1960 Le Mans

1960 — Stirling Moss was unimpressed with the FIA’s new sports car rules. The language mandating taller windshields really touched a nerve.

By the end of the first lap of the second round of the 1960 Sports Car Championship season, Moss was in fourth position and high dudgeon. Howling past Sebring’s pits in Lucky Casner’s Camoradi Tipo 61 Birdcage Maserati, he gestured forcefully at the tall windscreen. Moss is a giant in the record books; but like most great racers, he is not a tall man. His co-driver Dan Gurney – big both in the record books and the inseam – could see over the vast windscreen of Maserati’s newest sports racer. So Moss vented his anger on the racecourse.

His start at Sebring – they used the Le Mans start then – was uncharacteristically restrained and the white and blue Birdcage was a lowly 15th under the bridge. He wasted no time that angry first lap around the old airport and made his ire do some of the work. The Tipo 61 built up a huge lead through the morning and into the afternoon despite the Camoradi team’s sometimes comical pit work. Moss set the fastest lap and retired after eight hours when the rear axle broke.

Porsche won Sebring one-two. It was its first overall win in America’s Le Mans offspring enduro. On Sunday morning, the Sebring-winning roadsters were packed off to Brumos Porsche’s race shop in Jacksonville, Fla., where they were offered for sale: $4,500 American for a Sebring-winning RS60.

Porsches won again in Sicily, and Ferrari was screaming for revenge. He had stayed home from Sebring after a long distance argument with Alec Ulmann over Sebring’s official gasoline (Amoco) policy. So he sent four cars to the Nurburgring, where Jimmy Clark led the first lap in a used Aston Martin DBR1. Moss and Gurney led most of the rest with Gurney having the sort of day mere mortals dream of, putting the Maserati into the lead before handing off to Moss. Ferrari had another sort of gasoline problem at the ‘Ring and nearly burned down their pits during an especially clumsy pit stop. And Porsche (second overall) out-pointed Ferrari (third) again.

This left everyone four weeks to prepare for Le Mans. Ferrari sent four works 3.0-liter Testa Rossas, backed up by a fifth from Luigi Chinetti’s NART New York outfit.

Lucky Casner had lost the services of Stirling Moss a week before Le Mans. During the '60 Belgium GP at Spa – F1’s blackest weekend – Moss had crashed Rob Walker’s Lotus 18 at Burneville. Running over 150mph with his foot down hard, Moss lost a rear wheel on the fragile Lotus. It was the first big accident in a weekend that claimed two lives. Moss spent the Le Mans weekend in St. Thomas’ Hospital, London.

Briggs Cunningham was welcomed back to Le Mans like visiting royalty. He brought a trio of fuel-injected Corvettes and a prototype Jaguar, code named E2A, all running in the GT class.

Clark got the dark blue Border Reivers DBR1 Aston – looking absurd with its tall FIA-windscreen – away first, but was engulfed by the time he was under the Dunlop Bridge. Cunningham’s Corvettes and his E-Type prototype, Walt Hansgen up, went over the hill into the esses first. Masten Gregory was about 13th under the bridge.

When the mob arrived at Maison Blanche, Masten had done his best Stirling Moss imitation and had Casner’s full-aero Camoradi Birdcage (pictured above) well out front. Hansgen was an astonishing third in Cunningham’s Jaguar, ahead of all the Ferraris save Gendebien’s. But wild Willy Mairesse fixed that after only one more lap.

Gregory spent his first stint building a fat lead, but the red tide was five deep behind him. New A.C.O. rules mandating fuel capacities said no refueling before 24 laps, and Gregory pitted at 5:39 p.m. Co-driver Chuck Daigh waited on the counter. When his turn came, the long-tail Maser would not crank. It took nearly an hour to rebuild the starter. The Ferrari’s inherited the lead easily and were spared 90min with Daigh, the man who had won big-money Times Grand Prix in '58. Scarab’s original hit man was 11 laps in arrears by the time the Birdcage was repaired. The Paul Frere/Olivier Gendebien Testa Rossa simply drove by the inert Birdcage into a lead the Belgians would never lose. By then, Casner’s other Birdcage was gone with electrical problems.

Two miracles raced in fifth and sixth positions. Graham Whitehead had driven his new Ferrari 250GT to Le Mans from the factory, ran the athletic coupe through scrutineering, painted the No. 15 in the appropriate places and was running fifth; first among the GT cars. Behind him the ton-and-a-half Cunningham Corvette of John Fitch and Bob Grossman amazed and delighted the French spectators.

The rain hit at 6:00 o’clock, and that got everyone talking about the '58 race. The drivers, miserable and half blind behind their now-opaque FIA windscreens, started a seemingly endless round of pit stops, begging for cushions allowing them to bolster themselves and elevate their seating position. In the Corvette, Fitch turned on the windshield wipers and smiled involuntarily. Teammate Freddy Windridge had buried Cunningham’s No. 2 Corvette in the Tertre Rouge sand.

But by midnight the Ferraris had complete control placed first, second, fourth, fifth, eighth, ninth and eleventh positions. They had the overall and GT lead despite the heroic lunge of the Border Reivers Aston DBR1 splitting the leading Ferraris just before midnight. Roy Salvadori, winner of the ’59 24 Hours, was teamed with Aston Martin’s new find, Clark, who had been scheduled to race its DBR4 F1 car. It was a fine pairing. Clark’s temperament and ease with the car was ideal for long distance racing. By 2:00 a.m., the Aston had split the Ferraris and the first three cars were on the lead lap.

Something else was going on in the Camoradi pits. Daigh had lashed out beginning an impossible pursuit of the Ferraris, The Americans had regained 17 positions by the end of the eighth hour when the final ax, dead electronics, fell on the aero-Birdcage.

The other white cars were having a mixed day. Only the Fitch/Grossman Corvette was healthy, and had raced steadily into the top 10. Around 2:00 a.m., the Andre Pilette/Ricardo Rodriguez NART Testa Rossa got busy moving from fifth to second in the time it took to burn off a single load of fuel. The Mexican teenager was on the scent, but the adults in the leading works TR got the word from team manager Tavoni that Chinetti’s customer team was coming. The word went out to the Richie Ginther/Mairesse Ferrari as well, and they put the whip to their Testa Rossa and demoted the Chinetti car to third just before dawn.

The new morning ended the heroic race of the ungainly looking Ecurie Ecosse Jaguar D-Type of Bruce Halford and '56 winner Ron Flockhart. The carefully prepared old Jaguar wore a grotesque hump for the FIA suitcase, and it had a real glass windshield with a functioning wiper. A broken crankshaft put the Le Mans icon out after 168 laps. Cunningham’s be-finned E2A Jaguar had blown a head gasket during the dreary 10th hour. His fuel-injected Corvettes were up to ninth and 15th, running better and faster than expected.

The rain had finally gone, but the clouds lingered during the breakfast hours. Gendebien and Frere still had the race by the throa,t and the NART TR had managed to regain second overall, just a lap ahead of the Ginther/Mairesse TR.

One of the most gallant drives ended just after 11:00 a.m. The Dick Thompson/Fred Windrige Corvette had fought back after an expensive interlude in the Tertre Rouge sandbank. With most of the front bodywork in tatters the number-two Corvette’s engine expired in a theatrical cloud of steam right in front of the pits. Fred had to keep the firemen and marshals at bay as he parked the dead ‘Vette on the escape road. He finally pleaded with them to refrain from spraying the smoldering car with chemical extinguishers, "You know how fussy Briggs is!" In the final hour the Fitch/Grossman Corvette was up to eighth.

Then, with little entertainment from the steady run of the leaders, the crowd became invested in the plight of Grossman’s Cunningham Corvette. It had risen to fourth overall behind the big Ferrari prototypes and the Border Reivers Aston! Then it began to overheat alarmingly. Adding coolant wasn’t an option; the number-three Corvette hadn’t completed the minimum laps prescribed the A.C.O. between refreshments.

The hero of this opus was Cunningham’s Willy Frick. He sent his band to the Cunningham support trailer. Briggs knew how to do Le Mans and assaulted the Sarthe with a commodious, self-contained field kitchen and bunk house. The crew stole ice from the kitchen and Frick packed it around the engine. The rules also required four laps in the final hour if a car was to be classified as a finisher. Frick sent his ice-cooled Corvette back with orders for an easy. Grossman was back 15 minutes later and Frick’s men were standing by with more ice.

The American car was the center of attention. The moment should have belonged to Ferrari with an honorable mention to the Border Reivers DBR1. But all the chatter coming out of the loudspeakers was about the stricken ice-cooled Corvette. The public address monitored its progress around the circuit and kept Briggs and Frick informed on Grossman’s agonizing progress. More ice was delivered and Grossman went out for what all hoped was his final lap.

The crippled Edgar Barth/Wolfgang Seidel Porsche RS60, which had been parked near the pit entrance awaiting the hour, cranked back to life and chugged away, starting its final wheezing lap. Just before the clock struck four, Frere timed it wrong and had to drive one more lap. First under the flag was a three-car Triumph TRS formation (15th-18th-19th).

Grossman timed it better than Frere and chugged home eighth overall to the delight of practically everyone, even those who had originally seen the Corvettes as overgrown mutants. Briggs Cunningham was still America’s most effective ambassador in Europe.

Ferrari had won Le Mans again. This time was its first one-two finish on the Sarthe, winning the World Sports Car Championship in the world’s most famous race.