How Kristensen forged the Mr Le Mans legend

It was deep in the night at the 1997 Le Mans 24 Hours, and a star suddenly appeared next to the name Tom Kristensen on the timing screens. That meant the Joest Porsche driven by the race rookie had just posted its fastest lap so far. A few minutes later, a double star appeared. That signified the #7 car had just set fastest lap of the race. It was a portent of what was to come for Kristensen, because a star was born in the small hours of that Sunday morning.

That was the beginning of a romance between Kristensen and Le Mans. The young driver fell in love with the place, and seemingly the place fell in love with him. They say that the Circuit de la Sarthe chooses its winners and it picked Kristensen and team-mates Michele Alboreto and Stefan Johansson aboard the Joest Racing Porsche WSC95 that year. Over the next 17 editions of the 24 Hours it would choose him another eight times as he amassed a record tally of nine victories in the great race.

"That's when I really started to fall in love with Le Mans," explains Kristensen. "It suddenly all came together on this amazing track, everything clicked. But it didn't happen immediately."

That's not surprising given that Kristensen's Le Mans debut happened in a blur. He was, he says, "still trying to catch up" as he went into the race on Saturday afternoon. He'd got the call from Joest to drive the winning Porsche from the previous year only a week before the cars were due out on track. He'd arrived in Le Mans on the Monday, only to have to fly out again on Thursday.

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He had a prior engagement with the Italian Auto Sport Racing team with which he was leading the Formula 3000 International Championship at the time. He had to be at the A1-Ring for a test and did a deal with Reinhold Joest to borrow his private jet to fly in and out of Austria in a day. He didn't arrive back in Le Mans until after the second day's qualifying had started on Thursday evening.

Kristensen's experience of the WSC95 on a track he'd never previously seen stood at fewer than 20 laps when the green flag dropped on Saturday afternoon.

"I was the young boy on the team, sharing a car with two experienced drivers who'd raced for Joest before," he recalls. "I was never going to get a lot of seat time. Qualifying for me was just about dialling myself in, but the old mechanics on the team were at least finally beginning to answer my questions by the end of it."

Kristensen describes his first time in the car during the race on Saturday evening as "not too bad, but nothing spectacular". His second turn behind the wheel was most definitely spectacular as he announced himself as a driver with a big future ahead of him in sportscars.

A sequence of new lap records on a slightly reconfigured track flowed from the Le Mans newbie during his third stint on a set of Goodyear tyres. That resulted in some lively radio communication with Joest technical director Ralf Juttner.

"I had this chance with Joest and I knew I had to make the most of it. It was a launchpad for me. Without that chance my career wouldn't have worked out the way it did, absolutely no way" Tom Kristensen

"At one point Ralf came on the radio in German and said, 'schnellsten runde, schnellsten runde', fastest lap, fastest lap," remembers Kristensen. "The next time he spoke to me he said, 'lap record, lap record, keep it steady' in English. I thought to get a German to talk to me in English, I must be doing something right, but he was also trying to calm me down."

Shortly afterwards, Juttner was back on the radio. This time he was asking if Kristensen was ready to stay out for what at the time was an unprecedented fourth stint on a set of tyres: "I already had my belts undone when he asked me, but I said I was OK to do it. The truth was that I was absolutely knackered, though I don't think I realised it at the time."

The Joest Porsche had emerged as a true victory contender in Kristensen's hands: now it was at least matching the factory Porsche 911 GT1 Evo out in the lead as Alboreto and Johansson picked up the pace over the second half of the race.

"That was when we started to think we could win," says Kristensen. "The factory Porsche ahead of us in the lead had problems. The fact that we were pushing them played a part in that, I'm sure."

The car at the front shared by Yannick Dalmas, Emmanuel Collard and Ralf Kelleners retired in the closing stages, and the Joest car swept through to victory, giving Kristensen membership of the elite club of first-time winners at Le Mans.

Kristensen knew he had to make an impact at Le Mans in 1997. The offer to drive the Joest car was, he says, "a pivotal moment" in his career. He had returned to Europe in 1996 after a four-year stint in Japan that included winning the Formula 3 title in 1993 with TOM'S and a near-miss in F3000 in 1995 with Cerumo. He wanted to re-establish his name in the motorsport mainstream in Europe and had also yet to give up on the F1 dream.

"I had this chance with Joest and I knew I had to make the most of it," he explains. "It was a launchpad for me. Without that chance my career wouldn't have worked out the way it did, absolutely no way. It gave me a way to move forward, which I'd never really had before."

The offers flowed for Le Mans the following season. He had contact with the Porsche factory, Nissan and Mercedes before opting to go with BMW, which had entered into a partnership with Williams to build it an LMP1 car.

"I knew they were serious about winning Le Mans and would do whatever it took," says Kristensen, who was able to dovetail a Le Mans-only programme with an assault on the STW Super Touring series in Germany with the JAS Honda squad. He also admits that he was keeping a weather eye on F1. The LMP programme was a lead-in to BMW's re-entry to the pinnacle of the sport in 2000. "I still hadn't given up on F1," he explains. "Every racing driver starts out dreaming of F1."

Little more than a year after Le Mans number two for Kristensen in the Bigazzi-run BMW V12 LM, he had a new deal in his pocket. It was one that would come to define him as a driver and pave the way for his phenomenal success at Le Mans and beyond. He had agreed to join Audi for 2000 by the end of the previous summer.

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Kristensen describes signing up to race for Audi in 2000 as "the best decision I ever took". There were people around him with misgivings about his joining a manufacturer that had proved off the pace on its Le Mans debut in 1999, even if it did claim third and fourth positions.

"People were telling me I was crazy and asking me if I didn't remember the car jumping all over the place at Sebring [on the debut of the R8R in the 12 Hours], but I actually did the deal quite early," says Kristensen, who reveals that he reached an agreement with Audi Sport boss Wolfgang Ullrich long before the new R8 had turned a wheel. "Dr Ullrich showed me the drawings of the new car and I gave him a handshake there and then. The first time I drove the car, I knew I'd made the right call."

Kristensen would remain an Audi driver for the rest of his career - he was on loan to Bentley when he won Le Mans in 2003 - and still has a role with the brand today six years after hanging up his helmet. But he wasn't a regular in the German manufacturer's sportscar squad from the beginning. He was initially only contracted for two races in 2000 - Sebring and Le Mans - as an endurance driver alongside Emanuele Pirro and Frank Biela. Petit Le Mans at Road Atlanta at the end of the season was added to his programme later and only the following year did he join full-time for an assault on the American Le Mans Series.

No one could have predicted the success he would go on to have racing Audi's line of prototypes, and not just at Le Mans. He also became the most successful driver in the history of the Sebring enduro, adding five wins with Audi to the one he claimed with BMW in 1999. There was an ALMS title in 2002, which included his only victory at Petit, and finally at the end of his career he belatedly became a world champion in his chosen discipline. He won the World Endurance Championship together with Allan McNish and Loic Duval in 2013, the second season of the born-again series, a title that was anchored with Le Mans victory number nine.

"Going flat-out isn't what you want to do if it comes with a price in terms of fuel or tyres. That's what I love about endurance racing. You don't go flat out sometimes, but with a purpose. You can have a plan and then reap the benefits later" Tom Kristensen

But don't ask Kristensen what made him the most successful sportscar driver of his generation and, for Autosport, arguably the best in our 70 years of history. That, he suggests, is for other people to talk about. Or write about. He points to any number of things your author has said about him in the pages of the magazine and online over the years. Push him a little and he does, however, talk about adaptability and versatility as being the keys to success in endurance racing.

"When you go into a 12 or 24-hour race, you are not going to have the same car underneath you for the whole event," he says. "A track like Le Mans changes over time: the track conditions change almost constantly so you have to evolve your driving. It's about much more than just going fast.

"Sometimes people think you are not driving flat-out, but going flat-out isn't what you want to do if it comes with a price in terms of fuel or tyres. That's what I love about endurance racing. You don't go flat out sometimes, but with a purpose. You can have a plan and then reap the benefits later."

Kristensen believes this versatility or adaptability, call it what you will, was honed during his time in Japan. "I didn't just do F3 and then F3000, I raced Group A touring cars and in Group C," he explains, missing out a couple of seasons of Super Touring with Toyota and sporadic Super GT appearances through into 1996. "You had to be versatile out there, or at least it taught you to be versatile. Jumping into different cars was one of the things I loved most about Japan."

Kristensen's sportscar debut came at the wheel of a TOM'S-run factory Toyota TS010 3.5-litre Group C car in his first year in Japan in 1992. That he finished fourth in an All-Japan Sports-Prototype Championship round at Mine with Jacques Villeneuve and Eddie Irvine is well documented. Not so well known are the multiple days of testing he did in the car to hone its traction control systems.

"I probably had four to six days of testing in the car at the Yamaha test circuit near Nagoya," he recalls. "It was a bloody dangerous place, but the time I spent in the TS010 undoubtedly helped me when I made my Le Mans debut.

"Looking back, Japan was fantastic for me, very important in my development. It was great that I could try different things. Driving different cars was part of the game in Japan. It was in the days before email and mobile phones - we had fax and phone cards - so it toughened you up."

It probably isn't coincidence that Kristensen enjoyed similar success at Sebring to Le Mans. The Florida airfield circuit that still incorporates sections of concrete runway from the Second World War bomber base on which it is sited probably changes more through the 12 hours than the Circuit de la Sarthe does in 24.

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"I love the place, the challenge of it," he says. "It's rough and it's bumpy, and the grip is constantly changing with the temperature. You really have to be on it to produce the lap times because it's changing if not every lap, certainly every hour. It really keeps you on your toes."

Kristensen's Sebring story started in a not dissimilar way to his chronicles at Le Mans: there was a late call to do the race, a starring performance in the night and a race victory. BMW had stuck to its word about doing everything possible to try to win Le Mans, building a new car for 1999 to replace its hastily developed first attempt. The new V12 LMR was entered for Sebring but first it needed to come through a test at the Homestead oval just down the road in Florida the previous week. It didn't.

There was a problem with the differential, and BMW and Schnitzer were all set to go home and skip Sebring. Kristensen remembers going to bed on Friday night "expecting to be driving to Miami airport in the morning" in readiness for a return to Europe.

"But when we went down to breakfast it was all change after Williams and Xtrac came up with a fix," he recalls. "The team told us they were getting our rooms back at what turned out to be a very humble hotel in Sebring and we would be doing the race."

Kristensen and team-mates JJ Lehto and Jorg Muller came through to score a debut victory for the car, the Dane setting fastest race lap along the way. "This is where the Sebring story started for me," says Tom. "It laid the foundations of my later success."

BMW hit the target at Le Mans in year two of the programme, though not with the car shared by the Sebring winners. Victory instead went to the slower sister car, and Kristensen describes his failure to win the race that year "as the biggest disappointment" of his sportscar career.

"After that I never accepted anyone offering congratulations or telling me I was going to win. I'd always tell them to shut up. The unexpected can always happen at Le Mans" Tom Kristensen

None of Kristensen's nine Le Mans triumphs came by a margin greater than two laps, but in 1999 he and his team-mates were the better part of four laps to the good when a freak issue put them out of the race. The top of one of the front dampers unwound itself, the anti-roll bar came loose, fell down and jammed the throttle on Lehto in the middle of the Porsche Curves. Contact with the wall put the car out on the spot.

"We lost a certain win and after that I never accepted anyone offering congratulations or telling me I was going to win," he says. "I'd always tell them to shut up. The unexpected can always happen at Le Mans."

If 1999 was Kristensen's biggest disappointment at Le Mans, what about his best? He can't - or won't - come up with a favourite victory of the nine. He does, however, plump for the one that was the hardest and that was 2001, the middle year of his hat-trick with Pirro and Biela aboard the R8.

It was hard because of the torrid weather conditions and hard emotionally. That was the year that Alboreto lost his life in pre-Le Mans testing in an R8 at the Lausitzring in April.

"Dr Ullrich said something to us all that was very brave when we were at the funeral," recalls Kristensen. "He told us that if you don't want to race, then don't race. But we all decided pretty quickly that we wanted to race out of respect for Michele. There was something inside all of us that said, 'Goddam, we're going to get on with this and try to win the race'. You deal with the emotions afterwards."

Those emotions spilled out on the podium after Kristensen, Pirro and Biela made it two in a row for Audi, partly because "our thoughts turned to Michele" and partly because it was "my most challenging Le Mans". It rained shortly after the start and barely stopped over the duration of the race.

"There's no doubt that in terms of pure driving that was my most difficult or challenging Le Mans," he explains. "It was a tough race because we had something like 19 hours of rain.

"The stint I remember most came early on Sunday morning. I was put onto intermediate tyres and endured the most frightening 20 minutes of my life. It was 20 minutes of near misses because I couldn't get any heat into the tyres."

Many Le Mans watchers, including this author, count 2008 as the greatest ever edition of the race. The fact that Kristensen, along with team-mates McNish and Dindo Capello, drove out of his skin in a battle of the turbodiesels to beat Peugeot must surely put it up there among his favourites. He doesn't quite say that, though he admits that "on paper we should never have won". The ageing Audi R10 TDI, then in its third season, wasn't a match on a dry circuit for Peugeot's 908 HDi.

"We'd been trounced at Sebring and it hurt," he recalls. "We knew the Peugeot had more power. Ulrich Baretzky [Audi Sport's engine boss] told us that we could have more power, but it would mean engine failures."

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Kristensen and his team-mates knew their chance would come if it rained, and Audi's forecast was suggesting it would. Hanging onto the French cars until the inclement weather arrived was the task of the drivers and the team.

"It was a high-intensity race, but we smacked it with the team and our engineer Howden [Haynes]," he says. "I've never known a group of people as happy as we were afterwards. That's because we all knew that we'd given our absolute best and left nothing on the table."

There were near misses along the way, most notably when Kristensen was tagged at the Dunlop Chicane in the closing stages by a gentleman driver in an LMP2 car.

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"I was telling the team that the car was OK, but everyone was on edge because we had this amazing victory within our grasp," he recalls. "Howden made me drive alongside the pitwall so he could hang over and have a look for himself. It was all very tense at the end."

"It would have been nice to have added a few F1 seasons to my career, but not at the expense of doing what I did in sportscars" Tom Kristensen

The final Le Mans win for Kristensen was pivotal in his challenge for the WEC title together with McNish and Duval. He admits that becoming a world champion was "important in a wider perspective, to have that status is significant".

"It will stay with you for the rest of your life," he says. "Of course, for most of my career there was no world championship, but we always had something that was more important - the Le Mans 24 Hours."

Those nine victories in the French endurance classic more than make up for Kristensen missing out on his boyhood dream of making it to F1.

"I have no regrets about not doing F1," says Kristensen, who tested for Williams, Toyota, Tyrrell and Minardi, as well as undertaking tyre development for Michelin as it geared up for its return to F1 in 2001.

"If you think about it, I wouldn't have been able to get my six victories in a row at Le Mans [in 2000-05]. It would have been nice to have added a few F1 seasons to my career, but not at the expense of doing what I did in sportscars. I wouldn't give up any one of my Le Mans victories just to be able to say I'd done F1."