Category Archives: Endurance Racing

Endurance Racing

World Endurance Championship – 6 Hours of Silverstone 2015

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Despite somewhat chilly April weather – the opening round of the 2015 WEC at Silverstone was an event not to be missed.

The field of cars seemed smaller than last year but it offered (and delivered) the opportunity to see some great racing.

Audi were the ultimate victors this year with their No. 7 R18 E-tron Quattro driven by Andre Lotterer, Benoit Treluyer and Marcel Fassler but Porsche came a very close 2nd with their No. 18 919 Hybrid driven by Neel Jani, Marc Lieb and Romain Dumas. Toyota completed the LPM1 podium with their No. 1 car driven by Sebastien Buemi, Anthony Davidson and Kazuki Nakajima.

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Car Designers, Classic Cars, Endurance Racing, historic cars, Historic Racing, Porsche

London Classic Car Show – Sat 10th Jan 2015

The lack of sunshine during the dark Winter months gives rise to a particular form of Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) which can result in susceptible people suffering from mild depression. This condition is treated by exposing sufferers to bright light.

I suffer from a very specific form of Seasonal Affective Disorder called ICDD or Interesting Car Deficiency Disorder!  The only viable treatment for this terrible affliction is to expose sufferers to interesting cars at any and every opportunity.

The London Classic Car Show at London’s Excel Centre provided just such an opportunity! Judging by the turnout – lots of other people had also opted to for a serious course of ICDD treatment!!!

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Classic Cars, Endurance Racing, Veteran Cars

Regent Street Motorshow – Sat 1st Nov 2014

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Following the tradition of the last few years many of the London to Brighton Veteran Cars were on display on the Saturday before Sunday’s Run in the Regent Street Motorshow.

It offers a great opportunity to get up close to these wonderful old cars and to chat to their owners/drivers but it’s no substitute for dragging yourself out of bed to get to Hyde Park before dawn to see the cars embarking on the run (See separate London to Brighton Post).

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A-Z, Can-Am, Endurance Racing, historic cars, Historic Racing

A-Z of Car Stuff: P is for Porsche 917

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A-Z of Car Stuff

This is one in a series of posts on cars, drivers, designers etc. that have interested me over the years. I’ve bored my family and friends with this stuff for years – now it’s your turn!

See A-Z of Car Stuff page for more posts in this series.

So, what’s so special about the Porsche 917?

To my mind – the things that make the Porsche 917 special are:-

1) Form and function working in harmony. A perfect combination of a lightweight but beautiful body/chassis with a brutally powerful air-cooled flat 12 engine to fling it round race circuits.

2) The 917 took outright speed to new levels at Le Mans and it took outright power to ludicrous extremes in the Can-Am series. It was designed to reach 250 mph and it achieved this on the Mulsanne Straight at Le Mans in K (K=Kurz-heck or short tail) form pretty well straight well out of the box. In Can-Am racing – engine power reached 1100bhp in race mode and a crazy 1580bhp for qualifying!

3) The 917 finally secured Porsche’s 1st outright win at Le Mans in 1970 in the capable hands of Richard Attwood and Hans Herrmann. A further outright win came the following year when a 917 driven by Gijs van Lennep and Helmut Marko crossed the line first.

I think there are many  parallels between the development of the pre-war Auto Union race cars (Types A, B & C) and the Porsche 917. Both were bold and radical Porsche designs targeting domination of the new race formulae in which they were about to run. Both had well established and highly proficient competition in the form of Mercedes for Auto Union and Ferrari for the 917.

Both cars went through a phenomenally rapid design and construction phase and both attempted to mitigate risk as much as possible by utilising as many  tried and tested concepts, technologies and components as was possible at the time.

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Car Designers, Classic Cars, Endurance Racing, historic cars, Historic Racing

A-Z of Car Stuff: B is for Bizzarrini

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A-Z of Car Stuff

This is one in a series of posts on cars, drivers, designers etc. that have interested me over the years. I’ve bored my family and friends with this stuff for years – now it’s your turn!

See A-Z of Car Stuff page for more posts in this series.

So, what’s so special about Bizzarrini?

Well it depends if you’re talking about the designer or the car!

Starting with The Designer:-

1) Giotto Bizzarrini designed/developed some truly iconic sports cars. These included the Ferrari 250 Testa Rossa, Ferrari 250 GT SWB, Ferrari 250 GTO, Ferrari 250 Drogo Breadvan, Iso Rivolta GT, Iso Grifo and the Bizzarrini 5300 GT Strada & Corsa.

2) He created one of the most fantastic and enduring V12 engines. The V12 engine created for Ferruccio Lamborghini was an up-scaled version of Bizzarrini’s design for an unused ATS engine. The Lamborghini V12 remained in production from 1964 (when it initially powered the Lamborghini 350GT) until 2010 (when in much expanded and highly developed form it powered the Lamborghini Murcielago).

3) He was a brilliant hands-on development engineer. Bizzarrini masterfully combined insightful test driving technique with his engineering skills to effectively and directly convert issues into engineering development solutions. This approach was epitomised in his rapid development of the Ferrari 250 GTO and he subsequently applied the same principles to other cars he created and developed.

Moving onto The Car:-

4) The wonderful Bizzarrini 5300 GT Strada/Corsa. This Livorno (Bizzarrini’s hometown) manufactured car was built for an all too brief period between 1965 and 1969 resulting in just 133 examples. This beautiful car was a wonderful amalgam of Italian style, inspired engineering and reliable/powerful Chevrolet grunt. Thankfully many survive and some are still enthusiastically raced at historic events.

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Can-Am, Classic Cars, Endurance Racing, historic cars, Historic Racing

Donington Historic Festival – Sun 4th May 2014

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Donington – Sun 4th May 2014

I’ve always liked Donington as a racing circuit. Like Brands Hatch – its setting in rolling countryside makes it much more visually interesting for spectators than the airfield-flat-frozen-tundra of Silverstone.

Maserati 250F
Maserati 250F

I used to visit Donington regularly many years ago to attend historic racing events and it’s really great to see this historic racing tradition being successfully revived over the last couple of years under the Wheatcroft family’s fantastic stewardship.

From the vast array of earth moving vehicles parked at the entrance and evidence of what they’ve been doing inside  the circuit – its clear that Donington is slowly but surely being remodelled after the disastrous attempt to convert it into an F1 circuit simply to pander to Ecclestone’s pathological hatred of Silverstone and the BRDC.

My 911 parked amongst Porsche Club GB cars on the inside of Redgate Corner
My 911 parked amongst Porsche Club GB cars on the inside of Redgate Corner

The Donington atmosphere is also as it was – open, friendly and catering really well for classic car enthusiasts by providing cheap ticket deals for car club members, free access to the paddock/garages, Car Club reserved parking in the infield and opportunities for owners to drive their beloved classics around the circuit on parade laps during breaks in the racing. Continue reading Donington Historic Festival – Sun 4th May 2014 →

Endurance Racing

World Endurance Championship – 6 Hours of Silverstone 2014

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Who needs F1?

Mon 21st Apr 2014

I woke up knackered after a long and bloody freezing day out the previous day at Silverstone (Sun 20th Apr) for the 1st round in the 2014 WEC.

Lashings of coffee set-up me and the brother-in-law to watch  the BBC iPlayer highlights of the Chinese Grand Prix. After not too many minutes into it however – I became excruciatingly bored watching the procession of cars with precious little overtaking action. After losing interest completely I wandered off to look at my piccies from the Silverstone WEC race.

What I ask you is the point in fighting to see whatever snippets of non-live televised F1 boredom the BBC has to offer when for a relative pittance you can get yourself off the sofa and out of the house to watch the most brilliant races within a race at the WEC at Silverstone or other venues in the WEC programme. The sight and sound of LMP1 and indeed LMP2 cars repeatedly scything their way through the non-too-slow field of LMGTE cars is truly awesome with inter and intra class battles unfolding all of the time.

The end result of the inaugural 2014 WEC race (a bit early due to bad light and increasingly heavy rain) was also interesting with Toyota taking 1st and 2nd and Porsche 3rd after both Audi R18 cars crashed out.

Stuff F1 – from now on in I’m going to focus on the new breed of endurance cars – well I would if the media took a blind bit of interest in televising and/or reporting on it!

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Endurance Racing, historic cars

A-Z of Car Stuff: B is for Bell & Bellof

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A-Z of Car Stuff

This is one in a series of posts on cars, drivers, designers etc. that have interested me over the years. I’ve bored my family and friends with this stuff for years – now it’s your turn!

See A-Z of Car Stuff page for more posts in this series.

I was reading an article in the Nov/Dec 2013 edition of Classic Porsche about a recent celebration at the Nurburgring of the late, great Stefan Bellof and it reminded me of the times I’d seen him race in Group C endurance cars in the early 80s.

I was fortunate to see him during a period where he was one vital half of a wonderful racing partnership with Derek Bell driving a Porsche 956 in the Rothmans sponsored factory team. What I didn’t realise was that Bellof was idolised by a young up and coming fellow German driver – Michael Schumacher! Shades of the Vettel & Schumacher relationship in more recent times.

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