How Kristensen became Mr Le Mans

The Le Mans 24 Hours is going to feel a bit odd next season. For the first time in nearly 20 years the name Tom Kristensen is not going to grace the entry list. I haven't got my head around it yet, but thankfully he's given us a shade over six months to get used to the idea.

I guess I grew accustomed to the concept that I'd be reporting on a race in which Tom had a realistic chance of winning. Everyone talks about his nine victories in the 24 Hours, but perhaps the more telling statistic is his strike rate over 18 participations - a cool 50 per cent. And he could, and undoubtedly should, have won more.

There have, of course, been longer Le Mans careers and drivers who've had better hit rates (though with far fewer appearances), but no one has been such a force over so many starts at the 24 Hours. Not even the great Jacky Ickx, from whom Kristensen took over the 'Mr Le Mans' monicker.

It will also be hard to get used to his absence from the cockpit because his illustrious career and my own as a jobbing journalist have more or less overlapped. We were born just a few weeks apart, and he has been present for all but three of my assignments for AUTOSPORT at Le Mans.

Kristensen won on his Le Mans debut in the Joest Porsche in 1997 © LAT

To say that he has been part of the scenery during my time reporting on the 24 Hours is to play down his achievements. A better analogy would be that he has been an oak towering above the Le Mans landscape.

I feel privileged to have reported on all Tom's Le Mans starts, not to mention the majority of his big sportscar wins around the world. I am also proud to say that I played a small part in setting him on the road to success.

This is all fairly tenuous, but please bear with me. The Joest team, of course, had won Le Mans in 1996 with the Porsche WEC95 and received a guaranteed entry for the '97 race. Back then such things were new and the procedures not entirely clear, at least to Joest Racing.

I knew all about Joest's plans to defy the factory and take the WSC95 - chassis 001 and a car that started life as a Jaguar - that it had 'won' for triumphing in '96 back for a second assault. Which is why I was shocked when Joest was not on the entry list when it whirred through the AUTOSPORT office fax one morning. (Yes, it was a long time ago!)

I was straight on the phone to team boss Ralf Juttner. I explained that guaranteed or not, Joest's entry still had to go through the normal channels. That came as a surprise to Juttner and was followed by some frantic phone calls from Germany to the Automobile Club de l'Ouest.

There was opposition from some quarters - the ACO could be a peculiarly intransigent organisation back in the day - before the necessary entry was secured.

I'm not sure Kristensen was on the radar of Juttner and Reinhold Joest at that stage, but maybe had I not picked up my phone, Tom's might not have rung with probably the most important call of his career in June '97. That's what I like to think anyway.

Kristensen was part of the crew that took the Goh Audi to victory in 2004 © LAT

It was evident that the boy was a bit special from the moment he took to the Circuit de la Sarthe, or rather first drove in the race (he went into it with only a handful of laps under his belt in qualifying). I witnessed his amazing string of fastest laps during the night that first year.

And when I say 'witnessed', I mean I was watching the timing screens as first one star - indicating fastest race lap for the car - appeared alongside his time and then two stars, which meant the fastest lap by any car. And he was doing it on tyres that were on their third stint!

That was just the first of many great drives from Tom at Le Mans. My favourite, as I have written before, is 2008 and the against-the-odds triumph with Allan McNish and Dindo Capello.

They had no right to win that race for Audi in an ageing car in which they shouldn't have been able to hold a candle to the newer Peugeot.

The 2004 victory Team Goh was special for me, because he helped turn a team that had been struggling in the Le Mans Endurance Series into a Le Mans winner.

His final triumph last year has to be up there, too. Then there were his performances in 1999 with BMW and Audi in 2007, which both deserve comparison with any of his winning drives.

Kristensen was always mega at Le Mans.

It would be wrong to say he reserved his best for the Circuit de la Sarthe. Let's not overlook, for example, his record in the Sebring 12 Hours — six wins, two seconds and a third from 13 starts — and his performance there in 2001 (a race he didn't win) was arguably the best TK performance I ever witnessed.

It's more that he was always at his best on those eight and a half miles of hallowed asphalt in France. And that's why we shall forever know Tom Kristensen as 'Mr Le Mans'.