1988 Le Mans

1988 — Jaguar got the year off to a fine start, winning the 24 Hours of Daytona on their first try. It was also their first win at the exalted daylong distance and an impressive and sobering dress rehearsal for Le Mans. Porsche had fielded no works team for the Florida IMSA season opener, but Le Mans regulars Bob Wollek, Mauro Baldi and Brian Redman had Jim Busby’s 962 on the same lap, albeit barely, from the Castrol-liveried XJR-9 of Martin Brundle, Raul Boesel and John Nielsen at the finish.

When Jaguar faced Sauber’s new and menacing AEG-Darth-Vader-liveried C9-88 at Jerez a month later, the story was different. Peter Sauber's Hinwil outfit took the pole and the race from a full strength three-car Jaguar team. Tom Walkinshaw got his revenge a week later at Jarama and carried on winning both Monza and Silverstone. The early May Silverstone date served as a diluted replacement for Le Mans’ test days, as the Mulsanne straight was being repaved.

Porsche appeared at the Sarthe in full force and new colors. Rothmans livery and the world championship were out, while Le Mans, Dunlop and Shell were in. Porsche’s full-court-press Le Mans policy showed the championship for what it was.

Hans Stuck, Derek Bell and Klaus Ludwig shared the pole car. Bob Wollek, Vern Schuppan and Sarel van der Merwe raced the No. 18 962, while the No. 19 Porsche was an Andretti family project for Mario, son Michael and nephew John.

Sauber was voluntarily absent after one of its new, larger diameter Michelins exploded on the Mulsanne straight – scary at best and horrifying on something as fast as the C9. Through some small miracle, driver Klaus Niedzweidz seized control and actually returned it to the pits. There wasn’t enough left of the tire (not to mention the condition of the undertray) to conduct a proper postmortem. A few terse phone calls to the board led to a total Sauber withdrawal. Even 33 years after the fact, the D-B board was still tender about the events of June 1955.

By Friday morning, Le Mans ’88 became a straight fight between Jaguar and Porsche. Stuttgart was backed up by eight private 962s from the potent and accomplished Joest and Kremer teams, plus a few less-polished efforts.

Porsche faced a five-car Jaguar battle group that obviously was nothing resembling the traditional English role of brave and proper underdog. But Walkinshaw is a genuine son of Scotland, where even polite sparring matches mean spilled blood and light bruising. TW brought his familiar three-car FIA championship Sports-Prototype team, plus two cars from the American IMSA branch office run by Tony Dowe and packing FIA-spec V12 engines in place of IMSA-spec units. TWR wasn’t kidding around.

At the other end of the philosophical spectrum lurked the French WM team. Two cars were entered, one new P88 for the whole 24 hours, plus the remarkable low-downforce, high-speed, low-common sense P87 entered expressly for the frothy goal of breaking the imaginary and utterly meaningless 400kph "barrier" on the recently resurfaced four-mile Mulsanne straight. They even gave this mad project a formal name: Objectiv 400.

The works Porsche triumvirate gridded one-two-three and led away at 3:00 o’clock Saturday in lovely summer weather with Jan Lammers a closing fourth in the best Jaguar. The Porsches had the new Bosch Motronic 1.7 EMS boxes that gave greater range and nearly 50 more horsepower. But the new XJR-9LMs looked faster and sounded ferocious. On the seventh lap, Lammers went past Hans Stuck on Mulsanne, and that set off the enormous British contingent. Regardless of Porsche’s Motronic fuel management advantage, Lammers, Johnny Dumfries and Le Mans rookie Andy Wallace had the No. 1 car atop the first, second and third hourly reports.

At 3:35 p.m., Walkinshaw called the John Watson/Raul Boesel/Henri Pescarolo No. 3 to the pits for its first routine stop and brought his other two Silk Cut cars in on subsequent laps to avoid the mad rush at 50min, when everyone would be in practically at once. It was a canny move. Especially compared to Porsche's first round of stops. They went the other way and had all three cars in simultaneously. Klaus Ludwig stayed out one lap too long and had to crawl back to the pits on fumes. It was a very un-Teutonic mess. One cruel soul mentioned that this was exactly the sort of entertaining chaos that traditionally attends pit stops for red cars, though the Porsches looked just fine in their red, yellow and black livery.

Jaguar was not immune from troubles. John Nielsen ended up on the beach at Indianapolis, and that cost him and teammate Martin Brundle two precious laps. Objectiv 400 was running to its bizarre plan. Dorchy pitted the Peugeot-powered No. 51; the crew taped up all the air orifices that could impede ultimate velocity, trimmed the car for warp speed and sent poor Roger out to set a new, totally unofficial Mulsanne speed record. His efforts had perfectly predictable results: the 400kph "barrier" was broken with five kph to spare. It ruined the Peugeot engine and ended the WM team’s Le Mans adventure long before dusk. The team’s new P88 had devoured its gearbox early in the second hour so, with mission accomplished, there was nothing left to do but vacate the pits and celebrate the successful prosecution of Objectiv 400. Vin encore.

By midnight the works Porsches and the Lammers/Johnny Dumfries/Andy Wallace Jaguar had relentlessly exchanged the lead 22 times. Finally, Sunday morning brought the first retirement of a factory car: the Boesel/Pescarolo/Watson XJR-9LM ate its gearbox after 129 laps. Nearing the halfway hour, the timing chain failed on the Wollek/Schuppan/van der Merwe Porsche. The same thing happened to the American Family Andretti works Porsche, but they were able to carry on at a somewhat reduced gait.

With all precincts finally reporting, the No. 2 Jaguar led from the Derek Bell/Ludwig/Stuck Porsche. Then came Brundle’s XJR-8LM and, in fourth position, the quiet specter of the Frank Jelinski/Stanley Dickens/"John Winter" Joest Blaupunkt Porsche. Nervous eyes turned to the Joest machine. Pre-race strategy and tactics had factored in the economies of expected time spent following the pace car. That had not happened. It was time to recalculate fuel consumption and pit stop sequences and, perhaps, divine the manner of Joest’s strategic plans.

By dawn the pace car had still not appeared. Tom Walkinshaw was as tired of looking at the cracked windshield in the leading Lammers/Wallace/Dumfries car as Lammers was looking out through it into the rising sun. At 7:00 a.m., Walkinshaw stepped into the pit lane and single-handedly yanked the cracked glass from the No. 2 Jaguar while his crew replaced the pane. That done Martin Brundle’s Jag suffered a blown head gasket. This restored his traditional Le Mans bad luck and took him out of the equation. The leading Porsche demanded a new fuel pump, and the race with the Lammers’ Jaguar was suddenly restored.

The rains came with four hours to go. The weather muses strummed just the right chords: Stuck was aboard the No. 17 Porsche just as the skies opened and gleefully began a stalking hunt of the leading Jaguar, yodeling and sliding happily around the soggy Sarthe.

The big scoreboard announced that the David Hobbs/Franz Konrad/Didier Theys 962 from Joest Racing had just joined its stablemate in the top five, only to have the third place Joest entry pit with a misfire.

The rain had nearly the same effect as a pace car interlude and restored the primacy of the factory teams. Jaguar had three cars running, the Porsche works two but only the Bell/Stuck/ Ludwig car was positioned properly. Family Andretti was fifth, nearly 10 laps back. The Jaguar and the Porsche were on the same lap when the Porsche was revisited by the pesky fuel pump problem; they simply couldn’t pick up the last liters of fuel. It was repaired again, and Ludwig made one brave last-ditch attack. At 2:55 p.m., he had closed the gap to one minute.

It was that close. Ludwig had to finish in pit lane. Fans waving Union Jacks clogged the front straight, and the published 2:36sec margin of victory hardly represents Ludwig’s final effort.

Jaguar had finally done it. It was a glorious and honorable race between two grand marques that could have gone either way. The British fans were finally rewarded for years of undiluted loyalty. Jaguar Chairman Sir John Egan joined Wallace, Lammers, Dumfries and Walkinshaw on the podium. Then everyone who could – and many that couldn’t – sang "God Save the Queen" with far more volume and enthusiasm than skill.