Porsche at Le Mans: The key to its legendary dominance and greatest victory

Yes it absolutely should have won in 1969 and were the final fight not between a mismatched Jacky Ickx for Ford and Hans Herrmann in the Porsche, won it surely would have done. But it did win duly in 1970 and that was that.

Its current tally of 19 wins is unapproached by any other manufacturer. But even that doesn’t really reveal how good Porsche is at winning Le Mans. So let me put it another way. On the 20 occasions Porsche has raced as a works team at Le Mans since that first win, it has won 13 times, and that’s not including the works-backed Dauer victory in 1994, nor either of the Joest victories in in 1996 and 1997 with the WSC-95 lent to the team by Porsche for the first of those races and retained thereafter.

On three of the remaining four occasions where neither a Porsche entered nor Porsche supported team won, works Porsches came second on three occasions. This leaves the 2014 race alone as the only Le Mans in the last 53 years which a Porsche has entered with substantial factory backing of one kind or another and not come home in one of the first two places. When it comes to LeMans, Porsche really is in a different league to anybody else.

What’s the secret? I think most worryingly for those who try to rival Porsche, the truth is there isn’t one. I can’t think of one of those wins where Porsche brought some new technology to the table and blew everyone else away with it. It’s true it can get very cute with the rules: as legend recalls no one actually expected Porsche to make 25 917s in order to homologate the car in 1969; the GT1 of 1996 was not exactly within the spirit of regulations either.

The wheeze I particularly enjoyed concerned the suspension of the 911 RSR in 1973. Porsche wanted coil over springs fitted but the rules mandated that the original springing medium – in this case torsion bars – be retained. So Porsche just left the torsion bars in place, fitted the coils as well and then made so stiff the bars were rendered entirely redundant. The rules just said the old springs had to be there, they did not say they had to have a meaningful function…

But the closest Porsche sailed to the regulatory wind was with the Dauer in 1994. And getting a supposedly private team to run what was, in essence, a factory car right down to Norbert Singer running the effort, was just the start of it. The elderly Porsche 962 was still technically eligible for Le Mans in 1994, but under rules that stipulated such a small fuel tank and engine restrictor it had little chance of winning. That’s because after the disaster that was the 3.5-litre end of the Group C era, the rules were changed to make sure that only a GT car had a realistic chance of victory. And that car had to be based on a road car which the 962 emphatically was not.

Enter one Jochen Dauer who, with Porsche’s help built a 962 that conformed to the road going regulations and the rest you can guess. The ACO went potty, pointing out not unreasonably that turning a racing car into a road car just so you could turn it straight back into a racing car was not what the new rules intended at all. Porsche, with equal reason, asked where it said this was not allowed. Like it or not, what no-one could deny was that as the rules were drafted, the Dauer was legal. The error lay with those who drafted the rules.

Of course the Dauer couldn’t keep up with modern conventional prototypes in qualifying but with a fuel tank fully 50 per cent larger, nor did it need to. As for its newfound playmates in the GT category, it was 12 seconds a lap quicker than the best of them. The Dauers came first and third, with a lone Toyota prototype splitting the difference, the next fastest GT1 car, wait for it, 70 laps adrift.

So there is no secret to Porsche’s outrageous success story in France, but there is a key. It just thinks harder than anyone else, an attribute that allows it often to overcome apparent disadvantages. Take the 917 as an example.

Its tubular space frame chassis was inferior on paper to the semi-monocoque used by its arch-rival, the Ferrari 512. Because it was air-cooled, there was no space for heads with four valves per cylinder, unlike those of the water-cooled Ferrari. But it was the Porsche engine that always developed more power.

Spool forward to the Group C era and you find Porsche trying to create not only its first monocoque racing car and its first with ground effect, but lumbered with a flat formation engine, the very last thing you want when trying to route large, well-shaped and effective venturi tunnels under the car. Yet the result, the 956/962, was the most successful prototype sports racing car ever created.

When Porsche went back to Le Mans most recently with the 919 Hybrid, it had to build the entire programme from scratch, including the car, team and everything else in between. With odd looks and a strange V4 2-litre engine, some wondered if Porsche may have dropped the ball. But it led Le Mans first time out, won the next three on the trot (and the hat trick of World Endurance Championships to go with it), then bowed out at the absolute top of its game.

Which, then, was the greatest of those wins by the factory cars? For its drivers, probably the first, because there was not a less fancied 917 on the grid than that of Richard Attwood and Hans Herrmann. The slowest in qualifying – slower even than one of the Matras in the sub 3-litre category below – and with a 4.5-litre engine and four speed gearbox when the both 5-litres and five speeds were available, Attwood came to think that choosing reliability from engine, gearbox and co-driver over speed was a dreadful mistake.

Twenty-four hours of filthy weather later, with just seven of the 51 cars that started the race still running and he and Herrmann winning by five clear laps, he realised how right he’d been all along. But for Porsche the only real surprise would have been if one or other of the seven 917s in the race had not won.

The 1971 race, notable for Jack Oliver’s first 250km/h lap of the circuit in qualifying and a pole time almost six seconds quicker than the year before was, nevertheless, a Porsche benefit, the identity of the winning manufacturer never seriously in doubt.

The race ten years later appears a more likely candidate for the greatest Porsche victory as the 936/81 driven by Jacky Ickx and Derek Bell was literally a museum piece when it was wheeled out for what turned out to be a flawless race. But actually? Any win is only as good as the opposition it faced and that year, the last under the old Group 6 regs, it was thin to say the least.

The 1982 one-two-three win for the 956 was incredible, not just because it was a car unlike any Porsche had created before, but also for the fact that three months before the race, not a single 956 had turned a wheel under its own power. But again it was a victory against scant opposition.

I’m not including the Dauer win because that was achieved through a regulatory master stroke rather than any particular on track derring-do but I think the 2015 win deserves consideration.

This time the opposition was proper, with full works squads from Toyota and the hitherto almost all-conquering Audi team. It was a proper ding-dong battle between the two German brands almost from start to finish, and won by the flawless performance of Le Mans rookies Earl Bamber and Nico Hülkenberg, plus Nick Tandy in his first outing in a prototype in the race.

But actually I’m going to choose the 1987 race, the last won by a factory entered Group C Porsche. By then the 962C was in its sixth season and faced works teams from Nissan, Toyota and, of course, Jaguar with its state-of-the-art carbon chassis XJR-8LMs. The Jags had won every round of the championship on the run up to Le Mans, and would go on to win every one thereafter.

It is fair to say that if the chances of victory looked pretty slim a few weeks before the race, a few hours into it they look vanishingly so. First one of the three 962C had had a sizeable accident while being shaken down by Hans Stuck at Weissach, relegating him with his co-drivers Al Holbert and Derek Bell to the spare. Then, in practice, the third race 926, chassis 002, cannoned off the circuit on someone else’s oil and had an accident so big driver Price Cobb was as surprised as anyone to escape unharmed. Which meant that of the four Rothmans Porsches that were meant to go to Le Mans, two were out before the race had even begun.

Porsche had recommended a certain chip to use in the 962C’s engine management and teams which took the advice soon found it disagreed violently with the Le Mans-supplied fuel. It seems likely the cars that were driven hardest from the off were the first to be affected, while those drivers who pedalled more gently lasted long enough for the problem to be diagnosed and have their chips changed. A single, outdated Porsche against the quickest car of the year, and there were three of them.

But at Le Mans there is always a chance. A chance that newer, less extensively developed cars will prove vulnerable over such a vast distance on such a difficult track. A chance that, despite the odds, a driver line-up of the highest quality imaginable in a car with better odds of running fault free to the finish might just win through. And in Stuck, Bell and Holbert (a man whom Derek rates even above Jacky Ickx as the greatest team-mate he ever had), they had exactly that. Then luck stepped in.

Good luck for Porsche in so far as one of the Jaguars took itself out when it got a puncture on the Mulsanne Straight, unbelievable luck for Win Percy who was on board at the time who escaped from an accident that began on dark side of 200mph, involved his helmet scraping along the ground and which looked afterwards like a light aircraft had comedown, with barely a scratch. Factory Porsche driver Klaus Ludwig once told me of the envy he felt every time he encountered a Jaguar driver on track ensconced in his carbon fibre car. “I was jealous. I was frightened there. All the time. Every lap I ever did I was scared. You sat in these cars made out of folded aluminium and went down the Mulsanne at whatever they would do and you knew, you just knew that if anything went wrong, you didn’t stand a chance.”

But for Holbert, Bell and Stuck, nothing did go wrong, only to the Jaguars. Martin Brundle’s car succumbed to engine failure while that of Eddie Cheever, Jan Lammers and Raul Boesel struggled home in fifth, 30 laps behind the sole surviving, victorious Porsche. It was Stuck’s second win in the French Classic, Bell’s fifth and Holbert’s third. And while Stuck and Bell would stand on the podium again, what none could have known was that, so far as wins were concerned, for all of them it would be their last.