When Porsche privateers beat the factory at Le Mans

1997 - Joest doubles up against the GT1

Joest Racing had won the Le Mans 24 Hours for Porsche in 1996 after doing a deal to run its pair of stillborn WSC95 LMP prototypes. Good job the arrangement allowed it to keep the winning car. Fast forward 12 months, and it didn’t have a lot of option but to turn out at the French enduro with the chassis it now owned if it wanted to continue racing.

The result was another victory, not like the previous year ahead of a pair of factory cars, but this time in front of two McLarens. Joest saved Porsche’s bacon with its solo entry driven by Tom Kristensen, Michele Alboreto and Stefan Johansson.

There was a stark choice facing Joest ahead of 1997. It had lost its primary programme with Opel in tin-tops on the collapse of the International Touring Car series, and a proposed attack on the new FIA GT Championship with a pair of customer Porsche 911 GT1s had fallen through. So it was dust off the WSC95, chassis #001 that had started life as a Jaguar XJR-14, or sit on the sidelines.

Archive: The mothballed racer that became a double Le Mans winner

Porsche had seen the value in allowing Joest to revive the WSC95 project for 1996. Its 911 GT1, a parts-bin special conceived to meet the challenge of the McLaren F1 GTR, would be going into its first start at Le Mans, and having a couple of LMPs on the grid would be a nice complement. It went back into the wind tunnel with a project that had been axed at the start of 1995 and helped hone the car into a competitive proposition.

Now, however, it was offering no support to its long-time customer. The 911 had been race-proven over a short programme of events post-Le Mans in 1996, and now there was a new evo version of the 911 styled after its 997-shape 911 that was just going on sale. Porsche motorsport boss Herbert Ampferer was pretty outspoken about Joest’s return to Le Mans with its WSC95. And in a negative way.

“It wasn’t that they tried to hinder us,” says long-time Joest technical director and then team boss Ralf Juttner. “They couldn’t really. But you could sense limited enthusiasm on the factory’s part.”

There were those at race organiser the Automobile Club de l’Ouest who also didn’t want Joest at Le Mans. Not after it had made a basic administrative error. Joest had received an automatic entry for winning the previous year’s race – one of the first such to be awarded – and it interpreted this as meaning it didn’t have to go through the normal entry procedures. Wrong!

After winning as the factory Porsche entry in 1996, Joest won as a privateer in '97

Photo by: Motorsport Images

Autosport was well briefed on the plans Joest had for the WSC that year and had written about them. So when the entry list came out without the WSC95, there was a call from the magazine offices in London to the team’s HQ in Germany asking what had happened.

When a well-informed journalist explained to Joest technical director Juttner that all the paperwork still had to be completed as usual, it was time for another long-distance phone call, only this time from Germany to France. Juttner reveals that there were those at the ACO who weren’t prepared to overlook the mistake.

The WSC95 proved competitive despite the advances made by the GT1 contenders. Porsche would go nearly four seconds faster in qualifying with the evo version of the 911 GT1 than with the original in 1996.

“People were telling us that all the old LMPs wouldn’t have a chance,” recalls Juttner, who concedes that even though Alboreto put the car on pole, Joest knew it would have a battle on its hands to match the latest Porsche in the race. “We were expecting them to be quicker than us and they had a bigger fuel tank. We had to overcome that: our plan was to do triple stints on the tyres, which was unusual at that time.”

"We weren’t as quick as the new GT1, so we got lucky" 
Ralf Juttner

A quadruple was even more unusual, but that’s what Kristensen was asked to do in his marathon stint during the night. Joest was the better part of a lap down on the leading factory 911 GT1 Evo shared by Yannick Dalmas, Emmanuel Collard and Ralf Kelleners by this point. But crucially the WSC95 was on the lead lap.

“That’s all we could do: just try to stay on the lead lap and not give them any breathing space,” explains Juttner. “One small issue and their advantage would have been gone.”

As it turned out, the factory Porsche had a big issue after it had put the WSC95 a full lap down. A gearbox oil leak in the closing stages resulted in a fire that brought its race to a premature end. The Joest car swept through to give Porsche its 15th outright Le Mans victory.

“We weren’t as quick as the new GT1, so we got lucky,” says Juttner. “But we aimed to keep them under pressure and that’s what we did. Maybe that played its part.”

1985 - Old car wins again as works team returns

New Man-liveried 956 won fuel-saving game with factory 962s

Photo by: Motorsport Images

Joest Racing had upheld Porsche honour at Le Mans in 1984 when the Rothmans factory cars stayed away over a dispute concerning the future direction of the fuel rules for Group C. But then there were plenty of other customers to do that: Porsche 956s filled out positions one to seven at the chequered flag.

Twelve months later, with the works team back, Porsche Group C cars took the top five places. And once again Joest with 956, chassis #117, sat at the top of the order.

Fuel mileage was the key to its success with Klaus Ludwig, Paolo Barilla and Louis Krages, the German who raced under the pseudonym ‘John Winter’, that year. The allocation for Le Mans under the Group C regulations had been cut from 2600 to 2210 litres.

Fuel saving was more important than ever before, and Joest had an immediate advantage in this respect. Ludwig, Barilla and ‘Winter’ were driving a 956, whereas the factory had the new Group C version of the long-wheelbase 962 that had been racing in IMSA since the previous season.

“That was the first difference, and a big difference,” says Reinhold Joest. “The 956 had less understeer than the 962.” It allowed the drivers of long-serving #117 to adopt a more economic driving style.

Yet the winning Porsche was no ordinary 956. The Joest team built its own Porsche flat-sixes, or rather engine man Michel Demont built them himself at the German marque’s motorsport headquarters in Weissach. Joest tweaked the aerodynamics of the car, producing its own seamless one-piece undertray to replace the three-part unit that came as standard.

“They were all small points,” says Joest, “but they came together to give us a better car. We really worked on the details. That is always the secret at Le Mans.”

Piedade had little time for accusations that Joest was cheating

Photo by: Rainer W. Schlegelmilch / Motorsport Images

Joest had a gameplan, and stuck to it. The winning 956 ran as little downforce as possible and the tallest fifth gear available to maximise straightline speed down the Mulsanne Straight. What’s more, the drivers were instructed to turn down the boost and lean off the fuel mixture on this long chute – uninterrupted in those days by chicanes – and coast when they picked up the required slipstream. And then coast again after the hump down to Mulsanne Corner.

Joest ended up winning by three laps, with the best factory car down in third. It inevitably led to some finger pointing. The late Domingos Piedade, Joest’s team manager at the time, had an answer for them.

He always said he pointed a finger back, “the middle finger”, he claimed. He even drew an erect digit on the piece of paper stuck over the meter on the winning car’s fuel rig to keep prying eyes away.

1979 - Museum entry not enough to stop Kremer

Sportscar racing was in the doldrums at the back end of the 1970s. The Group 5 silhouette GT formula hadn’t taken off as expected, and there was waning interest in the Group 6 prototype category. Porsche only dusted off its 936 design because it had landed a late sponsorship deal – and rolled one car out of its museum. No wonder the Kremer Racing team went to the 24 Hours brimming with confidence with the new K3 version of its take on Porsche’s 935 Group 5 racer.

"The air-to-air intercooler on the K3 meant the engine didn’t lose power over the race distance, so we were always going to be ahead of the 935s running air-to-water" 
Achim Stroth

It reckoned it was more than a match for anyone else, the rest of the mostly Cosworth-powered prototype field and the other 11 935s of various iterations lined up against it. Its confidence was borne out by victory for Klaus Ludwig and the Whittington brothers, Don and Bill.

“We really went there believing we could win; we felt the factory with its 936 was the only real opposition,” says Achim Stroth, team manager at Kremer for a period spanning four decades. “The air-to-air intercooler on the K3 meant the engine didn’t lose power over the race distance, so we were always going to be ahead of the 935s running air-to-water.” And as for the rest of the prototype field? “We were a long way ahead of them after half the race.”

Kremer had qualified third behind the two 936s, in the hands of Bob Wollek and Jacky Ickx, but the two works Porsches were in trouble early on. A misfire, wheels rubbing on the hubs and a dramatic puncture for Brian Redman in the car shared with Ickx were among their initial woes. Both cars would retire: Wollek and Hurley Haywood with engine failure; Ickx and Redman for receiving outside assistance.

Kremer's K3 won amid dramatic circumstances in 1979 after the works 936s failed

Photo by: LAT Photographic

The Belgian, already a four-time Le Mans winner, had been stranded out on the circuit when the alternator belt snapped. The 936 did get going again, but only after Ickx was given a replacement to fit by a Porsche mechanic. Some say it had to be thrown across the track, others that it was handed over when he was given some sustenance. It was secreted inside a baguette, go the stories. Whatever, the ruse was spotted and disqualification followed.

On Sunday morning, the Kremer car headed the field by 15 laps, more than an hour’s worth of lead. That was just as well because all that time disappeared when an injector belt failed, stranding Don Whittington, the elder of the brothers, on the Mulsanne Straight.

The Kremer Porsche carried a replacement belt, but the driver damaged it trying to fit the thing. That looked to be that for the German team, but Whittington somehow effected a Heath Robinson repair using a spare alternator belt and gaffer tape to get back to the pits after a 79-minute lap.

Archive: How an ingenious fix prevented a movie legend from winning Le Mans

That should have handed victory to Dick Barbour Racing’s GTX-class 935, only for a wheel to jam on in the pits. The only way to get it off was to remove the hub! So Kremer won one of the craziest runnings of the Le Mans 24 Hours ever. It might have come to be regarded as even more crazy had the Barbour car won. Among its drivers was Hollywood legend Paul Newman.

Could there be a surprise Porsche customer success in this year's edition of the 24 Hours?

Photo by: Shameem Fahath