The great Le Mans garagistes that challenged factory might

De Cadenet - The old-school garagiste 

Alain de Cadenet was a throwback to a bygone age, a plucky privateer who stood out from the crowd even in the more carefree days of the 1970s when he started out on his quest to win Le Mans. The Brit with a French father once towed one of the specials he created with that aim all the way to France behind his 1928 Bentley Speed Six. The starting point was the tiny mews garage in central London that the team called home. De Cadenet took the term garagiste to a new extreme. 

Yet de Cadenet and his small team were genuine contenders in multiple seasons in the 1970s and into the 1980s. He made it onto the podium in 1976 with a Lola, but more to the point went to the 1980 event as one of the pre-race favourites after a pair of wins with his own open-top Group 6 prototype ahead of the 24 Hours. 

De Cadenet’s big chance in a year when there were no genuine manufacturer entries in the prototype ranks turned into the team’s annus horribilis. Desire Wilson, who had starred in the Cosworth-engined De Cadenet Lola LM78 in wins at Monza and Silverstone rounds of the World Championship for Makes, crashed the car during qualifying on Thursday.

Not only was the De Cad heavily damaged, but the organisers claimed that Wilson had not achieved the minimum qualifying time. She wouldn’t be allowed to start the race, leaving driving duties to de Cadenet and Francois Migault. The team pulled off a herculean rebuild task.

“It was an amazing effort and we were all shagged before the race even started,” recalls team manager Murray Smith. “I was running around the paddock getting people to help out with stuff like the welding. The roll-over bar was crunched, so we just put another tube over the top of it.”

Smith reckons the De Cad was “a top-three car at the very least” in the year when Rondeau won the race against limited opposition in the top class. 

“I think a lot of people thought we could win it after Monza and Silverstone,” he recalls. “The event turned into a real saga, but maybe we could still have won because we had our delays but had the speed to get back up to fourth or fifth.”

A broken rear crossmember on Sunday morning lost the De Cadenet nearly an hour to repairs, and the car ended up down in seventh.  

The Duckhams LM-Ford Cosworth De Cadenet raced at Le Mans in 1972 was based on a Brabham BT33

Photo by: William Murenbeeld / Motorsport Images

De Cadenet built his own car when Ferrari wouldn’t sell him one. He’d made his Le Mans debut in 1971 driving a 512M for Ecurie Francorchamps and made a bid to buy a 312PB for the following year. Instead he thought he’d do a Ferrari: he reckoned the PB was essentially a two-seater Formula 1 car with all-enveloping bodywork, and his Ecurie Evergeen squad already had a Brabham BT33. 

A young Gordon Murray did the design on the ‘conversion’ in his spare time, resulting in the first De Cadenet LM, or the Duckhams Special as it was sometimes known in deference to a sponsor who paid 500 quid for it to be painted yellow.

A Lola T380 followed in 1975, and it was with this car that De Cadenet notched up his only Le Mans podium sharing with Chris Craft the following year after the team began a series of evolutions that turned it into a proper De Cadenet for 1977. 

New low-drag bodywork for 1976 needed testing at high speed, so the car was taken for a midnight run down the M4 motorway in Wiltshire. It couldn’t happen today.

Pescarolo - The greatest missed opportunity

The Pescarolo-Judd C60 was the fastest car in 2005, but missed out on a landmark win due to gearbox problems and incidents

Photo by: Glenn Dunbar / Motorsport Images

Henri Pescarolo was already a living, walking sportscar legend with four Le Mans wins to his name, not to mention 33 participations in the great race, when he became a team owner ahead of the 2000 season. It was the start of a successful postscript to his driving career that should have given him win number five from the other side of the pitwall. His second place in 2005 with a car named after him wasn’t so much a near-miss as a wasted opportunity. 

Pescarolo Sport could have won the race with either of its LMP1 machines that year. The Judd-powered Pescarolo C60, which had been developed out of a Courage design, was the fastest car around the Circuit de la Sarthe, but a relatively minor gearbox glitch for one car and three off-track excursions for the other allowed Audi’s ageing but unburstable R8 prototype to take a fifth win in six years. 

And Pescarolo, never one to pull his punches, is still angry about it after all these years. He acknowledges, then as now, that it was a rare opportunity for a garagiste to win Le Mans, and the team let it slip through its hands. 

“That year was a fantastic opportunity; we should have won that race,” says Pescarolo, pointing out that his team was never again in the pound seats after the turbodiesels from Audi and then Peugeot arrived. “We were second again in 2006, but we weren’t really competitive; the balance between diesels and the petrol-powered cars killed privateers like me.”

The diesels had the kind of advantage that Pescarolo enjoyed in 2005. New aerodynamic and safety rules were being phased in for the 24 Hours and its sister Le Mans Endurance Series. Older cars such as the Audi R8 ran as they were conceived, but in heavily penalised form. Pescarolo chose to update his C60s to the new rules to what was then termed hybrid specification because it was a mix of the old and the new. 

Emmanuel Collard put the lead Pescarolo on pole position by eight tenths from the sister car, while the best of the three Audis was three seconds back. The drivers of the German cars reckoned that gap would come down in race conditions, but the opposite happened. It was more like five seconds per lap: Jean-Christophe Boullion, who shared the lead C60 with Collard and Erik Comas, was a minute up by the first round of pitstops. 

But it all started to unravel for Pescarolo Sport early on. Soheil Ayari clashed with a GT car at Arnage late in the second hour, losing six minutes to suspension repairs. It was the first of three mistakes by the Frenchman, who shared the second car with rally superstar Sebastien Loeb and Eric Helary, the last of which put them out of the race late on Sunday. 

Soheil Ayari had three separate incidents in the #17 Pescarolo that ultimately resulted in retirement

Photo by: Richard Dole / Motorsport Images

The Collard car lost 26 minutes in the pits with gear selection problems. Yet such was its pace advantage that he and his team-mates were able to charge back through the field. By Sunday morning, they were only three laps in arrears of the Champion Audi shared by Tom Kristensen, JJ Lehto and Marco Werner that would go on to win the race.

Shortly before two thirds of the way through the race, the gap was down to two laps. The Pescarolo did get back on the lead lap late on but, with engine temperatures rising and no chance of catching the Audi, the team backed off its pace to finish two laps down.  

Pescarolo blames Xtrac for the situation: he insists it was a known problem that delayed them. But he blames himself for the travails of the other entry. He admits that he had ulterior motives in the choice of drivers. They were all affiliated to Peugeot, which he knew was on its way back to Le Mans with what became the 908 HDi. He wanted to stake a claim to run the forthcoming turbodiesel.

“I wanted a full Peugeot line-up,” he says. “I knew Ayari was a quick driver, but I also knew he made mistakes. So it was my mistake putting him in the car.”

Gulf - Well-funded winners

The former JWA team romped to victory in 1975 as Gulf Research Racing with its DFV-powered Mirage driven by Derek Bell and Jacky Ickx

Photo by: Rainer W. Schlegelmilch / Motorsport Images

The Slough-based team formerly called JW Automotive notched up another Le Mans victory in 1975 with a new name above the door. Now known as Gulf Racing Research, the operation achieved what it had failed to do with the Porsche 917 in 1970 and 1971, and added to its 1968 and 1969 wins at the 24 Hours with Ford. This time it did so with a car of its own construction, but it was far from a low-budget affair even without major manufacturer backing.

John Horsman, who was running the show after former boss John Wyer went into semi-retirement, reckoned the team spent much more than during its two years with Porsche. After the 917 was banished from the World Championship for Makes, the team set on a new course, reviving the Mirage name it had used in the 1960s, for a new line of open-top Group 5 racers. 

“Grady Davis, vice-president of Gulf Oil, wanted it and what he wanted he got,” recalled the late Horsman in an interview with Autosport in 2017. “Gulf had actually had a cheap couple of years with Porsche, but he was ready to pay whatever it took.” 

What it took was several stabs at a design from Len Bailey and a punt on using the Ford Cosworth DFV engine. Cosworth boss Keith Duckworth insisted a powerplant dubbed the ‘Ford Vibrator’ wasn’t suitable for endurance racing, but Horsman reckoned there was “no other choice”. That’s to discount a Weslake V12 tried in testing but never raced.

The Mirages skipped Le Mans in 1972, notched up a double retirement the following year, and then scored a fourth-place finish with a revised car now known as the Gulf GR7 in 1974. But the car shared by Derek Bell and Mike Hailwood was a full 20 laps behind the winning Matra. 

Twelve months on, Matra was gone and Alfa Romeo, which was dominating the WCM with the T33/TT12, reckoned it could not meet the new fuel consumption rules at Le Mans, which wasn’t a championship round. The new low-drag GR8 driven by Bell and Jacky Ickx took the lead after the first round of fuel stops and never relinquished it.

Rondeau - Hometown hero

Jean Rondeau, who shared car #16 with Jean-Pierre Jaussaud, remains the most recent garagiste winner aboard his M379B-Ford in 1980

Photo by: Motorsport Images

Jean Rondeau remains the only driver to win Le Mans in a car bearing his own name. He’d made four attempts on his home race without distinction when he decided to build his own machine. His logic was simple. He knew his track record as a driver wasn’t going to get his bum in a machine good enough to win the race unless he built it himself.

The result was a car initially known as the Inaltera courtesy of sponsorship from a manufacturer of wallpaper. If his talents behind the wheel were modest, Rondeau was a persuasive, even charismatic, man who could charm the sponsors. He even convinced Henri Pescarolo, just a couple of years on from the completion of his Le Mans hat-trick, to drive one of the Cosworth-engined Inaltera LMs in the new team’s debut year at Le Mans in 1976.

Rondeau needed all his charisma to relaunch the team for 1978 after a split with Inaltera. But relaunch he did, and the team boss might have won Le Mans in 1979 in a machine he’d named after himself. Jacky Haran crashed their Rondeau M379 on Sunday morning when they were genuine contenders in a race in which the winning Kremer Porsche 935K spent an hour parked on the side of the Mulsanne Straight undergoing jury-rigged repairs. 

This was an era of minimal factory involvement at Le Mans. The following year, the two-car Rondeau entry made up 25% of the field in the top class for Group 6 prototypes of over two-litre engine capacity. 

In 1980, Rondeau finally fulfilled the ambition that had consumed him since his first visit to his local race as a boy. He and Jean-Pierre Jaussaud beat the Joest Porsche 908/80 shared by team owner Reinhold Joest and Jacky Ickx. The margin was two laps, but it was still a close-run thing. 

Rainy conditions at the end gave the delayed Porsche a shot courtesy of Ickx’s renowned skills in the wet and a starter motor issue for the Rondeau M379B, which forced the team to leave Jaussaud out on slicks during a shower near the finish. He survived a quick off-track excursion to claim the last Le Mans victory for a garagiste.

Rebellion - Up against the odds

Rebellion finished fourth in 2014 with its new R-One-Toyota against the mighty hybrids with Nicolas Prost, Nick Heidfeld and Mathias Beche

Photo by: Eric Gilbert

Rebellion Racing was the top privateer at Le Mans for more than a decade. The Swiss entrant has a phenomenal run of results at the French enduro first with an off-the-peg Lola LMP1 design and then its own car. The team racked up a tally of nine top-six finishes on the Circuit de la Sarthe, and that’s not to mention a trio of outright wins in the World Endurance Championship and two in the Petit Le Mans enduro at Road Atlanta.

Rebellion opted to commission its own car to replace its ageing fleet of Lolas when new rules came in for 2014. It turned to the French ORECA motorsport organisation for a car that became known as the R-One. Its debut was delayed, but after one WEC outing at Spa the best of the Toyota-engined cars claimed fourth at Le Mans in the hands of Nick Heidfeld, Nicolas Prost and Mathias Beche behind a pair of Audis and a Toyota.  Rebellion’s drivers hadn’t been very impressed with their new mount in Belgium, recalls team manager Bart Hayden.

“They were quite unnerved by the way the car was behaving at Spa,” he says. “It took a little bit of sorting out before Le Mans, so to come away with fourth was particularly sweet.”

That was Rebellion’s second fourth-place finish in the French enduro after 2012 when Heidfeld, Prost and Neel Jani beat one of the four Audi turbodiesels. With sportscar racing in a golden age as the German make slugged it out with Porsche and Toyota, it would be another four years before Rebellion featured so highly, with third and fourth in 2018. That’s not counting third overall with an LMP2 ORECA in the attritional 2017 race that was lost in the scrutineering bay. 

Rebellion had returned to the LMP1 ranks following a championship-winning foray in LMP2 after the WEC was forced to relaunch thanks to the withdrawal first of Audi and then Porsche. The promise of laptime parity for privateers going up against the remaining factory entrant, Toyota, drew it back to the top class for the so-called WEC superseason of 2018-19.

Rebellion would claim a first WEC win with the Gibson-engined R-13, a car hastily developed out of the 07 LMP2 car, at Silverstone in 2018 when the two Toyotas were disqualified. Two more followed in the 2019-20 season, at Shanghai and Austin, thanks to a system of success penalties that pegged back their Japanese rivals. 

But victory in the big one at Le Mans eluded Rebellion. Its best result came in 2020 with second place for Bruno Senna, Gustavo Menezes and Norman Nato on a day when both Toyotas spent time in their pitboxes. The Rebellion, always a finicky car, proved to be slower on the average than the previous year. The chance, however slender, to win Le Mans was lost. 

“I look back on the Rebellion years with great fondness,” says Hayden. “We achieved some great results for a privateer and I feel lucky that we did go to Le Mans with a chance, even if we didn’t get to win.”

Second in 2020 with its R-13 driven by Senna, Nato and Menezes was Rebellion's best Le Mans result

Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images