SHORT RACE AT LE MANS

Press, Volume CII, Issue 30169, 28 June 1963, Page 9

SHORT RACE AT LE MANS

By

BRICE McLaren

'THIS is not the story I'd hoped to write about Le Mans, and no doubt the records that will be filed away at Aston Martins in Feltham are not exactly what they had hoped for. Yet there is a story because this 24-hour endurance race is one pt the few classic motor races left in Europe, the Aston Martins were fast, and we had a fine team of drivers.

I was driving with Innes Ireland and between us we would have liked to write a happy story of a colourful week-end's motor-racing. But now more than anything else I remember a sudden loud clatter from the engine of our Aston Martin at 8.30 on Saturday evening, accompanied by a tingling sensation at the top of my spine which told me my rear wheels were covered in oil and I was still doing the best part of 175 m.p.h. With luck I managed to negotiate the fast kink in the Mylsanne straight and coasted to a stop on the grass before the hairpin. My thoughts then were immediately for the mechanics and the team. A year’s work by industrious and capable men gone for nought—blown through a hole in the crankcase left by a departing con

rod, I turned off the master switch and walking to the signalling pit after Mulsanne corner. A quarter of a mile behind me a large pall of smoke spelt accident: a car must have slid on the nil that I had deposited on the fastest part of the circuit. Back at the pits stories filtered through of a multiple pile-up with a Jaguar a Rene Bonnet, another Aston Martin and a Sunbeam. Driving at Le Mans can

be a wonderful sensation with a good car running well, its headlights stabbing whiteness into the corners, the cool night air being scooped into the cockpit, the signals hanging in profusion at Mulsanne. the flash of white faces at the pita—it can all be very absorbing. For nearly five days you have to live in a small world focussed on this one motor race.

My first impression of Le Mans this year was that it just had to last for 24 hours —the scrutineering alone took 2} hours. Our Aston Martin was terrific. It was a piece of cake lapping at 4min. ssec and it was relatively easy to get under 4min., which is tremendous for a GT car. As neither of us were particularly keen to do the start we decided to toss a coin, and as Innes said, he managed tn do a “Salvador?’ on me. When I told Patricia that I was starting she presumed that I had won the toss. She was more than a little puzzled when she found that I had lost.

As it turned out, the start went off fine, and Phil Hill’s prototype Aston Martin and my GT car were the first two under the Dunlop Bridge. I was swallowed up

by a few sports Ferraris after the Esses, but roaring down Mulsanne straight I passed one of them and crested the brow before the end of the straight, running comfortably with the first four. After that I took things gently and ran to our pre-arranged plan time. The first driving spell at Le Mans always seems the longest, and the two hours drag terribly. The car was handling like a dream and it surprised me how stable it was at high speed. I could go through the kink at the end of the straight at 180 m.p.h. and have a slide on occasions at that speed, but it was still completely controllable. I’d only done a few laps of my second spell at the wheel and we were still leading the GT class when that horrible death rattle occurred and the engine scattered itself around under the bonnet. Having run last year into the early hours of the morning and then had the news

broken to me that our car was out of the race, I knew how Innes must have felt back in the pits. He said he had turned down the offer of bacon and eggs in the Aston Martin caravan and was settling down with a cup of tea and a cigarette when he was told of my blow-up. So he changed his mind and was tucking into bacon and eggs while I was foot-slogging back to the its. Disappointed This disappointment on early retirement almost seems part of Le Mans. I'm quite sure if anyone had the courage to go slow enough or pull an axle ratio which was high enough, they could almost guarantee a place in the first three. It takes two to drive in this round-the-clock race I thought Innes rounded off the spirit of the race weekend well when he said at dinner on the Sunday night, “I’ve never finished at Le Mans and Bruce hasn't either, but I hope the good old fighting spirit of Aston Martin will rise again and come back with perhaps a lighter piston or a stronger gudgeon pin. or whatever the hell it was that broke, because I know darned well that this car is a winner, and I hor>e that if we come back again next year I'll be sharing the same seat . . . even if I do have to move it back a couple of clicki!”