With much made both then and now of Jaguar’s 1988 and 1990 victories of the Le Mans 24 Hours, its utter domination of the 1987 World Sportscar Championship has been largely forgotten. Yet it was arguably a much bigger achievement than winning a single, albeit 24-hour, race.
Alfa Romeo may be an also-ran in contemporary F1, but in 1993, the 155 V6 Ti rewrote history by winning the DTM championship in its first year of entry. With BMW and Audi withdrawing at the end of 1992, Alfa seized the opportunity to maximise the new-for-1993 FIA Class 1 touring-car rules.
A 911, clearly being driven with commitment, tackles one of the 127 corners of the Freiburg to Schauinsland hill climb. But this isn’t just any one of the many 911s that contested the Schauinsland climb until competitive events stopped after 1972. The driver is the Swabian, Eberhard Mahle, and in this 1966 photograph he’s well on the way to winning the European GT Hill Climb Championship and also the 911’s first international triumph. The irony is that if Huschke von Hanstein had prevailed, Eberhard wouldn’t have had a 911 to compete in.
Porsche’s first space framed Spyder, the 550A, competed at Le Mans in coupe form to win its class, marking the only time the model raced as a hard-top. One such car has survived an interim American body to be reborn through a sparkling restoration…
The Jaguar C-Type’s arrival in 1951 might have quickly made the XK 120 obsolete as a racing car but the British Racing Drivers’ Club still chose the now four-year-old model when it was organising a Race of Champions event at the 1952 Daily Express meeting on 10 May.
The Penske PC-23 is famous for its 12 of 16 victories in the 1994 IndyCar season and equally notorious for exploiting an ambiguity that surrounded pushrod engines, which saw it utterly dominate that year’s Indy 500.
There was more than a little criticism from the press when in early 1982 Tom Walkinshaw Racing (TWR) announced it was to enter the European Touring Car Championship (ETCC) with a Jaguar XJ-S. Big, heavy and very thirsty, it was – on paper at least – an unsuitable choice for this highly competitive series, just as the XJ12 Coupe had been five years earlier. Worse still, TWR’s effort had limited backing from the factory, only getting paid when the cars finished on the podium. With BMW dominating the series, doing so would be a tall order.
If the Formula One circus wasn’t already reeling from the shock of big-haired drivers sporting pork chop sideburns and man-medallions, nothing could prepare them for the arrival of the six-wheeled Tyrrell P34 in 1976
We’re talking about the best rally cars of all time. The World Rally Championship (WRC) was never more exciting and chock-full of memorable machinery as it was during the Group B era of the 1980s; a time when the cars were considered more wild and outrageous than their F1 counterparts, coining the phrase “Formula 1 for the forest”.
Jaguar may have pulled out of The World Sportscar Championship at the end of 1991 but it had one last season in endurance racing; the 1992 International Motor Sports Association’s GT series in the US. As with the WSC, Tom Walkinshaw Racing oversaw Jaguar’s IMSA entries and used a variety of cars for the 15-race series, including the V12-engined XJR-12 for the 24-hour events, plus the V6 turbo XJR-14 and its XJR-16 replacement for the others.
Raymond Boutinaud recently restored the one and only 928 to contest the 24 Hours of Le Mans. We take a trip to his workshop and check out this legendary ‘land shark’ for ourselves
