1998 Le Mans

1998 — Le Mans’ roster of marques made Formula 1, CART, IRL and even NASCAR look a bit puny about the entry list. Nearly every outfit in the car business wanted to win Le Mans. Which has probably always been true, especially when times are good and the showrooms are full and everyone from Tokyo to Highland Park, Mich., is feeling adventuresome and more than a little racy. But this was an extraordinary year. Mercedes-Benz, Toyota, BMW, Porsche, naturally, Nissan and Chrysler were poised. Even Ford, who had pretty stout Le Mans credentials already, was there through a stylish Georgia surrogate. Then there were the usual suspects from the small, private houses of orthodox Le Mans specialists – Courage, McLaren, Lister, Debora and WR

Toyota ached for a Le Mans win, and the proof was the stunning GT One from the pen of Andre de Cortenze, who drew Peugeot’s double-winner, the 905. The GT One was a new variation on the GT1 theme made popular by Jochen Dauer and refined for Nissan by Tom Walkinshaw. Toyota decided to take no chances and created a European team based in Germany to build a bespoke Le Mans winner to the A.C.O.’s unique GT1 rules. Team Toyota Europe brought three GT One racers, plus one road-worthy example of a car that had no purpose save winning Le Mans.

Mercedes-Benz liked the GT1 rules too and arrived at pre-qualifying with two CLK LMs for Bernd Schneider to play with. Porsche brought its new and seriously revised GT1 that looked like it had escaped from a different hangar at Area 51 than the Toyota. Stuttgart had hired Le Mans sophomore Allan McNish, and he rewarded their good judgment with a last minute "SO THERE!" lap pipping Martin Brundle’s best time by not quite 1/10th. In all 11 cars were under Michele Alboreto’s 1997 pole time, including the new Team Rafanelli BMW V12 out of Williams Grand Prix Engineering.

This was shaping up like the Porsche-Ferrari wars of the early Seventies, but with bigger, faster, smarter and richer players. Especially the richer part. Team Toyota Europe arrived from Germany with 151 people including its own meteorology department. This new team was assembled in Germany specifically to win Le Mans before Japan’s biggest carmaker left to conquer F1. The whole shiny thing had style, speed, money and a blunt mandate from the marketing department written all over it.

Early Saturday morning, big favorite Mercedes-Benz was the first to ruin Toyota’s day. Schneider won the pole from a very racy Martin Brundle. Teammate Thierry Boutsen gridded the No. 29 GT One seventh, with a genuine 24-hour race motor bolted in. He was one slot behind the Williams/Rafanelli BMW spyder, easily the best of the prototypes. McNish gridded a solid fifth with a lap 8/10ths off his May third eye-popper, which put him right behind teammates Bob Wollek, Uwe Alzen and Joerg Mueller.

Le Mans winners 15 times, Porsche wanted retribution after the flames of '97, though they seemed to lack the ultimate pace of Mercedes and Toyota. Both TWR-built Joest Racing prototypes – including double-winner "117" – had been welcomed home to Stuttgart from exile at Joest and were entered by Porsche, just in case. James Weaver was nominated in the second Porsche Spyder but during the May pre-qualifying managed some testing duty in Panoz’s new hybrid V8/electric Q9 GT1 coupe. Interesting but cranky in pre-qualifying, the purple Q9 stayed home in June.

The folks with the Union Jacks came over to root for Brundle who did not disappoint his legions. Schneider led away at 2:00 o’clock, locking up a brake in his efforts to stay ahead of Brundle. All for nothing. Brundle repaid Schneider’s qualifying insult with a TV-quality pass at Tertre Rouge and scrolled out a stunning first lap. Toyota-teammate Boutsen decided that…

A) Schneider was vulnerable and,

B) Two Toyotas GT Ones would look cool running first and second and picked off Schneider quickly.

Fine TV tactics. But with their media obligations fulfilled, the GT Ones pitted quite early. They had obviously gone under the flag on light tanks for just this effect. Pierluigi Martini shoved his BMW-Rafanelli spyder into third during the first hour ahead of all the works Porsches. However, his stylish efforts would be spoiled when the No. 24 Courage-Porsche moved over at exactly the wrong moment in what should have been a simple lapping maneuver.

The first shocker came early in the second hour once everyone had time to settle in after the first pit stops. Schneider’s leading CLK simply rolled to a silent stop. The V8 engine had quit when a power steering pump seal had leaked, causing the unit to seize. The Mercedes V8 runs the power steering pump and the oil pump on the same belt drive. Within minutes, Christophe Bouchut was similarly smitten in the No. 36 works Merc. The favorites were parked in the garages while the Toyotas fled. The TV director decided that the forlorn and abandoned Mercedes coupes made a swell static shot to lead into a station break. It would be the last televised image of a Mercedes-Benz at Le Mans for nearly a year.

Toyota found trouble before 6:00 o’clock when Eric Helary spun the "Brundle" GT One at Virage Ford. The subsequent pit stop revealed a pressing need for new for wheel bearings. Eight laps lost. Easy compared to the gearbox problems in the "Japanese" Masahiko Katayama/Aguri Suzuki/Kazuyoshi Tsuchiya No. 27 GT One that took nearly a half-hour to fix. But up front Boutsen had things under control for TTE.

Down the order, both Rafanelli BMWs contracted a different strain of wheel bearing disease – the grease wouldn’t stay inside the new, untested bearings, and Gabriele Rafanelli withdrew both cars long before dusk.

The ex-Joest WSC Porsches were also early WSC class victims. Eric van de Poele’s Ferrari 333SP inherited the prototype lead when the No. 7 Porsche was stricken with electronic problems, and David Murry spun the ex-Joest No. 8 sister-ship out of contention during the first rain of the race.

The TTE crew sharpened its gearbox repair skills further, fixing the sequential six-speed box in the leading Boutsen/Ralf Kelleners/Geoff Lees GT One quick enough – just 18min – to keep the No. 29 in seventh place. Wollek’s Porsche with Mueller up eased into the lead, and John Neilsen’s Nissan R390 GT1 was promoted thus to third and best of the Japanese class.

The night and rain were especially cruel to those nearest the front. Mueller lost a half-hour and the lead while a new belly tray was fitted to his No. 25 Porsche after a romp through the crunchy part of the chicane. Then Brundle got a nasty jolt of adrenaline and an unearned DNF during a wee-hours, full-throttle run into the Ford chicane: he plowed into a flood, flat in fifth gear. It made a large soggy mess and further wounded the struggling Toyota effort. Dawn was near, and soon thousands of crazed British fans would discover Brundle’s sizable absence.

Rain also summoned the crystal moment of the race. It came near the 14-hour mark when McNish put a lap on the Wollek GT1 sister-ship Porsche. By dawn, he had a hard-earned, three-lap pad just in time to pit with an excited engine temperature gauge. A leak in the cooling system ate all three laps and a few more before McNish was fighting fit again. The Boutsen/Kelleners/Lees No. 29 GT One swept into the lead, only to be stricken with further transmission paralysis. By the end of the race, Toyota, which never had a gear fail during testing, would replace five sets.

With 90min to go – lunchtime as the race had started at 2:00 p.m. – the leading No. 28 Toyota slipped a lap behind a resurgent McNish. The Boutsen Toyota was stranded on the circuit. It was the final blow to the gigantic Team Toyota Europe effort.

The unceremonious departure of the giants bracketed Le Mans; Mercedes-Benz went in the first hours, Toyota in the last. The comparatively small, independent sports car manufacturer from Stuttgart had prevailed over two genuine monsters of the motor industry to win their 16th 24 Hours of Le Mans on their 50th anniversary. It was perfect and symmetrical and coldly instructive. Winning Le Mans takes more than a huge budget and a mob of highly skilled, intelligent people. A victory by a giant like Ford or Mercedes or Renault is rare at Le Mans. It takes dedicated and tenured specialists.

While the magnificent first-year effort of Team Toyota Europe came seductively close to a first-time-out victory, success at Le Mans usually attends those intimate with the shadowy realities and protocols of the race, beginning with the little theater at Place des Jacobins. It’s why industry "little guys" Porsche, Jaguar and Ferrari always seem to have a step on the huge multi-nationals. And why such gifted privateers as Steve O’Rourke, Bill Auberlen and Tim Sugden came within four laps of the third-place works Nissan and the podium in their team Bscher McLaren GTR.

None of the starship Toyotas was running at the finish. The best Japanese car, a Nissan, was third with the all Japanese driving crew of Hoshino, Suzuki and Kageyama. The success of nations at Le Mans '98 seemed to be the inverse to corporate size.

Defiantly proud, independent manufacturer Porsche beat industry giant Mercedes-Benz with a stunning one-two finish; Nissan is a massive industrial giant but no real match for Toyota, except on this day at Le Mans. And no one wanted to be reminded that "tiny" Mazda, a huge company but subordinate to both Toyota and Nissan, was still the only Japanese marque to win Le Mans. When Hughes de Chaunac’s Team Oreca – the stewards and facilitators of Mazda’s '91 24 Hour victory – Chrysler Vipers won the GT-2 from the Porsches, there was little choice but to ask Hughes how he liked being a Le Mans winner.