The Le Mans oddities that have added to the race's legend

Chenard-Walcker Z1 Tank

A novelty that achieved its aim

Chenard-Walcker had claimed what we today call victory in the first edition of the 24 Hours at Le Mans in 1923 with its three-litre U3 15CV Sport, and taken fourth in the scratch classification with an improved two-litre car the following year. But when it went back in 1925 with the aim of sealing the win in the Rudge-Whitworth Triennial Cup, the big prize on offer in the early days of the event, two of its four cars were 1100cc Z1 Speciales. It’s a car that can rightly be called the first GT prototype to race in the French enduro.

The Z1 racer was a development mule for the Paris-based marque’s next production car, the 1500 Y8 Tank, that went into production in 1927. The aerodynamic shape for a car designed by Henri Toutee was clearly inspired by Bugatti’s Type 32 Tank designed specifically for the 1923 French Grand Prix on the triangular Tours road circuit. It then became the basis of the admittedly more svelte shape of the production car that appeared a couple of years later.

Robert Senechal and Alberic Loqueheux took the Triennial Cup with a 13th place finish, despite an off at Arnage. Senechal had to fashion a bridge out of wattle fencing to get the car back across the ditch that he had cleared and out onto the track.

The Z1 enjoyed more success before the season was out, class victories at Spa and Boulogne included, before Chenard-Walcker quit racing. The design would be back at Le Mans, however. An example contested the race 12 years later in 1937 in modified form, and it is this car that now sits in the Le Mans museum.

Ardex-BMW S80

A ground-breaker that never raced

Photo by: Motorsport Images

Max Sardou’s angular creation might have been a contender – in 1980. Not so in 1981

The strange-looking Ardex S80 Group 6 car powered by a BMW straight six can claim to be the first ground-effect sports-prototype, though not the first to race. In fact, it never did race, failing to make the grid on its one appearance, at Le Mans in 1981, but designer Max Sardou did pave the way for the exploitation of underbody aerodynamics in sportscar racing.

Frenchman Sardou had completed his doctoral thesis in 1973 on the potential of ground effect in motor racing, a couple of years before the first experiments at Team Lotus that led on to the ground-breaking 78 and 79 Formula 1 cars. He shopped his ideas around but couldn’t find any takers. So he set about building his own machine to showcase his theories. The result was the Ardex, its name created, he says, “by randomly pulling letters out of a hat”. There was no connection with the marque of the same name that built cycle-cars and microcars either side of the Second World War.

Not exactly a looker, the Ardex incorporated a number of innovations: there was trick suspension – control of bump and roll stiffness were separated – while the set-up was undertaken on what might be the first simulation computer programme used in motor racing. But it was in the aero department where the S80 was really different. The 3.5-litre engine sat alongside the driver.

"We were maybe one or two seconds away from the elimination time. If the Porsche hadn’t been there with their very powerful car, we would have been OK" Max Sardou

“It’s easier to have the ground-effect tunnels if you don’t have a bloody big engine at the back,” says Sardou.

The car had been intended to race in 1980, as its type number suggests, but “progress was slow because I was doing it with my own money”. In the meantime, Lola boss Eric Broadley had shown interest in the car, and Sardou played a key role in the design of the T600 Group 6/GTP contender of 1981, as well as the aerodynamics of the March-built BMW 81P, or M1C GTP, of the same year. So impressed was the German manufacturer’s engine guru, Paul Rosche, that he arranged the loan of a couple of the straight-sixes.

Testing for the Ardex ahead of its projected race debut at Le Mans was limited. “Maybe we did four hours over two days,” says Sardou. “We were just a little team with no money.”

The car qualified 50th in the hands of Michel Lateste, which left it outside the 110% qualifying minimum in Group 6. The year before the same time would have put the car well up the grid, but the game had changed with the return of Porsche’s 936, reworked with the make’s stillborn Indycar engine.

“We were maybe one or two seconds away from the elimination time,” says Sardou. “If the Porsche hadn’t been there with their very powerful car, we would have been OK.”

De Cadenet Lola-Cosworth LM/ADA-Cosworth 01

An ugly example of a lost art?

Photo by: Motorsport Images

ADA’s De Cadenet was classed as a Group C2 car on its second Le Mans appearance in 1983

It was dubbed the ‘Morris Minor’ for its sit-up-and-beg looks, a car cobbled together out of parts bought for next to nothing. It wasn’t quick and was never a success, but the British ADA Engineering squad’s De Cadenet Lola LM Group C epitomises a long-lost amateur spirit of Le Mans. And more importantly, it set the team on the road to success on the Circuit de la Sarthe.

The creator of the car, Chris Crawford, is happy to call the Cosworth-engined creation that subsequently morphed into the ADA 01 as “pretty terrible, embarrassing even”. But then the London-based operation wasn’t flush with cash. The total budget to build – or rather bolt together – a car ‘designed’ on two pages of A4 paper was £8000. And five grand of that went on the Cossie DFV in the back.

The chassis was an ex-Guy Edwards Lola T390 Group 6, not one of Alain de Cadenet’s specials as its name suggests. ADA only used the rear suspension from one of the British privateer’s machines. The starting point for this bitza special was actually a Porsche 906 windscreen turned upside down.

“Getting a screen that fitted the regulations was always going to be the most difficult bit,” explains Crawford. “I bent a bit of rollcage to go around the screen, and the car got uglier and uglier after that.”

ADA’s machine hardly distinguished itself in its maiden campaign, which included a debut at the Silverstone 6 Hours, nor when it returned as a Group C2 car in 1983, though it did see the chequered flag of the 24 Hours as a non-classified finisher. The car had one last hurrah at Le Mans as the ADA 01 in 1984 after a £2000 makeover by ex-Fittipaldi Formula 1 technical director Ricardo Divila yielded a 22mph increase on the Mulsanne Straight.

ADA would be back, though. Just four years after the original car’s debut, the team took Group C2 honours with a Gebhardt in 1986. It was a very special version of the German marque’s JC843, with the complete rear end from a Williams FW06 bolted on the back! The spirit of old Moggy was alive and well.

Spice-Ferrari SE88P

Le Mans bites the unprepared

Photo by: Archives JM Teissedre

A Spice without any: not exactly a classic despite what it says on the nose

The days of teams turning up for Le Mans utterly unprepared for the challenge facing them are long done. You don’t get an entry these days unless you are contesting one of the series under race organiser the Automobile Club de l’Ouest’s umbrella. In days of yore, some of the assaults beggared belief for their lack of readiness. The Classic Racing squad’s assault on the 1991 race probably takes the biscuit on that front.

Classic was a renowned Ferrari bodyshop in New Jersey that got hold of a Spice SE88P IMSA Camel Lights car and took a 308 road car engine, turbocharged it and stuck it in the back. It contrived to get an entry at Le Mans under the banner of the Euro Racing Spice team that was contesting the full Sportscar World Championship, and linked up with Silverstone-based GP Motorsport to help run the car.

Justin Bell, who was employed as one of the drivers, remembers getting worried early on in what can’t really be described as a programme.

That lack of a second powerplant would bite Classic Racing. On what Bell remembers as his third lap in the car, a fiery engine failure brought it to a halt on the Mulsanne

“I’d been introduced to these guys, and they’d got a bit excited that I was Derek Bell’s son,” he remembers of his first Le Mans – although he doesn’t really count it as such. “I’ve kind of blocked it out of my mind. I’d been to Le Mans enough times with my dad to know what the race was all about, and they clearly didn’t.”

GP boss Dave Prewitt, who sadly died this month, remembered questioning the team about the lack of spares: “I told them they couldn’t go to Le Mans with only one engine.”

That lack of a second powerplant would bite Classic Racing. On what Bell remembers as his third lap in the car, a fiery engine failure brought it to a halt on the Mulsanne. Classic, to its credit, didn’t give up. New parts were flown in from America and the engine rebuilt in situ in the back of the car.

The Spice didn’t get out in qualifying again and missed the cut. Despite Prewitt’s representations, it wasn’t allowed to start. It was, says Bell, “the most ill-prepared team I’ve ever seen”. But the lure of Le Mans kept him on board through the week.

“The excitement of going on the Le Mans circuit was palpable,” he recalls. “I was desperate to do the race and would have ridden a donkey around there.

MiG 100 GT

Not exactly a jet superpower

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The MiG failed to soar when it pitched up in the new GT class in 1993 and went slower when Motori Moderni V12 replaced Countach power

You might think that a racing car bearing the same badges as a famed builder of jet fighter aircraft might be blindingly fast. That wasn’t the case with the MiG M100 car that showed up at Le Mans in 1993. The thing’s best qualifying lap was more than a minute off the pace in the fledgling GT class. It didn’t qualify.

The MiG, which can claim the title as the first carbon-chassis GT car to run at Le Mans, started life as the Monte-Carlo Centenaire. The plans of sometime Formula 2 and Formula 3000 racer Fulvio Ballabio to build this new supercar in Monaco failed to come to fruition. New investment from Georgia allowed for its revival: the idea was that, with the need for fighters waning after the end of the Cold War, the MiG factory could turn out super sportscars instead. There were plans for three separate models, a four-door included.

The M100 that showed up at the Le Mans Test Day in April was a barely modified street vehicle with a Lamborghini Countach V12 engine, and a cigarette lighter and ashtray to boot. By the time it reappeared in race week, it had an F1-inspired Motori Moderni V12 in the back and was something quite different altogether.

The thing actually went slower than at the Test Day – by a whole minute. The engine was still mounted on road car rubber bushes, and finding a gear as the rear end wobbled around was a near impossibility. Giampiero Consonni, the only driver to manage a flying lap, came nowhere near to making the qualifying mark.

Nissan GT-R LM NISMO

Daring to be (very) different

Photo by: Eric Gilbert

The front-engine Nissan GT-R LMP1 was a disaster in 2015

Nissan went radical when, in 2015, it made its first bid in 15 years to win the Le Mans 24 Hours. Radical in the extreme.

Its GT-R LM NISMO had its engine up front ahead of the driver and its V6 twin-turbo drove through the front wheels. And the de rigueur hybrid system of the time was fully mechanical, designed to retrieve through the front wheels and deploy via skinny tyres at the rear. No surprise then that the queue of people saying it would never work at the Circuit de la Sarthe stretched all the way back to Paris.

The doubters reckoned the Japanese manufacturer should have gone conventional and played its way in as it went up against the LMP1 big guns of Audi, Toyota and Porsche. But that is to misunderstand the mindset of Nissan at the time. The architect of the programme, Darren Cox, explains that there would have been no Le Mans programme had it not done something off the wall and allowed the fertile mind of designer Ben Bowlby to go to work.

"The big thing was that we couldn’t use the kerbs because the suspension rockers weren’t strong enough. There’s so much time to be gained at Le Mans by going over the kerbs" Harry Tincknell

“One hundred percent that programme would not have got signed off if I’d pitched a conventional car,” says Cox. “Nissan at the time was pushing the line ‘innovation that excites’.

“It was a case of, ‘We’re not going to spend hundreds of millions like Audi and Porsche but can we bloody their nose spending a fraction of that?’ Nissan wanted to do things differently.”

Cox, a marketing man, had done that with his GT Academy, a scheme to take a gamer and propel him through the ranks to Le Mans in double-quick time. Lucas Ordonez, Jann Mardenborough and Wolfgang Reip would go on to have decent racing careers. Next up for Cox was the DeltaWing project, originally conceived by Bowlby as a future generation of IndyCar, that filled the Garage 56 grid slot at Le Mans for an innovative design at Le Mans in 2012. The Zeod RC hybrid followed hot on its heels two years later.

“DeltaWing would never have happened without the Academy, and LMP1 wouldn’t have happened without DeltaWing,” says Cox. “The Nissan brand was trying to promote itself as innovative and exciting. That’s why I was able to get away with so much with all those wacky ideas. In big car companies it’s all about momentum: you have one idea, it works and then you get asked, ‘What have you got for us next?’”

Photo by: Sam Bloxham / Motorsport Images

Running to a pace barely quicker than the LMP2 cars was hardly what Nissan's bosses envisaged of its factory P1 entry

The idea that the GT-R LM was all marketing hype is rejected by Cox. It could have succeeded, even though the hybrid system developed by the British Flybrid company rarely worked. It had long since been abandoned by the time a trio of Nissan LMP1s hit the track at Le Mans for the car’s delayed World Endurance Championship debut.

The simulations of the Indianapolis-based organisation headed by Bowlby running the cars suggested that a time in the low 3m20s was realistic. That would have left the car four or five seconds off the pace in qualifying. The reality was that the best of the three Nissans ended up 20s down on the pole-winning Porsche.

Cox’s claims were based on the GT-R’s times around the short and sharp Bowling Green test facility in Kentucky. It even flew in a Zytek LMP2 car to provide a benchmark and make sure its simulations were correct. They weren’t. The best Nissan time in qualifying was a 3m36s.

“Ben and I always joke that if we ever write a book about that car we will call it The Missing 20 Seconds,” laughs Cox. He has his ideas on where the time went and so does Harry Tincknell, the quickest Nissan driver in qualifying.

“The car was traction limited, because we were putting all the power through the front wheel,” states Tincknell. “But the big thing was that we couldn’t use the kerbs because the suspension rockers weren’t strong enough. There’s so much time to be gained at Le Mans by going over the kerbs.

“There was also an issue with the geometry where the inside wheel would pick up and create this bizarre motion in the car. It turned it into a bucking bronco. To avoid it you had to turn into the corners on a really shallow angle.”

Aerodynamic porpoising didn’t help either. Nor did reliability glitches that limited track time on Nissan’s arrival at Le Mans. Real progress was made, says Tincknell, in post-Le Mans testing while the team sat out the rest of the WEC. But momentum had been lost. The project was axed before Christmas.

Photo by: Eric Gilbert

The need to steer clear of the kerbs hardly helped the car's quest for laptime and it was axed after a single race