1970: Porsche's first Le Mans win

More than ever, Le Mans this year was a race of attrition. Only two of the seven 917s entered finished the race: two of the Gulf-JW cars retired with engine trouble, the Siffert/Redman car when leading comfortably, and the third crashed. Nine of the 11 Ferrari 512Ss retired before half distance: the Ickx/Schetty works car, which would have moved into the lead when Siffert retired, had gone off the road in pouring rain a matter of minutes before, killing a marshal. Four more 512Ss were eliminated in a multiple accident, and another of the quick ones blew up its engine in the first half-hour. All the works Matras and Alfa Romeos failed to finish.

Heavy thunderstorms which completely flooded the track were responsible for many of the accidents, but during a dry period Vic Elford's long-tailed Salzburg Porsche set a new lap record, averaging a fraction under 150mph. With the retirement of the fastest cars and the poor weather conditions, the race average was far from being a record.




As usual, practice occupied the evening of Wednesday and Thursday, following all the dramas of scrutineering and signing-on on Monday and Tuesday. Practice for this race serves more to ensure that the car is ready to race and nothing is falling off than to gain a good starting position; also, as the circuit is not normally available for testing, teams have to wait for official practice to try out their aerodynamic tweaks.

Both days were hot and humid, but dry. On Wednesday Vaccarella did great things for Ferrari's morale by being fastest in 3m20s dead, 1.9 secs quicker than the fastest Porsche, that of Rodriguez. Porsches filled the next three places. Vic Elford was trying both his long and short-tailed cars, finding that the new spoiler on the streamliner made all the difference in straight-line stability. But the gearing recommended by Porsche's computer proved to be rather optimistic and Elford was "only" touching 223mph, so the ratios were changed.

All three Gulf cars had a trouble-free session, although the drivers complained of weaving under heavy braking for Mulsanne, and the front castor angle was increased from 3 deg to 3 3/4 deg to give a compensatory effect. This was not a new problem for Porsche, but for the first time a similar trouble was worrying the Ferrari drivers - there is no other circuit which demands braking from such high speeds for such a sharp corner. Mauro Forghieri was giving the problem his full attention, and was on the phone to Maranello that night for new bits. Ferrari had managed to build one special 512S gearbox which had larger bearings, and this was put into the Ickx/Schetty car on Wednesday night.

Attwood and Herrmann were complaining of a long brake pedal movement on their Salzburg Porsche, while Merzario had a puncture under the Dunlop bridge - the first of a rash of punctures suffered by many cars, probably because the hot weather was loosening the road surface. Before practice the Bell/Peterson Ferrari broke its rev-counter drive, and some of the bits fell in the sump, and when the replacement drive broke as well they were forced to practice without a rev-counter. They got down to an excellent 3m23.4s and Peterson had the Ferrari sounding rather like a Matra coming out of some of the corners; needless to say a rod soon made its way out through the side of the block, though the bits in the sump could have been the culprit.

Fastest 3-litre car at this stage was Stommelen's Alfa with 3m33.8s, with the other Alfas close behind. By contrast the Matras were not having a happy time: the 660 had a faulty fuel metering unit, and Beltoise and Pescarolo were talking about driving one of the older cars because its handling also left something to be desired.

Elford's gear ratio change did the trick, for on Thursday evening he became the first man ever to lap Le Mans in under 200secs - despite the recently-adopted Ford chicane. The big white streamliner was now touching 227mph, only a small improvement, but Vic was now really happy with the car's handling, and his best lap was 3m19.8s. He said that an all-out effort with no traffic problems could have taken 4secs off this.

Vaccarella was still going very well, managing 3m20.6s on this occasion, while Siffert was quickest Gulf man with 3m21.1s. Sensation of the evening was the brave Merzario, who produced a 21.3; the Ferraris were pretty troublefree on Thursday apart form a perfect plague of punctures (nine!), whereas Rodriguez complained of poor brakes on his Gulf 917, and Siffert had a transistor ignition failure. Attwood said that his brakes had not been improved, and that instead the Salzburg mechanics had made various unwanted cockpit changes.

Ickx, displaying his usual unruffled approach to the 24-hour event, did very little practice, being content to scrub a few tyres and bed in brake pads and discs; by contrast, Forghieri was having to restrain his more extrovert drivers from wearing out their cars trying to better Vaccarella's time.

The only serious incident in the whole of practice occurred in the 140mph link just after White House halfway through the Thursday session. Brabham's Matra was coming up to pass Spoerry's Martini Porsche 908 which had moved to one side, apparently to let him through. When Matra was almost alongside the Porsche moved across again and the cars collided. Brabham kept the Matra under control, and brought it into the pits with slight bodywork damage, but the Porsche shot off the road into the bank and disintegrated. The engine was flung bodily down the road and the front suspension and steering wheel went in another direction, while the gearbox was found 50 yards away in a field. The wheel-less cockpit frame landed with Spoerry still strapped in it, and though the remains caught fire, the Swiss unstrapped himself and ran clear with nothing worse than a cut leg. From the lurid pictures of the accident that appeared in the French papers the next day, it seemed a really miraculous escape.

Brabham had been well in the groove with his 650 Matra, setting fastest 3-litre time in 3m32.2s, but the 660 was still not right and was wheeled away for an engine change, while the ENB Ferrari burnt out its clutch. The Ligier set fastest 2-litre time, but then a faulty oil pump produced bearing damage and it too got a new engine on Friday.

If practice were taken as indicating race form things looked good for Ferrari, with six cars in the fastest nine; furthermore, the Porsche team managers were going to have a stiff task persuading their drivers not to make a Grand Prix of it and try to beat each other. There is inevitably constant rivalry not only between Elford and the JW drivers, but even between Seppi and Pedro, and nobody knew better than David Yorke and John Wyer that a lack of discipline in this direction could be disastrous. It was also plain that Ferrari would probably try to send one car out in front as a hare to lure the Porsches on to engine and gearbox-breaking efforts. In their various hotels, while the mechanics worked in the garages and the drivers relaxed, the team managers spent Friday evening pondering on their tactics for the morrow. It looked like being a titanic struggle.




Further work on the Sarthe circuit since last year included 12 more kms of Armco barrier, which now surrounds almost the entire circuit, and resurfacing and widening at the Esses and Tertre Rouge. But of course the major innovation was the modified start. Mainly because drivers could waste race time doing up their seat harness, and usually did their first stint without wearing seat belts (John Woolfe was not wearing his when he had his fatal first-lap accident last year), the traditional start with the drivers running across the road at the drop of the flag had been abandoned.

After toying with the idea of getting the co-drivers to run across, it was decided that now the cars were to line up in shallow echelon down the pit road according to practice times, with the drivers belted in and the engines switched off. At the drop of the flag (wielded this year by none other than Dr Ferry Porsche) engines could be started and the race was on.

Amid all the usual pomp and playing of national anthems the 51-car field lined up. Porsche wanted to start the spare Salzburg 5-litre with Dieter Spoerry at the wheel, so that if one of their other cars was an early retirement its driver could take this one over, but Spoerry didn't pass his medical - his bruised leg from his incredible practice accident was still hurting him - and so the car did not run.

Last minute drama for the JW team came when the Siffert/Redman car sprang a fuel leak just before the start, but this was quickly fixed. The weather was warm and muggy, but the sky threatened rain and almost everyone was on intermediate tyres - except for Merzario. He was to be the Ferrari "hare" to try to keep the pressure on the Porsches, and his 512S was on Firestone Indys.

Suddenly it was 4 pm, the flag was down and the cars were firing up and snaking away down the road. At the top of the line Elford made a good start, but Siffert's was even better, and the two 917s accelerated up the hill side by side. By contrast, Jacky Ickx repeated his relaxed demonstration of last year and waited for the worst of the frantic traffic to subside before driving off, while Jack Brabham was even cooler: he climbed aboard the Matra when there was only 30 secs to go, and was one of the last away.

At the end of the first lap, to no-one's surprise, Elford came streaking through in the big white Porsche well ahead of the Gulf Porsches of Siffert and Rodriguez. The first Ferrari was Merzario's according to plan, lying fourth just ahead of Vaccarella, Hobbs in the 4.5 Gulf Porsche, Muller's Ferrari and van Lennep's 917. Elford was setting a terrific pace right from the start, and at the end of his second lap his lead over Seppi was a fat 5.8 secs, while Merzario was pressing Pedro, passing him on lap 3.

Elford continued to pull away from his pursuers, so that the gap to Siffert was 9 sees on lap 4, only for Siffert to make up some ground in traffic (the slowest cars were lapped on lap 3!). The Porsche 908 camera car, having filmed the two opening laps, came in for a camera change: then the starter wouldn't work and it took an hour to rebuild it (under the regulations, starters may not be changed).

Meanwhile there had already been several pitstops. Skailes brought the Chevron in after only one lap with a loose gear lever, while Galli overshot the chicane and called at his pit to avoid penalty. Merzario came in to check a front suspension vibration, and then the fastest Ferrari of practice went missing. After a long pause Vaccarella struggled in with a very crippled 512S: a rod had come through the side, and that was that. Another early Italian retirement was Hezeman's Alfa; a stone made its way through an inlet trumpet, broke a valve and holed a piston, and oil and water were dripping out of one of the exhaust pipes.

First puncture of the race befell Derek Bell. Pescarolo was another pits caller, complaining that the Matra's nose section was loose.

Lap 10 and Elford had settled down to some consistent lappery, but Siffert was certainly not treating the Salzburg car like a team-mate and was driving very hard to catch it. The gap was now 2.5 secs; about half a minute behind, Rodriguez was third from Muller, Hobbs, van Lennep and Larrousse. Ickx was next, moving up well, followed by Merzario, who was catching up again after his short stop, and Attwood, who had been caught rather unawares by the start. Bonnier stopped to have his oily screen cleaned, and Zeccoli's Alfa came in with a loose passenger seat, of all things.

After 15 laps came the first fuel stops; the first three places were unaffected, but good Gulf pitwork saw Hobbs make up a place on Piper, who had taken over from van Lennep. By contrast, it took Matra 2m14 s to get Brabham out of the 650 and Cevert in.

With an hour of the race gone, suddenly Siffert was right on Elford's tail, and any doubts about whether Wyer and Salzburg were rivals were dispelled by the blue and orange machine getting alongside past the pits on two occasions, first on one side and then the other, and then taking the lead. The Swiss also set a new lap record in 3m22.6s; but the vagaries of Le Mans traffic saw him behind Elford again soon after, who replied with a lap in 3m21.0s. The Ferraris of Bonnier and Bell were battling equally closely.

Then came the first Porsche retirement on lap 22. At Arnage the engine in the Rodriguez Porsche suddenly stopped. The shaft that drives the cooling fan had broken, and dropped into the crankcase, wrecking the whole unit. The car was immobilised, and Pedro walked sadly back to the pits.

Just before the two-hour mark light rain began to fall. It was nothing serious yet, however, and everyone pressed on. Then the leaders came in for their second routine stops: Ahrens relieved Elford and Redman took over from Siffert, and again Gulf's pit-work paid dividends, for at the end of the next lap the Gulf car had a 10.5 secs lead. Ickx had worked his way up to third place ahead of Hobbs, but Merzario, who had been going very well, was forced in by the rain to change his Indy tyres, handing over to Regazzoni, which let Piper into fifth spot. In the 3-litre category the de Adamich/ Courage Alfa led for a while, but during their second routine stop the Brabham/ Cevert Matra went ahead.

Redman had now built up a 20 sees lead over Ahrens, but all this and more disappeared when a wheel balance weight fell off and he came in for a wheel change. Then came a bitter blow for Ferrari: an accident which eliminated no fewer than four 512Ss.

Reine Wisell in the Filipinetti car, unable to see where he was going as his screen was still covered in oil, pulled to the side of the road just before the White House and slowed up; Bell, Regazzoni and Parkes arrived on the scene almost as one, having been dicing together along the Mulsanne Straight, and Bell swerved to avoid Wisell. Regazzoni tried to go between the two and at 150 mph hit the back of Wisell's 50mph car with an enormous blow. The Swede shot across the road into the crash barrier, ricocheting back across the road, and it and Regazzoni's spinning 512S finished up in the path of Parkes' car. Parkes' car went into them and caught fire, but marshals speedily put this out, although Parkes burnt his leg slightly. In all this drama Bell missed a gear, coming straight into the pits with an over-revved engine, while Parkes was able to struggle in to retire with his sadly battered machine. Four 512Ss fewer for Porsche to worry about...

Then to cap it all the rain really started to come down in bucketfuls. The track was now awash, and the pits were busy as everyone changed to wet-weather tyres. Yet again Gulf were quicker than Salzburg, and the Siffert/Redman car went ahead again. Speeds dropped drastically, but not enough for some: Facetti, who was going 8 sees faster than his team-mates in the wet, spun his Alfa on the fast uphill curve after the pits while in thick traffic. The car smashed into the Armco, damaging two wheels: the optimistic Facetti ran back to the pits for a jack and two more wheels, but was unable to make the car raceworthy because a few minutes later along came Mike Hailwood's third-placed JW Porsche. Mike was fighting for control on the slippery surface, and as he was sorting it all out he found the parked Alfa occupying the piece of road he needed. Porsche hit Alfa head on, and for both the race was over. Back at the pits a shamefaced Hailwood said to John Wyer: "I'm bloody sorry, John." Wyer replied with one of his ghostly smiles: "That's all right, Mike. Don't ring us - we'll ring you."

Bourdon crashed his Stingray at the Esses, and under heavy braking the Healey skated into the back of Martland's Chevron, doing bodywork damage to both which required stops for repairs. Kelleners thumped the barrier in the Esses avoiding another spinning car, doing the nose of the Loos 512S no good at all: the Ferrari works team lent them one of the latest-style noses, and this was grafted on in a long stop.

Still the rain fell, and the yellow danger lights heralding further spins were on almost continuously. It wasn't until about 8 pm that the rain began to ease, and with one-sixth of the race completed the official order was:
1, Siffert/Redman (Porsche 917), 61 laps: 2, Elford/ Ahrens (Porsche 917), 61; 3, van Lennep/Piper (Porsche 917), 60; 4, Attwood/Herrmann (Porsche 917); 5, Larrousse/Kauhsen (Porsche 917); 6, Ickx/Schetty (Ferrari 512S)- 7, Brabham/Cevert (Matra 650); 8, Galli/ Stommelen (Alfa Romeo T33/3); 9, Manfredini/Moretti (Ferrari 512S); 10, Lins/Marko (Porsche 908).

Things looked pretty good for Porsche, with the Attwood/Herrmann and Larrousse/ Kauhsen 917s now ahead of the Ickx/Schetty Ferrari, which had lost time with a slowish brake pad change. On the Group 6 front, the wet weather had not agreed with two of the Alfas, which had had a plug change (Galli) and alternator bothers (Courage), while the Matras were all smoking heavily and displaying an ominous thirst for oil, even though they were being filled up with oil as often as the regulations allowed: the reason for all this was that the special long-distance piston rings fitted to all three for this race were a bad batch and were breaking up.

The Jabouille/Depailler car slithered into the Armco, and body repairs lost it 26 minutes. The VDS Lola, which had been performing well in the wet, lost some time replacing a broken alternator bracket, but was lying 14th nevertheless behind the NART 512S. The ENB 512S was well down, behind the Juncadella/Fernandez example, after a long stop to change a broken fuel line. A leaking fuel tank had already caused the demise of the Chevron-Mazda.

With virtually the whole of Ferrari's hopes resting on their shoulders Ickx and Schetty were going very consistently, and by 10 pm the sole remaining works car was up in third place again. The Matras were spending longer and longer in the pits: as well as their extremely high oil consumption, the old Matra trouble of breaking distributor arms raised its ugly head on the Jabouille/Depailler car. Beltoise had a couple of stops with the 660: it had used all its oil and replenishment so soon would entail disqualification, so it was pushed away. Shortly after 10 pm both the other Matras were retired for the same reason, bringing the French team's 1970 Le Mans to a premature end.

Since its earlier accident the Kelleners/ Loos Ferrari, despite its new nose, had been handling very badly. Finally Kelleners refused to drive it on the still wet track: Loos took it out for a couple of laps, agreed, and retired the car.

Then the handling of Elford's second-placed Porsche suddenly deteriorated and he came in to have the suspension checked. Nothing wrong could be found, although a broken headlamp mounting was fixed; Vic made two more stops before a slow puncture was finally found. All this put the Gulf car comfortably in the lead, the Ferrari up to second and Elford down to fifth behind Attwood/Herrmann and Larousse/Kauhsen. Courage spun the Alfa T33/3 at the Esses, damaging the rear bodywork, and a new tail section had to be fitted, which dropped him to 13th position; a similar fate befell Piper, who had been lying third in the AAW 917. In his case the front bodywork and headlights were damaged, and he fell to 14th while they were mended.

Now leading the Group 6 class after some very consistent motoring were Lins/Marko in their 908, who were sixth overall, a lap ahead of the Galli/Stommelen Alfa and two in front of Posey/Bucknum in the NART 512S. Lying ninth was the VDS Lola, but soon after midnight the big car's clutch failed and it was out. The Manfredini/ Moretti 512S had cooked the innards of its gearbox after the oil drain plug fell out, and the mechanics were busy rebuilding the transmission, while the Martland/Baker Chevron went very sick when a valve dropped. Paul Owens lifted the head, changed the valve - which had fortunately not damaged the piston - and in an hour Digby was back in the fray. One of its class rivals, the Ligier-FVC, broke its distributor drive and retired.

Further troubles were suffered by the Autodelta team when Courage's car ran out of petrol at the bottom of the pit road. He parked it and ran to the pits for some petrol to get it in for a refuel. Meanwhile team-mate Galli had to stop for a loose oil pipe to be fixed. The van Lennep/Piper Porsche 917 was making up time after its long stop, but the accident had put the front wheels out of true, and when van Lennep took it over he hadn't done many laps before a front tyre blew at 180 mph on the Mulsanne Straight, a chunk of tread tearing through the wing. The Dutchman stopped the car safely, but it was too badly damaged to continue.

Then at 1.45am Ferrari's last and strongest hope for victory suffered a cruel blow. Ickx was braking for the Ford corner in close company with the only car that was leading him in the race, the Siffert/ Redman Porsche; as the cars were wheel to wheel a rear brake locked on the Ferrari and the big red car spun, went over a sandbank and hit a marshal, who was killed instantly. The Ferrari caught fire briefly, but Ickx, although shocked and naturally very upset, was unhurt. The Belgian had steadily been going about the race in the right way, and could so easily have won, as it turned out. It was effectively the end of Ferrari's effort to come back and win at Le Mans.

Hard on the heels of this drama came another. The JW Automotive team, having lost two of their three cars uncharacteristically early, were still cautiously optimistic with the Siffert/Redman car no fewer than seven laps in the lead after 10 hours' racing. But for John Wyer there was to be no victory hat-trick: just after 2am Seppi brought the car in with oil pouring from the exhaust pipes and the rev-counter tell-tale reading 9600 rpm. The very disappointed Siffert said that the car had jumped out of fourth.

But it was still Porsche 917s 1-2-3, with the Salzburg cars of Attwood/Herrmann and Elford/Ahrens split by the long-tailed Martini entry of Larrousse/Kauhsen. Porsche were also looking good in the 3-litre Group 6 class, for fourth overall was the Lins/ Marko 908, two laps ahead of the Galli/ Stommelen Alfa.

The Spanish Ferrari 512 spun and crunched its front bodywork very badly; this plus a split gearbox casing forced its retirement. The Manfredini/Moretti 512S, well down the field after its earlier gearbox dramas, went off at Tertre Rouge, and after much bodywork rebuilding in the pits it too was out. So now only two of the 11 512Ss, the NART and ENB entries, remained. Soldiering on well were Enever and Hedges in the Healey-Repco, despite the bodywork damage incurred earlier. A very long stop at around 2 am to change the dog that engages fourth gear lost plenty of time, but it continued to run consistently.

Just a few minutes after the race passed the halfway mark the rain began again, hard enough to bring the speeds right down once more, and demanding tyre changes all round.

The Elford/Ahrens 917 passed its Larrousse/Kauhsen fellow when the heavy rain got into the latter's electrics and sent its fuel pump on the blink. Courage had dropped farther back with a second spin, this time on his own fuel as his filler hadn't been closed properly during his previous routine stop. The car was damaged at the rear again, and another new rear section was required; in addition the car was not very healthy and had been on seven cylinders for much of the night.

Among the 2-litres, both the Porsche 910s had fallen by the wayside, one with rear brake trouble (Rouveyran/Meier) and the other (Poirot/Kraus) with a sick engine. The Skailes/Hine Chevron was running poorly because the tappets had closed up; the hard-working crew took the camshafts out and adjusted the shims which took about 90 minutes, and this had the car running well again. Martland was doing most of the driving in the B16-BMW because Baker was complaining of a stomach upset. The NART 312P spun in the rain and damaged its bodywork front and rear, so the spare car was robbed of its bodywork to replace the bent bits. The Wicky/Hanrioud Porsche 907 had two pitstops to cure a sticking throttle, but then it jammed again at Tertre Rouge and the car bent itself against the Armco.

It was a miserable dawn, with the rain still falling from a grey sky and the tired drivers taking things gently. By 8 am, with 16 hours' racing behind them, there were 24 cars still running. Elford had lost some time with a stop just before 8 am to fix disintegrating front bodywork, while the big Corvette's rather leisurely routine stops had seen it lose the Group 4 lead to the astonishingly consistent Sonauto Porsche 914.

Then came another blow for Porsche. At 8.30 the Elford Porsche was in again: an inlet valve had broken. The car was wheeled away, and now the Martini 908 was second.

Just after 9 am the Alfa force was reduced to the single sick Courage/de Adamich car when the Galli/Hezemans machine was disqualified for receiving outside help when it had stopped on the circuit earlier with its oil pipe trouble. The misfiring NART 512S, which now had the benefit of all the unem-ployed works Ferrari mechanics, stalled after a routine stop and needed a jump-leaded battery to coax it into life. The organisers asked for the battered front of the Healey to be more sturdily mended, which lost the car from Warwick some more time, and the second-placed 908 got a new set of wheels and a once-over to try to cure a vibration that they had had most of the night. At first the pit crew couldn't undo the wheels at all, and they had to find the fattest German mechanic in the pit road to jump on the wheel wrench.

The Martini Porsche 917 was now going very healthily again and catching the 908 rapidly. The Martland/Baker Chevron broke a valve spring, and this time it was retired: the Skailes/Hine Chevron was spending far more time in the pits than on the track as they tried to coax some power out of the FVC. Then at 10.30 Courage, whose car had been sounding progressively sicker, coasted into the Alfa pit with a dead engine. The mechanics could not find out what was wrong, and the car was wheeled away to join its team-mates.

A watery sun was now struggling through the clouds to dry the track, and Larrousse made use of the improving conditions to take second place from the 908.

So it was 917-917-908, and then 512-512-312, although the Group 6 Ferrari was severely delayed with an incurable misfire. They tried changing all the plugs, and one broke, which lost more time, but the car kept struggling on. The Corvette had got the Group 4 lead from the Porsche 914, but only by a narrow margin. Meanwhile both Attwood and Hermann were making sure that they did not throw away their five-lap lead and were lapping very cautiously around the 4-mins mark, so that the Larrousse/Kauhsen car was currently the fastest on the track.

At 12.15 the weather played another trick. While the south of the circuit remained dry, a fantastic cloudburst suddenly flooded the pits area, the Esses and Tertre Rouge, wash-ing mud off the verges onto the road. Speeds were reduced to a crawl, and in came every-one to change to ultra-wet tyres. This affected the Corvette, which took nine minutes to do it and lost its G4 lead to the 914, and the third-placed 908. Once again the comedy with the fat mechanic was enacted, but this time one of the rear hub nuts seemed to have become immovably welded to the hub. They spent 10 minutes jumping on it and trying to loosen it without success, while the other mechanics changed the other three wheels; having failed with the fourth, they admitted defeat and the dry tyres were put back on again, with an angry Lins twitching up the road through the puddles. However, so great was his advantage over the NART Ferrari that this performance didn't lose him a place.

Almost as suddenly the rain stopped, the sun came out and the track dried, so everyone was in to change tyres yet again. Now it was a case for everyone of keeping going in the remaining time. There were one or two rather sick cars struggling round, notably the Skailes/Hine Chevron which was still in and out of the pits and finally, with 1 1/2 hours left, ground to a halt on the Mulsanne Straight. As Cosworths apparently recommend only four hours' racing between rebuilds for the FVC engine, it had done well! The 312P Ferrari was still plagued with ignition and injection dramas: it was always very difficult to restart after its pit stops, and would barely pull itself up the hill away from the start-finish area, but once on the Mulsanne Straight it would clear and start to run on at least 10 of its cylinders. The Healey was another reluctant starter after pitstops, and was sounding a little off song from time to time. One of the 911s, the Sweitlik/Lagniez car, had a serious oil leak but was struggling round to finish.

The only excitement in the final hour was Larrousse unlapping himself on Attwood, bringing the gap down to five laps, and the arrival half an hour before the end of the usual huge posse of gendarmes to control the crowd, greeted by the spectators in the customary manner with boos, jeers and whistles. A final retirement was the Healey: poor Enever had stopped with ignition failure only two laps from the end on the Mulsanne Straight, a cruel blow.

The Attwood/Herrmann Porsche crossed the line just before 4 pm and had to do another lap, and then - an innovation this year - instead of the crowd swamping the circuit, they were held in the enclosures and Dickie and Hans, plus Dr Ferry Porsche, were loaded onto a sort of municipal dust cart, on which they did a slow lap of honour sans car or mechanics. By contrast with the jubilant near-riots of past years, it was an anti-climatic end to a rather anti-climatic Le Mans.

Behind the two 917s and the 908 - a long way behind - came the sole survivors of the mighty Ferrari armada, the private NART and ENB cars. A worthy sixth should have been the Corvette and eighth the 908 camera car, but when the official results were announced it was found that the organisers had invoked the qualifying distance rule, which requires cars to travel a certain distance according to their capacity to qualify as finishers. Neither the Corvette nor the camera car had done this, the Corvette having been slowed particularly by the rain and the changes to and from wet and dry tyres, so the little 914/6 Porsche, which had run incredibly reliably (on the same set of brake pads and the same dry Dunlop tyres for the whole race!) was declared sixth overall and GT category winner.

Thus Porsche had won all three categories; they also took the Index of Performance (the Lins/Marko 908) and the Energy Index, calculated on fuel consumption by capacity (the Larrousse/Kauhsen 917). For 30-year-old Attwood and 42-year-old Herrmann, whose racing career dates back to the Mercedes-Benz Formula 1 team in the 1950s and beyond, it was perhaps an unexpected victory, the reward for a consistent drive after so many faster teams had dropped out. For Ferrari - and for JW Automotive - it was a disappointing race: but for Porsche the result could not have been better, even if they too had had a low reliability record. On their 20th visit to Le Mans, they had at last scored outright victory.