The Le Mans racer that turned an underdog's dream into reality

"As I came into the final chicane, the helicopter was up in front of me and I thought we must be close to the leader," remembers Martin Short of his greatest moment in a racing car - although he didn't realise it at the time. "On the Mulsanne, I could see an Audi chomping at the bit in my mirrors, so I made it easy for him. Into the second chicane I let Stephane Ortelli through, but little did I know I'd been in the lead of the Le Mans 24 Hours.

"The ORECA Audi had pitted and was on its out-lap. Either the radio didn't work or the guys didn't tell me in case I did something stupid, but I had no idea. At the end of my stint I came into the pitlane and all I could see was a whole phalanx of cameras and film crews. What's going on? You've only just bloody led Le Mans! It was just phenomenal."

Not bad for a bloke who started racing in a Martlet kit car at the age of 27.

Short, now 61, spent many (mostly) happy years working his way through the club racing ranks, including five years in TVR Tuscans and on to the British GT Championship, which his Rollcentre Racing team conquered in 2003 with Mosler - all with a distant dream to stand on the podium at Le Mans.

Technically, he actually achieved that early on in a Rover GTi on the Bugatti circuit, but that's not quite the same thing. A podium at the 24 Hours? He never quite made it, although fourth in a Pescarolo in 2007 got him close.

But it's the car you see here, in which he actually led the race in 2005, that means the most to him. That's why he still owns it: ORECA Dallara-Judd SP1 chassis 006. The LMP1 car in which an ambitious, committed amateur - albeit a damn good one - kissed the sky.

To mark LMP1's final hurrah at Le Mans as endurance racing's top class, Short pulled out the Dallara for a celebratory blast at a mid-week British Racing Drivers' Club test day back in February, before you-know-what ground our world to a halt. At lunchtime, he was let loose on the Grand Prix Circuit.

Short gunned the four-litre Judd V10 - and all hell broke loose. Forget lunch, every face in the pitlane hung over the pitwall as the Dallara wailed down the old start/finish straight. On the other side of the track students piled out onto the balcony at the National College for Motorsport to get a glimpse of what was making that wonderful din. Modern race engines don't make this sound. It's why we're already missing the golden days of LMP1, the class that could turn club racers into bona fide Le Mans heroes.

The money came first, of course.

"I got a phone call from a guy who I met at a trackday," he says of the moments that changed his life - again without knowing it at the time. "At Bedford Autodrome, I was stood in a Portacabin next to a guy wearing a bobble hat and anorak. He said, 'You're Martin Short. I tried to get you some sponsorship. I work for Deutsche Bank.'

"After the race the guys from the ACO strolled down the paddock. They reached over, grabbed my hand and gave me a Gallic nod. I was in for Le Mans" Martin Short

"I ran outside, borrowed a TVR Cerbera, sat this guy in the passenger seat and gave him three laps. 'Wow, that was amazing.' I didn't get his name, didn't think anything more of it. The next year, Chris East got back in touch, saying, 'You may not remember me, would you like some sponsorship?' We started with a little bit and ended up with quite a bit more over time."

At the end of 2003, East made a suggestion: "'Why don't we do Le Mans?' I said Porsche or Ferrari? 'No. Top class.' What? 'You worry about the cars, I'll find the money. Go find a car.'"

After a nudge from Bob Berridge, Short went to see Hugues de Chaunac at ORECA.

"I flew down to Paul Ricard to see two beautiful cars that were doing nothing, with acres of spares. So I rang Chris and he said, 'It's a deal.' So I shook hands with Hugues."

Next stop was a Le Mans entry.

"Chris and I went to see the ACO," Short smiles. "They took us to a little bar and said, 'So you've got an LMP900 [as LMP1 was then known]. What have you raced before?' Class 2 in British GT in a TVR. 'You know these cars are very dangerous...' I suggested we do Sebring to prove ourselves."

Pitted among the Audi R8s, unknown Rollcentre Racing stunned the American Le Mans Series at the 12 Hours, chassis 004 only slipping from third to fifth in the last hour with throttle cable trouble, Short sharing driving duties with British GT team-mate Rob Barff and Mosler factory driver Joao Barbosa.

"After the race the guys from the ACO strolled down the paddock," says Short. "They reached over, grabbed my hand and gave me a Gallic nod. I was in for Le Mans."

Short remembers his 2004 outing at the Circuit de la Sarthe as "an amazing experience", until a bespectacled Frenchman ruined the morning.

"At 6.30am I was in the car and we were lying fourth overall," he says. "Sebastien Bourdais was coming up behind me at a rate of knots in his Pescarolo and hit me in the left-rear wheel, just after the Dunlop Bridge, sending me off into the gravel.

"I got back to the pits, and the lads did a visual check of the car. We were still in fourth place and we couldn't find anything, so off I went. At the Porsche Curves, a bolt had partially cracked in the impact and the left-rear wheel toed out under load. The car just turned right and went straight into the concrete. It was like an aircraft crash.

"When it stopped, the first thing I did was try and start it, as you do. The marshals were waving to stop. So I got out and realised a wishbone had stuck in my right ankle. Not as bad as it sounds."

Rollcentre headed back to Le Mans the following year with 004 now fitted with a three-litre Nissan V6. The NISMO deal was a good little earner, even if the engine proved uncompetitive. But for Short and Barbosa, now joined by Vanina Ickx in 006 with the Judd, optimism remained high and they qualified a decent ninth.

"Vanina was tough and impressive," says Short. "She was fast and an interesting character as the daughter of Jacky Ickx. She had it harder than anybody to be there. The name wasn't necessarily a passport. I have a huge amount of respect for her. Joao was quiet, laid back, but so fast... He's won the Rolex Daytona 24 three times outright now. I have watch as well as speed envy!"

Short himself was out of sorts.

"I couldn't match Barbosa and had to remind myself I was driving the truck, running the team, building rollcages, running Mosler Europe and finding the money," he says. "And I'd had a son. Over the hump where cars had flipped in the past, every single time I thought, 'Am I going to see my son again?' Something had happened within me. Dealing with an aero car, I just recognised I wasn't as good as I should have been."

"The biggest mistake I ever made was we should have stopped the car then, put the other rack on and lost 20 minutes. Instead we laboured on, but rather than doing 11 laps we could only do five or six before the fluid started pissing out" Martin Short

The magic moment in the lead occurred early on Saturday night, but the dream didn't last.

"When we were building the car up in the workshop, I remember one of my guys was rebuilding the steering rack," says Short. "He said he couldn't find the seals for the end of the rack, but he had some others that he said would be just as good. 'OK, I trust what you are saying.' But during the race we started getting a power-steering leak from those bloody seals.

"The biggest mistake I ever made was we should have stopped the car then, put the other rack on and lost 20 minutes. Instead we laboured on, but rather than doing 11 laps we could only do five or six before the fluid started pissing out. So we slipped down the order. We finished 16th overall. That was Le Mans with the Dallara."

Rollcentre moved on, first with an LMP2 Radical and then on to the Pescarolo with which it would score that fourth place in 2007. But what to do with the Dallaras?

"At the end of the season someone made me an offer for both cars and all the kit, which was a shock, so I decided to hang on to them, and wait," says Short.

"We eventually sold 004 to a guy in America, then it went to auction and James Cottingham and Max Girardo bought it, and it's come back to us. We've put it back in ORECA's original PlayStation colours, which was a mission in itself. We were just doing it from photographs." As for 006, "I wanted to hang onto the car in which I led Le Mans," says Short.

Le Mans Classic this year was supposed to be his shot at that Le Mans podium - of a sort - but that will have to wait a little longer thanks to the pandemic. But at least on our day at Silverstone he is able to revel once again in a car that means so much to him.

"I hope I can hang onto it long enough to let my sons Morgan and Marcus [named after British sportscars, naturally] to experience it for themselves. To sit in that thing and hurtle down the straights is bloody phenomenal," he grins.

"And the sound that comes out of those pipes... Everybody in a five-mile radius of Silverstone was hearing what they thought was a Formula 1 car. That's all part of it. And it doesn't matter that some old bloke was driving it."