as he lost ground during his stint, but the Finn was soon back in to hand the car back. Rodriguez continued his masterclass as the track dried, with only Ickx able to match his pace.

After nearly seven hours, Rodriguez crossed the line to win by five laps at the front of a Porsche 1-2-3-4, having driven for 5h30m of the event. Rodriguez would put in a similarly impressive charge in the 1971 Osterreichring 1000Km, but it's the Brands performance that stands as one of motorsport's finest wet-weather drives.

"His precision and sensitivity were fantastic," said JWA team manager David Yorke. "A day like that was made for him."

Brian Redman, 1970 Spa 1000Km

Car: Porsche 917K
Finished: 1st

To say that Redman is one of motorsport's great underrated drivers has become something of a cliche, but the fact is he could mix it with the best in endurance events. Alongside Ickx, Redman won two world sportscar races in Gulf JWA Ford GT40s in 1968, then switched to Porsche and won five rounds partnering Siffert in 1969.

The duo continued together for 1970, when they joined the JWA Porsche team. It was a tough season for them, but victory in the Spa 1000Km, on the old, fearsomely fast 8.8-mile configuration stands out for Redman.

"In practice Jo had two front tyres come off, on two different laps on the Masta Straight," recalls the 83-year-old. "Back in the pits, all four wheels were changed and, although I expressed the thought that there might be something wrong, I was told to get on with it.

"On my fourth lap I was flat out when, at the fast, blind right-hander at the top of the return straight at 180mph, the left-rear tyre came off the rim.

"Quite how I didn't have an almighty crash, I do not know. Except that as I slid from side to side, I lost feeling of where I was counter-steering in relation to the angle of the car. I'd read in a motor racing book that in these circumstances if you let go of the steering the Ackermann would straighten it. It did!"

In the race, which started wet, Siffert and team-mate Rodriguez famously banged wheels through Eau Rouge, Siffert coming out ahead. Local hero Ickx also moved his Ferrari 512S to challenge the Porsches and the trio battled for the lead, changing positions several times.

Redman outpaced Ickx's co-driver John Surtees as the track dried, while the gearbox broke on the Rodriguez/Kinnunen 917. Siffert and Redman came through to win at an average speed of over 149mph, then a record for a road circuit.

Another Spa race that same season also gets an honourable mention from Redman. Lola and Chevron had battled for supremacy during the 1970 European 2-Litre Sports Car Championship. The Lola T210 of Jo Bonnier tended to set the pace but the manufacturers' title came down to the Spa finale, with Redman now armed with the lighter B16 Spyder, which would form the basis of the famed B19.

"I swapped places with JoBo lap after lap," says Redman. "Finally I took the lead on the last corner, La Source, of the last lap, for Chevron to win the championship over Lola by one point!"

Henri Pescarolo, 1973 Le Mans 24 Hours

Car: Matra MS670B
Finished: 1st

"Like a grand prix for 24 hours." That's how sportscar legend Pescarolo describes Matra's battle with Ferrari for victory at Le Mans in 1973. It explains why he picks the win with Gerard Larrousse in the middle year of his hat-trick with the French manufacturer at the endurance classic as his greatest sportscar race.

"The competition at Le Mans in 1972 and 1974 came from inside Matra: we had the best team and the best car," he says. "But in 1973 there was a real war with Ferrari and all those great drivers - Ickx, Carlos Reutemann, Carlos Pace."

No quarter was given as the four-strong fleet of Matras, three of the latest long-tail MS670Bs and an older MS670, and the trio of Ferrari 312PBs slugged it out.

"The only instruction we had from Matra boss Jean-Luc Lagardere was to beat Ferrari," says Pescarolo. "There were no target lap times and there was no strategy. That meant we drove flat-out for the whole race."

Pescarolo reckons the Matra and the Ferrari were evenly matched: "I remember our handling being a little bit better, but the Ferrari having a stronger engine."

Ferrari outpaced its rival in qualifying, taking the first two grid spots. Matra quickly moved to the top of the order in the race, only for the wheels to come off its bid for a second straight Le Mans victory.

The car shared by Jean-Pierre Jabouille and Jean-Pierre Jaussaud lost 10 laps after four hours with a blow-out on the Mulsanne Straight. The sister car of Francois Cevert and Jean-Pierre Beltoise suffered an identical problem shortly afterwards, while the older car driven by Patrick Depailler and Bob Wollek retired with an oil pump issue as the sun set.

Two of the three 312PBs were out of the mix in the first half of the event, turning the race into a two-horse affair: Pescarolo and Larrousse for Matra versus Ickx and Redman for Ferrari. A series of minor glitches for the Matra dropped it two laps behind, before an exhaust issue on the Ferrari levelled things up.

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"We were pushing as hard as possible and it continued like that until Jacky had an engine problem with 90 minutes left," says Pescarolo. "Winning such a competitive race with a team-mate who I really liked makes this the most special of my four victories at Le Mans."

Al Holbert, 1975 IMSA Camel GT, Wentzville

Car: Porsche Carrera RSR
Finished: 1st

Holbert and rival Peter Gregg were the two most successful homegrown stars of the American IMSA GT championship in the 1970s and 1980s. Holbert scored more wins than any other driver in the first IMSA era that ran from 1971 until 1998.

"Al was one of the few guys that could not only drive, but would come in, say 'do this, this and this' and the car would be better," said former co-driver Hurley Haywood in 2018. "Al really set the benchmark for preparation of the cars and for driving manners."

Holbert set up his own frontrunning team and also won the Le Mans 24 Hours three times with Porsche. But it was a key event much earlier in his career that Holbert selected as the race of his life shortly before his untimely death in an aircraft accident in 1988.

Porsche Carrera RSR racer Holbert was still trying to establish himself when he arrived at the Mid-America circuit in Wentzville in July 1975. At that time Gregg, already a triple champion and winner of the Sebring 12 Hours and Daytona 24 Hours, was the established ace.

"Peter was 'King of the Hill' in Porsches and I was still inexperienced," Holbert told Autosport in 1988.

In blisteringly hot conditions, Holbert took on Gregg around the challenging circuit across two races, with Carl Schafer's powerful Chevrolet Camaro joining in until the V8 machine faded.

"It was my first time at Wentzville, a very bumpy course and difficult to set up for, but very interesting," added the 41-year-old. "It had a real sharp corner at the end of the straightaway, a right-hander with a huge, high bank at the end of it. That's where most of the overtaking took place. Peter passed me into it and I passed him out of it - it was like Formula Ford racing!"

After many changes of position, Holbert came out on top to win both contests, setting himself up to win the first of his five IMSA titles the following year.

"I learned a lot from that race, and from Peter," said Holbert. "One of the things I learned from him is that motor racing is a cerebral sport.

"It was my first full year of IMSA and it was good, wheel-to-wheel racing with lots of thinking. Peter was a real strategist and I felt very proud. It was just a real confidence-builder."

Jacky Ickx, 1977 Le Mans 24 Hours

Car: Porsche 936
Finished: 1st

Ickx's inclusion should surprise no one. His many endurance racing successes, which include six Le Mans victories and two world titles, give him a strong case against Tom Kristensen being the greatest sportscar driver ever.

The Belgian's narrow 1969 Le Mans win in an ageing Ford GT40 against Hans Herrmann's Porsche 908 is probably his most famous drive, but Ickx is clear about what he regards as his best performance.

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Renault arrived for the 1977 edition of the French classic with a serious four-car assault, determined to win on home ground as it started to change its focus to Formula 1, and locked out the front row.

Ickx and co-driver Pescarolo started third, but their Porsche 936's engine blew before quarter distance. Ickx was transferred to the sister car of Hurley Haywood and Jurgen Barth, which had qualified only seventh and already lost eight laps in 41st due to fuel injection problems. There was no choice but to attack.

Ickx's first three-hour stint, during which he set a new lap record, brought the car into the top six. He was soon back in the cockpit again and the next time he climbed out the 936 was third, six laps behind the leader, despite a broken rev-counter. In intermittent rain during the night, Ickx had been consistently the fastest driver on-track, an effort that left him completely drained.

"For me, this is the most incredible and exciting race I ever had," Ickx recently told Autosport. "As we started to come back, it was very motivating. The gap came down and the leaders had to start pushing a little bit. The Renault cars started to have problems and then we started to believe."

Did this pressure get to Renault? What can't be questioned is that all of its entries failed, handing the lead to Porsche with a quarter of the race to run. Then the 936 holed a piston, but the problematic cylinder was blanked off and Barth nursed the car to victory.

"You had to be conservative at Le Mans in those days," added Ickx. "The fascination of the race in 1977 was that, with nothing to lose, we drove flat-out.

"After the race, I was completely finished. I think it is one of the races that I drove the best in my whole life. You just can't explain why at some races you have that little bit more."

Derek Bell, 1983 Le Mans 24 Hours

Car: Porsche 956
Finished: 2nd

The combination of Ickx and Bell was one of the strongest in sportscar history, delivering three Le Mans victories. Bell went on to win the event twice more, as well as take two world crowns and three Daytona 24 Hours. And yet it's a race the Briton lost that was "most satisfying".

Bell and Ickx were aiming for a third consecutive Le Mans win as part of a three-car works Porsche 956 assault in 1983. Three factory Lancias and a phalanx of privately-entered Porsches provided the main opposition, but the race boiled down to a fight between Ickx/Bell and the sister Rothmans 956 of Haywood, Holbert and Vern Schuppan.

"We had a lot of pressure on us to win, but the race started badly when Jacky got hit up the back by Jan Lammers on the second lap," recalled Bell in 1988.

After repairs, Ickx and Bell managed to be more economical than their team-mates and hauled themselves back into contention. Bell got the lead on Sunday morning only for the engine to die.

"There were three things you had to do - change a sensor that went to the flywheel, change a resistor that was on the bulkhead of the car, and change the Motronics box," explained Bell. "All the bits were taped to the cockpit and I changed the three things."

It worked. Bell made it back to the pits, but was now six laps down and things got worse when an oil cooler pipe split. Now they were far enough behind and had sufficient fuel in hand simply to go for it. They charged back to second, but a victory looked unlikely.

When Ickx came in to hand over to Bell for the final time he reported cracks in the brake discs. "The mechanics were going to change them but then we'd have had absolutely no chance of winning," said Bell, who decided to go out with the compromised stopping power.

"Instead of using the brakes very hard at the end of the Mulsanne, I was using the gearbox like hell and just dabbing the brakes. I was lapping pretty close to the lap record and I felt fantastic."

To add to the drama, the leader was in trouble. The left-side door had detached, disturbing the airflow to the flat-six turbocharged engine, and Holbert was desperately trying to get the car to the end.

As he started the final lap, the engine seized. Holbert banged it down the gears and floored it. Somehow the engine freed itself and Holbert crossed the line just over a minute before Bell, who did not have enough fuel to complete another lap...

Hans Stuck, 1988 ADAC Bilstein Super Sprint, Nurburgring

Car: Porsche 962C
Finished: 1st

Stuck picks an unlikely race as his best drive in a sportscar. It's neither of his victories at Le Mans in 1986 and 1987, nor one of his other six wins in world championship sportscar racing. He plumps instead for the ADAC Supercup round at the Nurburgring in September 1988.

Stuck chooses the finale of the domestic German Group C series for a number of reasons: "It was the very last Group C race the 'real' Porsche works team took part in and I have never sat in such a high-tech racing car as the Porsche 962C with the PDK semi-automatic transmission."

The other reason is that he came out on top in a hard-fought race held in mixed conditions over old rival Bob Wollek. The winning margin after 72 laps of racing was a shade under two seconds.

The only world championship race Porsche contested with its in-house factory team in 1988 was Le Mans, but it did mount a full two-car assault on the Supercup sprint series with Stuckie and Klaus Ludwig, respectively driving PDK auto and a car with a conventional gearbox.

Stuck believes that the PDK transmission played a role in his victory at the head of a field that included a pair of Sauber-Mercedes C9s and privateer Porsches fielded by the Joest, Brun and Dauer teams.

"The drivers with conventional transmission had to back off when they accelerated too hard on a damp track, but my transmission changed automatically to the next gear when there was too much wheelspin," he explains.

Stuck overtook the Sauber of Jean-Louis Schlesser to take the lead, shortly before the race was red-flagged. After the restart, he battled with Schlesser, Jochen Mass in the second Silver Arrow and team-mate Ludwig. The PDK Porsche got in and out of the pits quicker than its rivals during the mandatory stops, only for a charging Wollek in a Joest Porsche now equipped with wets to start closing down on him.

"He became a real threat to me, but I just managed to take the first factory Porsche win of that year," says Stuck. "It was a cause for celebration, but also a sad occasion. Porsche had arrived at the circuit with little black flags on the aerials of the cars to indicate that the race was going to be the last for the works team."

Tom Kristensen, 2008 Le Mans 24 Hours

Car: Audi R10 TDI
Finished: 1st

Audi's battle with Peugeot at Le Mans in 2008 produced the greatest ever edition of the French enduro to the minds of many. It has to be in this list, so we're going to give it to Kristensen even if the man himself is reticent to pick his finest drive aboard a sportscar.

Trounced at Sebring, beaten at Spa and the Le Mans test day, and then more than five seconds off the pace in qualifying, Audi didn't appear to have a chance with the ageing R10 TDI against the season-two version of Peugeot's 908 HDi. The only glimmer of hope was provided by the German car's pace in the wet at the official pre-race test two weeks before the main event. It was as fast or perhaps a tad faster than the Pug.

Audi's forecast ahead of the race was that it would rain, but only sometime after the halfway mark. That meant the task for Kristensen, Allan McNish and Dindo Capello was to stay on the lead lap until then.

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That's exactly what they did and, when the track became wet, the Audi was quickly into the lead: Kristensen moved ahead of Jacques Villeneuve in the Peugeot he shared with Marc Gene and Nicolas Minassian in the space of 90 minutes.

Ever-changing conditions kept the race alive and there were some twists and turns in the closing stages: a spin for Kristensen after he was tagged by an LMP2 car and a late gamble on slicks by Peugeot when the rain briefly returned.

"People were telling us we couldn't win that race, but that became part of our will to win," recalls Kristensen. "We had the perfect race, and I'm not just talking about Allan, Dindo and myself. The same goes for our engineer Howden [Haynes], Leena [Gade, assistant engineer] and all the mechanics at Joest.

"Dindo summed it up best when he said it was the race where the men [and women] beat the machines."

The victory has extra significance to Kristensen. It marked the completion of his comeback from a head trauma sustained in the DTM opener at Hockenheim at the start of the previous season. He did race at Le Mans in 2007 after a late decision made only the weekend before, but he admits that he wasn't 100%. Le Mans 2008 was, he says, "the start of my second career".

Allan McNish, 2009 Sebring 12 Hours

Car: Audi R15 TDI
Finished: 1st

The R15 TDI is the forgotten car in Audi's line of successful LMP1 prototypes, but McNish's drive aboard the ugly duckling on its race debut at the 2009 Sebring 12 Hours was unforgettable. It's difficult to argue against the contention that it was the greatest of a great career as he came from behind to snatch victory from Peugeot in the car he shared with Kristensen and Capello.

The R15 looked out of it during the early running of the American Le Mans Series season opener, but the balance between the Audi and the Peugeot 908 HDi changed with the temperatures as the sun went down. The German car got better and better after its switch to the soft-compound Michelin tyre.

PLUS: The 12 greatest Sebring 12 Hours ranked

It still looked like it was going to be a hard slog for McNish after he climbed back aboard the car for the run to the flag. Sebastien Bourdais was out front in the Peugeot he shared with Franck Montagny and Stephane Sarrazin doing the kind of times he could only dream of.

"I remember getting in for my final stint and 'H' [engineer Howden Haynes] coming on the radio and saying: 'Allan, Bourdais has just done a 43.5'," recalls McNish. "I'd done a best of 1m45.2s or something up to that point, and had been straining my nuts to do that.

"I thought, 'Christ sakes', but we just got on with the programme. The team worked with the tools we had, things like tyre pressures and the traction control, to maximise what we had."

McNish ended up with an amazing car underneath him.

"Everyone slates the R15, but at Sebring I had the best-balanced sportscar I ever had in my career, perhaps the best-balanced racing car of any kind," he explains. "It was the first time I ever managed to go around the outside of someone at Sebring's first corner. I had so much confidence in that car."

He needed it, because it became clear in the closing stages that the Audi would need one more stop - a late splash-and-dash for fuel - than the Peugeot. The Audi set a series of laps below the pole position mark to build enough of a buffer to get in and out of the pits ahead to claim Audi's ninth Sebring victory.

Just nine months after it pulled off an arguably the greatest ever heist at Le Mans, it did it again. And by the 'comfortable' margin of 22s.

To pre-order your copy of the 196-page standalone special, please go to: autosport.com/autosport70th

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