September 1984 Wheels Magazine
Posted by torana_05
i was just looking round the internet when i came across this little article. enjoy
Larry Perkins looked worn, but the fire hadn’t gone out. Not by a long shot. The famous Rolex clock said it was just after midnight on Sunday morning, June 17.
In that dimly lit concrete corridor behind the pits at Le Mans, where the gravel crunches under your feet and the smell of overflowing toilets is enough to turn the strongest stomach, Perkins was engaged in a not-so-silent lament: “If ... if. Bloody if. If we hadn’t lost that wheel, if we’d had the right rocker instead of one from Arsehole Engineering, if...”
The sentence trailed off, drowned by the sharp-edged exhaust of a Lancia, reverberating off the concrete as it darted out of Virage Ford and up the pit straight, lights ablaze, towards Dunlop Bridge.
Perkins’ race suit was now dry. Eight hours ago it was soaked, literally dripping with perspiration after his first, taxing 45-minute stint.
Balanced on his lap, the immaculate helmet, in Lotus gold and green; the new one the scrutineers made him buy at Silverstone. It replaced a scarred relic, a veteran of his Formula Three days and that unlucky stint with the F1 circus. That old helmet embarrassed everyone except LP.
But then Larry Perkins, ‘Graphmeister’ as Brock calls him, isn’t big on pree-zen-tayshun, or image, or interviews, or anything else that’s not absolutely essential to preparing a race car, then alternately wringing its bloody neck or nursing it like a child, as the circumstances dictate.
He leaves the media bullshit to Brock. In Australia, that works fine, but at Le Mans, as far as the European press was concerned, Perkins was the star. Brock was a mere touring car driver, co-steering with the wild man from BRM they nicknamed a ‘Larrikins’.
For the past five weeks, this bespectacled, gifted engineer; this uncompromising, wonderfully profane character reared in Cowangie, Victoria; this man who uses the English language sparingly, but with devastating effect; had lived nothing but “Lee Manz”. So much so, that back in Melbourne, there was a newborn daughter he hadn’t seen.
Now, nine hours into the 52nd running of the 24 Heures du Mans, his other baby, the orange Porsche 956T with the boxing kangaroo on its back, faced a giant task.
Brock was out there, running smoothly and consistently, piloting the car up to 21st position after a series of setbacks. A lost wheel had cost 28 minutes, relegating Team Australia from eighth place to 35th; then Graphmeister nearly killed himself on the infamous Mulsanne Kink when a non-genuine rear rocker arm sheared at 350km/h: “It was oscillating, the wheel coming off the ground at every turn ... and I couldn’t see. I should’ve come in, but I thought, bugger it, next lap. Then it broke, right on the bloody kink, and I thought, ‘here goes’.”
That was three hours ago. By midnight it seemed the bad luck had passed. Car 34 was running sweetly and the team had begun to realise that at Le Mans, everyone has problems. It’s the team which recovers best that takes home the dinnerware.
Even Graphmeister, so named after his penchant for plotting all manner of things with a graph, managed an enthusiastic smile amid his reverie: “This is a bloody good race,” he said, eyes flashing beneath the rimless glasses. “You can get your teeth into it; you’re very much your own boss out there, because it’s up to you to keep it on the road. That’s always the name of the game in racing, but here, it’s even more so. Ever since I was a kid I can remember ‘Lee Manz’ as being the best race in the world. You’ve got to try if you’ve got any racing blood in you...”
And of that stuff, the Perkins family is well endowed. Winning Le Mans was still the name of the game when LP strapped himself into the Porsche just before 2am, Sunday morning.
He was racing. Turning in lap times three or four seconds faster than the smooth, heady Brock; trying to haul back the deficit. On lap 146, it ended in the catch fencing at Tetra Rouge ... and the last man to offer any excuses was LP: “I came unstuck, Peter didn’t. It’s as simple as that.”
Seven months previously, it began with a simple conversation between Peter Brock and John Fitzpatrick at the Australian Grand Prix.
Fitzpatrick, the businessman racer, observed that Brock had won everything worth winning in Australia. He opined that it was about time Peter Perfect had a lash at the big time. Meaning Le Mans. Meaning John Fitzpatrick Racing could supply a Porsche 956T, mechanics and workshop space. For the right sort of fee. In other words, a lease deal.
Brock mulled it over, then enlisted the services of Greg Siddle, an expatriate motor-racing deal-broker and sometime team manager to Roberto Moreno and that other Brazilian, Nelson Piquet.
They announced the plot in February, still without a major backer and the quarter-million dollars they required. Then Siddle put the deal to Bob Jane. With time running out, and the grand plan teetering on the brink, Jane bought it. Castrol, Dunlop, Adidas and TAA kicked the tin, and Team Australia was on the way.
By June 16, the whole of Australia was ready for another America’s Cup. There were special colour spreads in the papers, hour upon hour of direct television coverage and a huge contingent of Aussie pressmen to expertly cover every move – even if most arrived late and began filing their definitive discourses within half an hour of getting to the track.
To the bloke in the street, Brocky was going to show the Frogs how it was done. By the time the Big Day rolled around, Gricey was there too, and the Jones boy, and that bloke who’d won it last year, the one with the unusual name. Schuppan. Yeah, Vern Schuppan. And Rusty French.
The fact was, Team Australia arrived at Le Mans after several weeks of pushing it uphill with a pointy stick. The fact that the HDT boys had succeeded in pushing the aforesaid up the aforementioned was no mean tribute to their level of professionalism.
The rot began at Silverstone. The first JFR car, in its new Bob-Jane livery, sheared a bolt in the lower suspension wishbone after 10 laps. It took 66 minutes to replace and set the relationship between Perkins, responsible for the mechanical preparation of the car, and Fitzpatrick, who owned it, on a somewhat less-than-best-mates footing.
To paraphrase one of the Team Aussie mechanics, someone neglected to tell Perkins that the bolt was a well-known weak point on the 956, a change-after-every-race item. The bolt was several outings old.
To Perkins, such cavalier treatment in what was one of the most important ‘tasks in his career’ was not appreciated. And to earn LP’s ire is not a wise move. But in that first 10 laps, the HDT men had shown they’re competitive runners, if slightly off-pace of the aces.
That was understandable, for the JFR car at Silverstone ran without the latest whizz-bang Motronic engine-management system, and the lads were still feeling their way. After all, to get their lone engine for Silverstone, Brock and Perkins had embarked on a mad dash across Europe to Porsche HQ in Weissach, in a Kombi van.
As Brock recalled, they were slipstreaming sparrows on the autobahn to get their precious $80,000 flat-six to the church on time. For Le Mans, they were to get a much fresher car, complete with Motronic, so vital in keeping fuel consumption within the strict limits laid down by the Automobile Club de L’Ouest, organisers of the classic. But with delivery of the new car, the problems were far from over.
When it came time to apply the bright-orange paintwork, it was found that one nose section had carried no fewer than eight different sets of livery during its colourful career.
Undaunted, Perkins set about preparing the jigger to his satisfaction. As the countdown to Le Mans went by, LP, assisted by Andy Bartley and Neil ‘Part’ Burns from the HDT and Pommie spanners David Scottley and Andrew Lindsay from JFR, put in a string of 10pm days.
It was the detail stuff that wins or loses endurance races – securing the bodywork properly, making sure the water pipes weren’t chafing – that sort of thing. But as the countdown reached Le Mans minus seven days, a bigger problem raised its ugly head. Team Aussie didn’t have an engine.
The delivery from Porsche was put back again and again. The Tuesday test session at Silverstone came and went ... and still no engine.
The German metal workers’ strike had delayed production of the special Mahle pistons, and Porsche was suffering from the spate of blown motors in the previous two WEC (World Endurance Championship) rounds. In all, 14 of these twin-turbo 2649cc flat-sixes, with their quad cams and 24 valves, had self-destructed. A combination of bad fuel, too lean a mixture and excessive boost were quoted as the reasons. And Porsche was very busy, anyway. The demands of servicing the 36 TAG engines used by the McLaren Fl equipe was placing a strain on Weissach’s resources.
So, on the Friday before the week of Le Mans, Perkins and Burns took matters into their own hands and set off once again, bound for Germany, in the much-travelled Kombi. They procured their single engine, and made a U-turn for the Mother Country.
On Saturday morning, the mechanics (“mules” in Brockspeak) shoehorned their prize into the 956. By 7pm, Team Aussie had a race car, but no racetrack to test it – so Perkins and Brock improvised.
The small village of Dartford is located about seven kilometres from the JFR workshops at Silverstone. With the evening light still strong, Brock set off in his black Opel Kadett GTE, with Perkins following in the 956 along the narrow lanes. Brock hit 198km/h. Perkins managed the same, which equates to 3500rpm in fifth gear – exactly half the Porsche’s top-speed potential.
They arrived in Dartford fairly smartly, removed the two-piece bodywork in the village square and proceeded to tinker. The locals found this somewhat interesting – doubly so, when these two wild colonials and their entourage fired up the beast and returned in the direction from whence they came, at a high velocity.
Brief though it was, that “test” led to two hours work for the spannermen. It was the only shakedown run the car was to get.
Officially, Le Grand Prix d’Endurance de Vingt-Quatre Heures du Mans begins on the Tuesday, with a French farce called ‘scrutineering’. As one of the Australians commented, in gleeful anticipation: “A frog with a rulebook in his hand, versus LP, over 15 rounds.”
But LP was controlled, smiling even, when they told him the wheelbase on the 956 was too short. He wasn’t alone, for at least three other 956s were in the same boat. So they measured it again, and again; until finally, the Frogs conceded.
As Brock said: “How can the bloody wheelbase be wrong; the car’s been built by Porsche, the same as everyone else’s.” As the boys were learning, logic doesn’t have a lot to do with scrutineering at Le Mans. Ask Mario and Mike Andretti, pulled off the grid two years ago because their gearbox oil cooler was behind, rather than above, the transmission.
As it transpired, Team Australia got pinged on another matter. The word PORSCHE on the top of the screen was too big, by the width of a gnat’s nasty. It will 'ave to be redone.
Le Mans, of course, conjures up images of the classic motor race, first run in 1923. But Le Mans had a quite respectable history before Charles Ferroux and the Automobile Club de l’Ouest arrived on the scene.
It is a cathedral city, dating back to the 12th century. Set on the sandy plains of western France, about 200km south-west of Paris, Le Mans is surrounded by pleasant, flat countryside, partly covered by forest, but mostly by picture postcard farmland. Before the workers commenced removing noble heads a couple of hundred years ago, the Sarthe region, and the nearby Loire area (both named after their major rivers) was home to the filthy rich. Their weekenders – chateaus, if you like – are still very much in evidence. In fact, most teams snub the hotels for the week of Le Mans and subscribe to Rent-A-Chateau.
Team Australia’s headquarters was the once-magnificent, Le Grande Perray, a big and drafty mansion dating back to the 14th century.
The estate is precisely 47km from the end of Mulsanne Straight, in the tiny village of La Bruere Sur Le Loir, which is about the same size as Grong Grong, but with a bit more class.
On Tuesday morning, June 12, Larry Perkins held the chateau-to-track lap record, via the towns of Mulsanne, Ecommoy and Vass. The time was 27 minutes, set in the Opel.
Tuesday found the team well set in the paddock behind the pits, nestling next to the Skoal Bandit transporter of John Fitzpatrick Racing.
It was then I began a diary...
TUESDAY, JUNE 12
It is a hot day at Le Mans. Warm enough to burn. And while that’s pleasant enough for spectators, it’s slightly worrying for the teams. Heat is one of the great enemies of the long-distance driver, particularly if he’s in the enclosed cockpit of a Porsche 956T, where temperatures can frequently exceed 65ºC.
To counter the heat, and the side effects of dehydration, Team Australia has resorted to a space-age countermeasure – the Cool Hat.
This $4000 piece of hardware pumps refrigerant through a series of hoses and into a medieval-looking black skull cap, which sits snugly under the driver’s helmet.
This morning, Brock and Perkins are undergoing a test fitting. Apart from that, and the seemingly endless list of small jobs on the car that characterise any race team at any meeting, there’s not much happening.
As Brock says: “We’re just lurking.”
Fifty metres away is the Charles Ivey Racing operation, which will run another 956 (the ex-Team Aussie car from Silverstone) for Allan Grice and his partners Alain de Cadenet and Chris Craft.
Grice wanders into the Team Australia enclosure, and greets Brock: “I’ve driven a VW Kombi once, and I’ve got a Porsche sticker, is that enough to get me around this place?”
“You’ll be rapt in these mate,” says Brock, gesturing at the 956, pushing his leg down on an imaginary throttle pedal, eyes big in mock fear.
Brock is his usual ebullient self, bouncing around the enclosure; chatting and joking with the press and requesting endless cups of tea from his ever patient partner, ‘Bevo’.
Already, Graphmeister and Brock have worked out their plan of attack. With a single engine, they can’t afford to be heroes on the Wednesday and Thursday qualifying sessions. Instead, they’ll concentrate on getting the car right to run racing lap times. The target is consistent 3min 40sec laps.
“If you do that for 24 hours, you’ll win the race,” says Perkins. His graph told him so. For Team Australia, the policy is strictly conservation.
They’ll run the 956 on an especially conservative Motronic engine management program, with slightly richer settings than most of the other teams and a bit less spark.
Instead of 1.45-bar boost on the turbo, they’ll run 1.2. Instead of 7800rpm, they’ll use 7600 maximum.
“It’s a 24-hour race,” says Brock. “You can’t afford to get sucked in and go for the headlines.”
Today is an early finish, and by seven o’clock, most of the team is sitting around the Chateau sipping cool Heinekens or Kanterbraus.
Perkins, the former farm boy from Cowangie, spends the time walking around the crumbling outbuildings, poking his head into stables, examining old Fiat tractors, and checking out the hayloft.
Brock laps the grounds on a pushbike while Greg Siddle, the grey haired 32-year-old who Brock says is really feeling the pressure of his management role, lights one cigarette after another. He doesn’t smoke.
After dinner, there is a team debriefing. Siddle holds court in tandem with his 2IC, Grant ‘Spear’ Steers, a long-time friend of Brock’s and the HDT’s race-day organiser.
In the adjacent drawing room, awaiting an audience with Greg Siddle, is the team doctor, Hugh Palmer. This Melbourne medico has taken a special interest in the physical toll long distance racing has on the driver. And he’s a worried man.
“Dehydration will be a serious problem,” he says. “They’ll lose at least two litres of fluid for every hour they’re in the car. The stomach, unfortunately, just can’t absorb replacement fluid any faster than one litre an hour. What people don’t realise is that even a small loss in body fluid has a tremendous impact on concentration. A five percent moisture loss can impair concentration by as much as 20 percent.”
Palmer wants them both to drink a special, tasteless formulation during the race, the same stuff the marathoners imbibe. But Brock won’t hear of it, he wants Gatorade. And LP says water will be fine. Dr Hugh appears to be fighting an uphill battle.
At 1:00am, Brock still isn’t tucked into bed. He’s got a business to run back home and spends a long time on the phone, taking care of it. Siddle is exhausted, barely keeping his eyes open as he waits in the semi-darkness, to use the blower.
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 13
And so to the real business that brought this team halfway around the world. Today is the first qualifying day at Le Mans, and the pressure is on – not physical pressure, but the mental anguish which accompanies the very thought of a DNQ.
Brock doesn’t say anything, but there must be some memories of that abortive 1981 effort in the 924 GTR, when, despite a big budget and professional planning, the Alan Hamilton-inspired project failed to get off the ground. With a quarter-mill of someone else’s dollars and the place swarming with press, there can be no excuses this time.
As the hours tick away to the first session, we find Vern Schuppan in his usual, helpful and talkative mood, awaiting the briefing.
This self-effacing Australien, rapide du volant, as the morning papers call him, is arguably our most under-rated export. Like Ralph Doubell (remember? He won Olympic gold in the 800 metres in Mexico), the name Vern Schuppan means very little to the average Norm.
Yet this charming man from Mt Barker, just outside Adelaide, merits the same sort of media coverage our burly, former world champion Alan Jones attracts. After all, his record speaks for itself; a winner at Le Mans in 1983, second in ’77 and ’82, third in ’75. At Indy in ’81 he blitzed ’em, driving a non-ground effects car into third place. And, of course, he’s driven F5000, Formula One and Can Am, all with distinction.
Maybe it’s because the man is such an unassuming type, but any other driver with his record would surely be a household name. Vern remains very much the quiet achiever, and, one suspects, he prefers it that way.
Autocar expressed it best: “Schuppan’s talent is immensely under-valued but he remains far too honest for such an abrasive sport.”
Honest is probably the best adjective to describe the man.
On the subject of his formidable co-driver, Alan Jones’s fitness: “I don’t think Alan’s been doing much, but he wasn’t fit at Silverstone last year and he still drove bloody quickly.”
On that most-feared Le Mans phenomenon, the Rent-A-Driver: “There’s a lot here that have bought their rides and you must be prepared, at some stage during the race, to be carved up by one of them. You’ve still got to go hard, but have that little bit in reserve, just in case one of the guys you’re overtaking moves out and carves you up on a corner.”
Prophetic stuff indeed.
On the subject of qualifying, he smiles and shrugs: “Qualifying isn’t that important here; it’s just prestige. I started ninth last year and after two laps I was second. If you’re there at the end of 24 hours, it doesn’t really matter where you started, does it?”
How will he run his race in the Kremer Brothers car?
“We’ll start 10/10ths and go flat out to draw some sort of lead. After a couple of hours, we’ll back off, use fewer revs and less boost, but still circulate quickly. If we’re still there on Sunday, we’ll be so far in front, we’ll be able to ease off and get our fuel consumption back to a respectable level. By going hard, you give yourself a buffer should you strike a problem.”
Schuppan is driving in a three-man team with Jones and Jean-Pierre Jarier. Are three drivers necessary?
“It makes it easier. Ickx and Bell were both having big problems last year. Towards the end, neither of them could do a two-hour stint. They had to change after an hour. With three drivers you’re much sharper at the end of the race and that can mean a lot, if it’s tight.”
With that, the compulsory drivers’ briefing is called to order in a large but asphyxiating hall. It drags on for more than an hour and the pilotes get progressively more restless.
When, at last, it’s over, Brock quips good naturedly that he’ll “have trouble keeping Graphmeister out of the car”.
He is correct. For, at a few minutes to six, it is the aforementioned Perkins who wheels out of Pit 34 to give his baby its first run in anger.
The pits are hopelessly overcrowded and dangerous. A photographer was killed here a couple of years ago, and it’s easy to see why. It seems anyone can get access. And the noise is unbelievable. The engines, the non-stop French diatribe from the PA, the whistles and sirens of the marshals, the rattle and whine of the air guns.
Perkins and Brock do a half-dozen laps each and the bugs begin to show. The rear bodywork isn’t secured properly, the wheels are badly out of balance, the brake pedal isn’t good, and there’s a disconcerting high speed float. Worse still, the engine isn’t spinning out cleanly.
But both the drivers have now qualified, albeit well down the list in 17th place with a time of 3min 41sec. The Lancias are quickest (with qualifying engines and rubber) with 3min 17sec.
Messrs Perkins and Brock are not the only Aussies with problems. Allan Grice is quickly made aware that the standard of car preparation from the Ivey team isn’t what he’s used to: “I’ve got a high-frequency vibration somewhere,” he tells Brock.
“Better start chasing it, mate,” replies Brock. “It shouldn’t bloody be there. Something’s likely to fall off.”
Grice lights up a smoke, shaking his head slowly, no doubt contemplating “something falling off” on Mulsanne Straight. It’s the last time anyone sees him smile – save for a grimace on Friday – until it’s all over.
At the end of that two-hour practice, the Porsche engineers are asked about the engine’s reluctance to rev. LP and Brock agree that the spring rates are too soft and at least one of the Billies has gone “a frag off”. Despite the teething troubles, it hasn’t been a bad session. Three sets of tyres are scrubbed in, a set of discs and two sets of pads. The price for missing that test day at Silverstone is being paid.
Yet the ignominy of a DNQ is almost behind them. All that remains are the compulsory four night laps each and they’re assured a spot on the grid come Saturday. The second session is more bedding-in work and, as Brock puts it so scientifically, “getting the car feeling nice”.
Team Australia is no faster, and at 11pm, after it is finished, there are some concerned faces.
Brock, at his technical best, explains the problem: “The puffer isn’t puffing. So we’ve gone to Porsche and got the sequence for testing to see if the engine’s a bit knackered – and it isn’t, the comps are within cooee of each other. We’ll throw in some new wastegates and turbo bits and that should cure it.
“We’re also going to put the right springs back in and some new dampers from Bilstein. It’s been a bit of a handful today, you could hang the tail really easily, and with no boost, it got a bit handsome out there.
“We know we can haul seconds off our time. Using second, instead of fourth, through the back section will help. Having some boost will be good, too, because I was losing bulk time. And the headlights were real possum-hunting models.”
Any problems driving at night?
“It’s a bit like driving a Group 3 down the Hume at night – the car is faster than the headlights.”
With the mechanics “muling”, we leave the track for the run home to the chateau. At the end of Mulsanne, with a full moon hanging dead ahead in a clear sky, Brock flashes past in the Opel, followed soon after by Perkins in a fully loaded Renault 5. The lap record is in jeopardy.
It’s during that ride home that two of the crewmen in my car venture the opinion that if the deal was to be done again with Mr Fitzpatrick, then there would be a lot more fine print in the contract relating to exactly what bits would be provided.
At 2:00am, I collapse into bed in the mule’s quarters – a converted servants’ sleepery. St Vinnie De Paul probably wouldn’t cop the fold-out divan. The gas hot-water heater isn’t working and the shower is overflowing. But after a long day at Le Mans, it feels like The Ritz.
THURSDAY, JUNE 14
Daybreak brings with it a chorus of birds. This is rural living, French-style. In that 300-year-old kitchen, with its vaulted ceilings, Ray Dahl, the Aussie cook, has got eggs sizzling in the pan and coffee brewing. All is well.
Brock is relaxed and talks freely about the 13.6km circuit that is Le Circuit de la Sarthe. A cup of steaming hot tea in his hand, a cigarette in the other: “It’s sheer pace and wide open spaces,” he says, and it’s very difficult to attune yourself to it. I’ve driven it before, in the BMW and a couple of laps in the 924. Then you’d be sitting there waiting for a corner to arrive. In a 956, it seems to flow. Where other cars are on the brakes, you’re on the power.” And their grid position? Somewhere in the Top 10 would be nice, something around a 3min 30sec. But it’s not all that important. We’re trying to do race times, not practice times.”
Perkins wanders in, and while demolishing breakfast, sets the record straight. Some of the visiting pressmen have noted that it’s him, not Brock, who’s been doing the bulk of the driving and posting the times.
“Brock’s been doing the same times as me, but we really haven’t had a run. If it was any other race, we might screw up the boost and go for it, but with one engine, it’s a pointless exercise. It might cost us $80,000 for a rebuild to move up a few places on the grid. And for what?”
Thursday grinds by in the paddock at Le Mans. The place is now chock-a-block and you can feel the build up of tension, the sense of occasion.
Bill Tuckey says that Le Mans is just like the Bathurst 1000, only it’s not as well organised. In one sense, he is absolutely correct, for what surprises me, a novice at Le Mans, is the level of preparation.
There are maybe a dozen really professional outfits. The Joest Newman team, the Kremer Brothers, Fitzpatrick Racing, the works Lancias and Jaguars, the Mazdaspeed and Goodrich teams, and to a lesser extent, the Aston-Martin Nimrod equipe. Team Australia, despite the handicaps, fits in there somewhere too. For the rest, it’s amateur hour, the sort of stuff you see in the back of the paddock at Bathurst. Blokes you know have got Buckley’s of finishing.
The Thursday night sessions produce few surprises. Graphmeister goes out for some more bedding-in laps, returning to the pit hot but happy. Bloody hot,” he says, “Sweating like a pig I am, but the car’s good”.
He has done a few 3.37s on race rubber before handing over to Brock, who repeats the performance, almost to the last hundredth of a second.
“That’s nice,” he says. “Now we’re pulling 7500 down the chute and it’s honking. Still got a bit too much understeer, but we can dial that out with the front bar.”
LP straps some Dunlop qualifiers on, and sets off to post a couple of times. He’s still going to use low boost, but he’s looking for a clear lap.
He gets one – a 3.35.34 – fifth-fastest for the session and 10th fastest, overall, to date. Then word comes to the pit that Larry has been involved in an accident. A Big One. While the shock is still being felt, Graphmeister calmly wheels the orange car into the pits. It looks remarkably intact, save for a few tyre marks down the left flank.
What happened? He looks at me, as if mentally scratching his head, trying to work out what I’m talking about.
“What happened?” he says slowly. “Bugger all happened.”
But Brock knows of which I speak.
“He launched an ethnic.”
“Oh yeah,” says the laid-back LP. “That...” as if recalling some trifling incident that occurred in 1968.
“I was on a lap, one of the few where I was having a bit of a go, and I came across another Porsche in one of the fast parts of the track. He was going relatively slowly, wandering along in the middle of the road. I’m flashing my lights and thinking, ‘where are you gonna go – left, right or stay where you are?’ He looked like staying where he was, so I committed myself to the corner. Just as I passed him he decided he needed more room, so he pulled his nose into the back of my car. And that spun him off: it was a pity, because his car was badly damaged.”
Then with a look that reinforces the words, like steel reinforcing in a concrete pour: “Ours isn’t.”
Brock, despite the levity, isn’t happy. That was far too close.
So now they’ve qualified, LP has posted a respectable time and the car felt “nice”. Good sense dictates there is nothing to be gained from the 9-11pm final practice session. Nothing that is, apart from Peter Brock laying down a time to equal Larry’s, to silence the so-called experts who are muttering that the transition from driving taxis at Bathurst to a 956 at Le Mans has found a chink in Peter Perfect’s armour.
The easy solution would have been to bolt on the second set of Dunlop qualifiers and do a time. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that Brock could have done it.
To his eternal credit, Brock tells the crew to put the car away.
“We’re not going to achieve anything,” he says matter-of-factly, “every lap we do tonight might be one we don’t do on Sunday afternoon”.
There spoke the voice of a mature racer, a professional pilote who wasn’t about to let ego get in the way.
It must have been tempting, nonetheless. All week, the European press had wanted Perkins. Brock was very much the bit player, as they saw it.
“Peter Broke” (as the local paper Ouest France, called him) was “the numero 1 des courses de Production en Australie.” The italics are mine, but the emphasis is theirs. You see, production drivers aren’t really as well-regarded as ex-European Formula 3 champions who’d driven Fl with both Brabham and BRM.
The preliminaries are over as midnight arrives. Friday is a rest day, then, at 3:00pm on Saturday, it’s a dog-day afternoon at Le Mans.
But Thursday isn’t quite over. Yet.
We’re driving home, that big moon bathing the fields in a soft glow. There are headlights up ahead. Gary and Scott Campbell, a father and son combination here as re-fuellers to Car 34, opine it must be Larry.
We’re in a de-toxed Alfa 33. Perkins is in the R5, loaded to the gunwhales. We suck on to the back and LP tries that little bit harder. What we lose on the twisty bits, we can easily make back on the straights. It is moderately rapid, yet safe as a bank.
With a few kays to go, LP overshoots a left-hander in the town of Vass. We reverse, he turns around. We hold him off to the finish and it’s a good natured jibing in the car park: “Why didn’t you take me earlier,” says LP. “You obviously had more grunt.” I didn’t tell him, but I’d thought about it, and considered the prospect of having Perkins in a Renault 5 up my arse, ready willing and able to pull much more desperate acts than I ... as not being conducive to good health.
But here’s the punchline: 40 minutes later Brock arrived, and got straight to the point.
“Did you get pulled up at the roadblock by the coppers?” Um, what road block? “They were pulling over anyone with foreign plates.” Then, when realisation dawned, he got a knowing smile on his face and said simply: “LP, you bastard.”
FRIDAY, JUNE 15
It’s a rest day at Le Mans, so there’s nothing much of a race-nature to report. But a conversation with Brock, over breakfast, cannot go unrecorded. We’re talking about the concentration required to keep it on the island, lap after lap, at those speeds, with the precision that a Porsche 956 demands. Brock is matter-of-fact about it. He says when he’s really driving well, even in the Commodore, he has a sort of out-of-body experience.
“You get to the point where your mind is in total control of your body. It becomes detached. You can almost look down at yourself operating, as if you’re casually observing your body doing the work. Your mind seems to have a power and a perspective totally removed from the physical. I feel it often, particularly at Bathurst. When it happens, I know I’m on the ball.” It’s a subject I want to explore further, but the signals suggest that now is not the time.
Friday ends with a big dinner in the grand dining room, hosted by sponsor Bob Jane and attended by the ‘Melbourne Mafia’ – businessmen, car dealers, advertising men, even a man from the Collingwood Football Club – who form a tight-knit circle of money and influence. There’s a Merc SEC in the car park, and a black Porsche 930 that has seen the inside of the Kremer Brothers workshop in Cologne.
And then there are the T-Mart men in their white sweatshirts. They’ve sold enough tyres to win an award trip to Le Mans with their wives.
Through the good-luck toasts and hearty humour, Brock and LP seem to genuinely enjoy themselves. I can’t help but think where they will be, what will have happened, in 24 hours...
SATURDAY, JUNE 16
Another hot day, and Dr Hugh has a frown on his face. I ask Brock about the wisdom of ignoring his counsel.
“He means well,” says Peter, “but we’ve done this sort of thing before; we can handle it, no worries.”
With Perkins working on (you guessed it) a graph – this one about fuel consumption – the mood is anticipatory, but relaxed. LP is grinning for the first time all week.
He wants Garry Campbell to plot each fuel fill against a moving trend line. He wants to know at every hour whether they’re above or below the statutory limit of 2500 litres for the 24 hours. The graph is tabulated for 376 laps – seven more than Schuppan’s race-winning distance last year.
Then they carry out a question-and-answer drill, like two schoolkids learning their times table by rote: “Equal flashes, two a second, independent of revs,” says Perkins.
“Air temperature sensor problem,” answers Brock.
“Four longish flashes. Goes out for 7-10 seconds then returns?”
“Water temperature sensor problem.”
“Light on permanently, glowing brighter with more revs?”
“Check timing sensor for dirt. If the engine doesn’t rev past five grand, check mixture switch.”
And on it goes. Brock checks to see if a set of spanners, a torch and the three spare black boxes that control the Motronic engine management system are in the car. Then, perhaps to relieve the mounting tension, the conversation swings to LP’s newborn child. When was she born?
“Um, I dunno ... the 2nd of June,” says dad.
“No it wasn’t,” says Brock.
“Must’ve been Sunday the 3rd,” confirms Perkins, only to be corrected by Peter. “The previous Sunday, LP, the Oran Park round.”
It appears LP’s wife is “lurking with the new unit” back home and there’s a competition on to name her.
“So far we’ve got Gertrude, Murgatroyd and Hazel,” says Brock, “but LP doesn’t fancy any of those.”
At 12:54pm, incredibly early for a 3pm race-start, the cars are called to the grid. The anthems are played, the drivers presented, the parachutists do their stuff and the Hawaiian Tropic girls strut their tans. At 2:54pm, the pace car takes the field on the traditional warm-up lap prior to the rolling start.
Thus it begins. LP stays well clear of the start-line fracas, but within three laps has improved his 15th grid position by four places.
In the pit, there is nothing to do but wait, something that happens a lot at Le Mans. But the wait is shorter than expected. On lap 12 – three before it’s expected – the fuel warning light comes on in car 34 and LP is in, handing over to Brock.
Graphmeister emerges from the car in a right state, sweating profusely and issuing a torrent of expletives. The driver’s door isn’t sealing properly; it’s understeering, the Cool Hat isn’t operating and the bottle of Gatorade is so hot “it’ll make Brock sick.”
Dr Hugh dispenses two cups of his brew which Perkins scoffs without complaint. The doc shakes his head. Bevo takes away the sodden suit.
Then there’s news from the adjacent pit. The Charles Ivey car has lost another of its BBS wheels – the second this week. The wheelmen consult as Grice silently suits up. How must he feel?
Yet after that first hour, Team Australia is running in a solid 11th place while Vern Schuppan cuts his way through the field to take the lead.
Brock is punting the car around in consistent 41s – bang on the plotted pace. At 4:35, Perkins suits up again, the Cool Hat tubes hanging from his helmet like something out of NASA.
The second stop is a slow one – 35 seconds above the statutory two minutes for 100 litres of fuel and four tyres. But Brock is in a much healthier state than his co-driver after those first, frantic laps.
He complains of “wankers doing 40 miles an hour” and the Cool Hat still won’t work properly. Siddle says: “Larry was stuffed when he came in ... sick.”
Brock reacts with surprise, but confirms that “the stuff in the bottle is so hot you could make a cup of tea with it”.
In that grey, prison-like concrete corridor behind the pits, Brock strips to the waist and drinks several cups of Mr Lipton’s best. The understeer is getting worse, but apart from that the car is running like a bought one.
On lap 29, word comes through that LP has spun. There is a pregnant, awful pause until he comes by. Grant Steers checks his stopwatch and immediately turns to Brock and says: “He’s lost 9.6 seconds on the road. How many spins is that?”
Brock, stone-faced, replies: “One.”
After two and a half hours – more than a Grand Prix – the leading four cars are split by a mere 12 seconds. And Team Australia is moving steadily upward in the computer rankings.
When Perkins hands over to Brock for the second time, he’s sweating just as heavily, but says he feels fine and the balance of the car is great. “No worries, I could’ve done another stint.”
At six o’clock, the computer says Team Australia is lying fifth ... but then amends that to eighth. No matter, it’s still excellent news. The team’s spirits are up.
Then the pendulum swings. On lap 53, just one before a scheduled stop, Brock is on the fast section of the course near Virage Porsche. His front wheel parts company with the car. “I thought, gee, this is feeling dodgy under brakes,” he says later. “Very heavy and lots of vibration. I went through a left-hander then into a long right and it didn’t feel too handy at all. Next thing there’s a thump and I’m on three wheels. I just kept my boot into it, accelerated past the wheel and came very gently back into the pits.”
He was doing fully 180km/h when the wheel came adrift, but makes light of it: “We’ll be talking to the Porsche people,” he says with a shrug. The resulting pit stop costs 28 minutes, as the spanners struggle to replace the damaged hub and send Perkins out.
As it turns out later, Team Aussie learns the wheel-throwing is a regular 956 trick when shod with BBS rims. Most other teams use Momos for that reason. Including JFR. Perkins is seething, because he chose to run BBS in deference to his sponsor, Australian importer, Bob Jane. Nobody told him about the difference in expansion rate between the alloy centre and the steel insert. But what’s done is done, and now the fight back from 35th place must begin.
After five hours, they’re back up to 23rd spot, and the gloom is lifting.
A hundred metres down pit lane, Vern Schuppan’s Wednesday prophecies have unfortunately been fulfilled. At 8:30pm, he pits, the left front corner of his Kenwood 956 showing the scars of a coming together. He sits impassively in the car, sucking fluid through a plastic hose. Alan Jones surveys the damage to the leading car, says someone’s had a spin in front of Vern, then opines, with some relish, that he’d “better put the eyes on”.
In AJ-speak that refers to a state of mind when he’s at his aggressive, fighting best. It has been a long time since Jones has driven something as quick and challenging as a big Porsche at Le Mans. One look at his face, suffused with energy and light, is enough to confirm that the competitive fire still burns as strongly as it ever did. It will be a different story tomorrow afternoon, however.
At 9:00pm, according to my crumpled, stained notebook, Larry Perkins limps into the pits. The rear rocker arm has sheared like a piece of low-grade pipe.
It happened on Mulsanne Kink, and as Perkins says, it was as close to a spin at 350km/h as he’s ever been. As the mechanics swarm over the rear of the car, the two Aston Martin Nimrods enter the Mulsanne Kink, separated by just 300 metres.
There is no firm indication as to why, but the leading car of Sheldon goes out of control at 300km/h. The Nimrod spears off the left-hand side of the track, spinning back across the road to charge the barrier on the other side.
The second impact sparks off a fireball so intense, it sets the forest alight. The second car, driven by Olson, swerves to avoid a piece of wreckage and it too, slams the barrier.
Sheldon pulls himself from the blazing wreck, suffering burns to the chest, throat and hands. Olson survives unscathed, but track marshal Jack Loiseau dies, a victim of the flying debris. His colleague, Andre-Guy Lefebre, is seriously injured.
Back in pit lane, nobody knows quite what happened. The four pace cars are out and so they stay, with the race cars circulating slowly under the yellow, for 62 minutes.
The accident brings into sharp focus what this business is all about. The laid-back Perkins and his smoothdriving partner are laying their lives on the line. As Perkins says: “That could easily have been me, when that bloody rocker broke.” He’s cold about it, though, matter-of-fact, almost brutal. “It’s part of the game, mate, you know the risks when you get in the thing.”
I don’t know how, but Perkins has established that the failed rocker, another noted weak point on the 956, is not a genuine ex-factory, specially reinforced item. He knows from whence it has come.
Meanwhile, the hapless Grice is at his cutting best: “The gearbox is pretty bad, the wheels are so far out of balance that I can’t see, the brake bias is wrong and the seat’s broken, so I’m sliding all over the car. Apart from that, it seems pretty well prepared.”
At midnight, the Bob Jane car has settled back into a rhythm, regaining 21st place. Perkins has his little chat with me in the gloom of the corridor and I decide to try and catch an hour or two of sleep in the front seat of the Alfa. It is a mistake.
While I sleep, Perkins ventures out, just after 2am. On lap 146, it all came to a shuddering halt in the catch fencing at Tetra Rouge.
Perkins later explained what happened: “I came across three slower cars. She went to pass the other one and I went for a third lane and misjudged the situation, didn’t allow myself enough room and ran out of road. I wasn’t tired, not in the slightest, which is why I don’t even have a good excuse.
“I misjudged it in terms that I was trying to keep on a good pace, around 37s, when I should have read it earlier that I was facing a hazardous situation and backed off. We might still be driving around. But these things happen. We were behind schedule and I was driving full bore, well in top gear. I suppose I went off at something like 240 kays ... but the catch fencing is pretty efficient.”
The remaining 11 hours of Le Mans 1984 pass in a fatigued, unshowered, unshaven daze.
With a little less than an hour to go, the last Australian hope, the second-placed Porsche of Schuppan, Jones and Jarier, expires with a bent rod. It sits silent and unattended in the now-deserted pit row until Vern restarts it with one lap to go. He struggles around, headlights ablaze, and is credited with sixth place.
Jones is quoted as saying: “That’s it. At least I can tell my children I’ve done Le Mans, but I don’t think I’ll be back.”
Le Mans 1984 is over. The Team Australia members, from Brock to Ray Dahl, the cook, are packing up.
Bob Jane, the man who has footed the bills, sits in the sun and says yes, he’s very happy with the effort and the publicity return on his investment. Of more significance, he says he’ll be back; “probably with two cars” and it will be “an all-Australian effort”.
He’s happy too, he says, with the support from John Fitzpatrick Racing, but thinks to win this race, you must start with a brand-new car.
“Survival is the name of the game here. We’ve learned that – and a lot more. After all, we didn’t win the America’s Cup on our first try.”
PS: Larry Perkins’ daughter, after four weeks without a name, is now Nichola Louise Perkins.
__________________________________________________________________________
Larry Perkins looked worn, but the fire hadn’t gone out. Not by a long shot. The famous Rolex clock said it was just after midnight on Sunday morning, June 17.
In that dimly lit concrete corridor behind the pits at Le Mans, where the gravel crunches under your feet and the smell of overflowing toilets is enough to turn the strongest stomach, Perkins was engaged in a not-so-silent lament: “If ... if. Bloody if. If we hadn’t lost that wheel, if we’d had the right rocker instead of one from Arsehole Engineering, if...”
The sentence trailed off, drowned by the sharp-edged exhaust of a Lancia, reverberating off the concrete as it darted out of Virage Ford and up the pit straight, lights ablaze, towards Dunlop Bridge.
Perkins’ race suit was now dry. Eight hours ago it was soaked, literally dripping with perspiration after his first, taxing 45-minute stint.
Balanced on his lap, the immaculate helmet, in Lotus gold and green; the new one the scrutineers made him buy at Silverstone. It replaced a scarred relic, a veteran of his Formula Three days and that unlucky stint with the F1 circus. That old helmet embarrassed everyone except LP.
But then Larry Perkins, ‘Graphmeister’ as Brock calls him, isn’t big on pree-zen-tayshun, or image, or interviews, or anything else that’s not absolutely essential to preparing a race car, then alternately wringing its bloody neck or nursing it like a child, as the circumstances dictate.
He leaves the media bullshit to Brock. In Australia, that works fine, but at Le Mans, as far as the European press was concerned, Perkins was the star. Brock was a mere touring car driver, co-steering with the wild man from BRM they nicknamed a ‘Larrikins’.
For the past five weeks, this bespectacled, gifted engineer; this uncompromising, wonderfully profane character reared in Cowangie, Victoria; this man who uses the English language sparingly, but with devastating effect; had lived nothing but “Lee Manz”. So much so, that back in Melbourne, there was a newborn daughter he hadn’t seen.
Now, nine hours into the 52nd running of the 24 Heures du Mans, his other baby, the orange Porsche 956T with the boxing kangaroo on its back, faced a giant task.
Brock was out there, running smoothly and consistently, piloting the car up to 21st position after a series of setbacks. A lost wheel had cost 28 minutes, relegating Team Australia from eighth place to 35th; then Graphmeister nearly killed himself on the infamous Mulsanne Kink when a non-genuine rear rocker arm sheared at 350km/h: “It was oscillating, the wheel coming off the ground at every turn ... and I couldn’t see. I should’ve come in, but I thought, bugger it, next lap. Then it broke, right on the bloody kink, and I thought, ‘here goes’.”
That was three hours ago. By midnight it seemed the bad luck had passed. Car 34 was running sweetly and the team had begun to realise that at Le Mans, everyone has problems. It’s the team which recovers best that takes home the dinnerware.
Even Graphmeister, so named after his penchant for plotting all manner of things with a graph, managed an enthusiastic smile amid his reverie: “This is a bloody good race,” he said, eyes flashing beneath the rimless glasses. “You can get your teeth into it; you’re very much your own boss out there, because it’s up to you to keep it on the road. That’s always the name of the game in racing, but here, it’s even more so. Ever since I was a kid I can remember ‘Lee Manz’ as being the best race in the world. You’ve got to try if you’ve got any racing blood in you...”
And of that stuff, the Perkins family is well endowed. Winning Le Mans was still the name of the game when LP strapped himself into the Porsche just before 2am, Sunday morning.
He was racing. Turning in lap times three or four seconds faster than the smooth, heady Brock; trying to haul back the deficit. On lap 146, it ended in the catch fencing at Tetra Rouge ... and the last man to offer any excuses was LP: “I came unstuck, Peter didn’t. It’s as simple as that.”
Seven months previously, it began with a simple conversation between Peter Brock and John Fitzpatrick at the Australian Grand Prix.
Fitzpatrick, the businessman racer, observed that Brock had won everything worth winning in Australia. He opined that it was about time Peter Perfect had a lash at the big time. Meaning Le Mans. Meaning John Fitzpatrick Racing could supply a Porsche 956T, mechanics and workshop space. For the right sort of fee. In other words, a lease deal.
Brock mulled it over, then enlisted the services of Greg Siddle, an expatriate motor-racing deal-broker and sometime team manager to Roberto Moreno and that other Brazilian, Nelson Piquet.
They announced the plot in February, still without a major backer and the quarter-million dollars they required. Then Siddle put the deal to Bob Jane. With time running out, and the grand plan teetering on the brink, Jane bought it. Castrol, Dunlop, Adidas and TAA kicked the tin, and Team Australia was on the way.
By June 16, the whole of Australia was ready for another America’s Cup. There were special colour spreads in the papers, hour upon hour of direct television coverage and a huge contingent of Aussie pressmen to expertly cover every move – even if most arrived late and began filing their definitive discourses within half an hour of getting to the track.
To the bloke in the street, Brocky was going to show the Frogs how it was done. By the time the Big Day rolled around, Gricey was there too, and the Jones boy, and that bloke who’d won it last year, the one with the unusual name. Schuppan. Yeah, Vern Schuppan. And Rusty French.
The fact was, Team Australia arrived at Le Mans after several weeks of pushing it uphill with a pointy stick. The fact that the HDT boys had succeeded in pushing the aforesaid up the aforementioned was no mean tribute to their level of professionalism.
The rot began at Silverstone. The first JFR car, in its new Bob-Jane livery, sheared a bolt in the lower suspension wishbone after 10 laps. It took 66 minutes to replace and set the relationship between Perkins, responsible for the mechanical preparation of the car, and Fitzpatrick, who owned it, on a somewhat less-than-best-mates footing.
To paraphrase one of the Team Aussie mechanics, someone neglected to tell Perkins that the bolt was a well-known weak point on the 956, a change-after-every-race item. The bolt was several outings old.
To Perkins, such cavalier treatment in what was one of the most important ‘tasks in his career’ was not appreciated. And to earn LP’s ire is not a wise move. But in that first 10 laps, the HDT men had shown they’re competitive runners, if slightly off-pace of the aces.
That was understandable, for the JFR car at Silverstone ran without the latest whizz-bang Motronic engine-management system, and the lads were still feeling their way. After all, to get their lone engine for Silverstone, Brock and Perkins had embarked on a mad dash across Europe to Porsche HQ in Weissach, in a Kombi van.
As Brock recalled, they were slipstreaming sparrows on the autobahn to get their precious $80,000 flat-six to the church on time. For Le Mans, they were to get a much fresher car, complete with Motronic, so vital in keeping fuel consumption within the strict limits laid down by the Automobile Club de L’Ouest, organisers of the classic. But with delivery of the new car, the problems were far from over.
When it came time to apply the bright-orange paintwork, it was found that one nose section had carried no fewer than eight different sets of livery during its colourful career.
Undaunted, Perkins set about preparing the jigger to his satisfaction. As the countdown to Le Mans went by, LP, assisted by Andy Bartley and Neil ‘Part’ Burns from the HDT and Pommie spanners David Scottley and Andrew Lindsay from JFR, put in a string of 10pm days.
It was the detail stuff that wins or loses endurance races – securing the bodywork properly, making sure the water pipes weren’t chafing – that sort of thing. But as the countdown reached Le Mans minus seven days, a bigger problem raised its ugly head. Team Aussie didn’t have an engine.
The delivery from Porsche was put back again and again. The Tuesday test session at Silverstone came and went ... and still no engine.
The German metal workers’ strike had delayed production of the special Mahle pistons, and Porsche was suffering from the spate of blown motors in the previous two WEC (World Endurance Championship) rounds. In all, 14 of these twin-turbo 2649cc flat-sixes, with their quad cams and 24 valves, had self-destructed. A combination of bad fuel, too lean a mixture and excessive boost were quoted as the reasons. And Porsche was very busy, anyway. The demands of servicing the 36 TAG engines used by the McLaren Fl equipe was placing a strain on Weissach’s resources.
So, on the Friday before the week of Le Mans, Perkins and Burns took matters into their own hands and set off once again, bound for Germany, in the much-travelled Kombi. They procured their single engine, and made a U-turn for the Mother Country.
On Saturday morning, the mechanics (“mules” in Brockspeak) shoehorned their prize into the 956. By 7pm, Team Aussie had a race car, but no racetrack to test it – so Perkins and Brock improvised.
The small village of Dartford is located about seven kilometres from the JFR workshops at Silverstone. With the evening light still strong, Brock set off in his black Opel Kadett GTE, with Perkins following in the 956 along the narrow lanes. Brock hit 198km/h. Perkins managed the same, which equates to 3500rpm in fifth gear – exactly half the Porsche’s top-speed potential.
They arrived in Dartford fairly smartly, removed the two-piece bodywork in the village square and proceeded to tinker. The locals found this somewhat interesting – doubly so, when these two wild colonials and their entourage fired up the beast and returned in the direction from whence they came, at a high velocity.
Brief though it was, that “test” led to two hours work for the spannermen. It was the only shakedown run the car was to get.
Officially, Le Grand Prix d’Endurance de Vingt-Quatre Heures du Mans begins on the Tuesday, with a French farce called ‘scrutineering’. As one of the Australians commented, in gleeful anticipation: “A frog with a rulebook in his hand, versus LP, over 15 rounds.”
But LP was controlled, smiling even, when they told him the wheelbase on the 956 was too short. He wasn’t alone, for at least three other 956s were in the same boat. So they measured it again, and again; until finally, the Frogs conceded.
As Brock said: “How can the bloody wheelbase be wrong; the car’s been built by Porsche, the same as everyone else’s.” As the boys were learning, logic doesn’t have a lot to do with scrutineering at Le Mans. Ask Mario and Mike Andretti, pulled off the grid two years ago because their gearbox oil cooler was behind, rather than above, the transmission.
As it transpired, Team Australia got pinged on another matter. The word PORSCHE on the top of the screen was too big, by the width of a gnat’s nasty. It will 'ave to be redone.
Le Mans, of course, conjures up images of the classic motor race, first run in 1923. But Le Mans had a quite respectable history before Charles Ferroux and the Automobile Club de l’Ouest arrived on the scene.
It is a cathedral city, dating back to the 12th century. Set on the sandy plains of western France, about 200km south-west of Paris, Le Mans is surrounded by pleasant, flat countryside, partly covered by forest, but mostly by picture postcard farmland. Before the workers commenced removing noble heads a couple of hundred years ago, the Sarthe region, and the nearby Loire area (both named after their major rivers) was home to the filthy rich. Their weekenders – chateaus, if you like – are still very much in evidence. In fact, most teams snub the hotels for the week of Le Mans and subscribe to Rent-A-Chateau.
Team Australia’s headquarters was the once-magnificent, Le Grande Perray, a big and drafty mansion dating back to the 14th century.
The estate is precisely 47km from the end of Mulsanne Straight, in the tiny village of La Bruere Sur Le Loir, which is about the same size as Grong Grong, but with a bit more class.
On Tuesday morning, June 12, Larry Perkins held the chateau-to-track lap record, via the towns of Mulsanne, Ecommoy and Vass. The time was 27 minutes, set in the Opel.
Tuesday found the team well set in the paddock behind the pits, nestling next to the Skoal Bandit transporter of John Fitzpatrick Racing.
It was then I began a diary...
TUESDAY, JUNE 12
It is a hot day at Le Mans. Warm enough to burn. And while that’s pleasant enough for spectators, it’s slightly worrying for the teams. Heat is one of the great enemies of the long-distance driver, particularly if he’s in the enclosed cockpit of a Porsche 956T, where temperatures can frequently exceed 65ºC.
To counter the heat, and the side effects of dehydration, Team Australia has resorted to a space-age countermeasure – the Cool Hat.
This $4000 piece of hardware pumps refrigerant through a series of hoses and into a medieval-looking black skull cap, which sits snugly under the driver’s helmet.
This morning, Brock and Perkins are undergoing a test fitting. Apart from that, and the seemingly endless list of small jobs on the car that characterise any race team at any meeting, there’s not much happening.
As Brock says: “We’re just lurking.”
Fifty metres away is the Charles Ivey Racing operation, which will run another 956 (the ex-Team Aussie car from Silverstone) for Allan Grice and his partners Alain de Cadenet and Chris Craft.
Grice wanders into the Team Australia enclosure, and greets Brock: “I’ve driven a VW Kombi once, and I’ve got a Porsche sticker, is that enough to get me around this place?”
“You’ll be rapt in these mate,” says Brock, gesturing at the 956, pushing his leg down on an imaginary throttle pedal, eyes big in mock fear.
Brock is his usual ebullient self, bouncing around the enclosure; chatting and joking with the press and requesting endless cups of tea from his ever patient partner, ‘Bevo’.
Already, Graphmeister and Brock have worked out their plan of attack. With a single engine, they can’t afford to be heroes on the Wednesday and Thursday qualifying sessions. Instead, they’ll concentrate on getting the car right to run racing lap times. The target is consistent 3min 40sec laps.
“If you do that for 24 hours, you’ll win the race,” says Perkins. His graph told him so. For Team Australia, the policy is strictly conservation.
They’ll run the 956 on an especially conservative Motronic engine management program, with slightly richer settings than most of the other teams and a bit less spark.
Instead of 1.45-bar boost on the turbo, they’ll run 1.2. Instead of 7800rpm, they’ll use 7600 maximum.
“It’s a 24-hour race,” says Brock. “You can’t afford to get sucked in and go for the headlines.”
Today is an early finish, and by seven o’clock, most of the team is sitting around the Chateau sipping cool Heinekens or Kanterbraus.
Perkins, the former farm boy from Cowangie, spends the time walking around the crumbling outbuildings, poking his head into stables, examining old Fiat tractors, and checking out the hayloft.
Brock laps the grounds on a pushbike while Greg Siddle, the grey haired 32-year-old who Brock says is really feeling the pressure of his management role, lights one cigarette after another. He doesn’t smoke.
After dinner, there is a team debriefing. Siddle holds court in tandem with his 2IC, Grant ‘Spear’ Steers, a long-time friend of Brock’s and the HDT’s race-day organiser.
In the adjacent drawing room, awaiting an audience with Greg Siddle, is the team doctor, Hugh Palmer. This Melbourne medico has taken a special interest in the physical toll long distance racing has on the driver. And he’s a worried man.
“Dehydration will be a serious problem,” he says. “They’ll lose at least two litres of fluid for every hour they’re in the car. The stomach, unfortunately, just can’t absorb replacement fluid any faster than one litre an hour. What people don’t realise is that even a small loss in body fluid has a tremendous impact on concentration. A five percent moisture loss can impair concentration by as much as 20 percent.”
Palmer wants them both to drink a special, tasteless formulation during the race, the same stuff the marathoners imbibe. But Brock won’t hear of it, he wants Gatorade. And LP says water will be fine. Dr Hugh appears to be fighting an uphill battle.
At 1:00am, Brock still isn’t tucked into bed. He’s got a business to run back home and spends a long time on the phone, taking care of it. Siddle is exhausted, barely keeping his eyes open as he waits in the semi-darkness, to use the blower.
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 13
And so to the real business that brought this team halfway around the world. Today is the first qualifying day at Le Mans, and the pressure is on – not physical pressure, but the mental anguish which accompanies the very thought of a DNQ.
Brock doesn’t say anything, but there must be some memories of that abortive 1981 effort in the 924 GTR, when, despite a big budget and professional planning, the Alan Hamilton-inspired project failed to get off the ground. With a quarter-mill of someone else’s dollars and the place swarming with press, there can be no excuses this time.
As the hours tick away to the first session, we find Vern Schuppan in his usual, helpful and talkative mood, awaiting the briefing.
This self-effacing Australien, rapide du volant, as the morning papers call him, is arguably our most under-rated export. Like Ralph Doubell (remember? He won Olympic gold in the 800 metres in Mexico), the name Vern Schuppan means very little to the average Norm.
Yet this charming man from Mt Barker, just outside Adelaide, merits the same sort of media coverage our burly, former world champion Alan Jones attracts. After all, his record speaks for itself; a winner at Le Mans in 1983, second in ’77 and ’82, third in ’75. At Indy in ’81 he blitzed ’em, driving a non-ground effects car into third place. And, of course, he’s driven F5000, Formula One and Can Am, all with distinction.
Maybe it’s because the man is such an unassuming type, but any other driver with his record would surely be a household name. Vern remains very much the quiet achiever, and, one suspects, he prefers it that way.
Autocar expressed it best: “Schuppan’s talent is immensely under-valued but he remains far too honest for such an abrasive sport.”
Honest is probably the best adjective to describe the man.
On the subject of his formidable co-driver, Alan Jones’s fitness: “I don’t think Alan’s been doing much, but he wasn’t fit at Silverstone last year and he still drove bloody quickly.”
On that most-feared Le Mans phenomenon, the Rent-A-Driver: “There’s a lot here that have bought their rides and you must be prepared, at some stage during the race, to be carved up by one of them. You’ve still got to go hard, but have that little bit in reserve, just in case one of the guys you’re overtaking moves out and carves you up on a corner.”
Prophetic stuff indeed.
On the subject of qualifying, he smiles and shrugs: “Qualifying isn’t that important here; it’s just prestige. I started ninth last year and after two laps I was second. If you’re there at the end of 24 hours, it doesn’t really matter where you started, does it?”
How will he run his race in the Kremer Brothers car?
“We’ll start 10/10ths and go flat out to draw some sort of lead. After a couple of hours, we’ll back off, use fewer revs and less boost, but still circulate quickly. If we’re still there on Sunday, we’ll be so far in front, we’ll be able to ease off and get our fuel consumption back to a respectable level. By going hard, you give yourself a buffer should you strike a problem.”
Schuppan is driving in a three-man team with Jones and Jean-Pierre Jarier. Are three drivers necessary?
“It makes it easier. Ickx and Bell were both having big problems last year. Towards the end, neither of them could do a two-hour stint. They had to change after an hour. With three drivers you’re much sharper at the end of the race and that can mean a lot, if it’s tight.”
With that, the compulsory drivers’ briefing is called to order in a large but asphyxiating hall. It drags on for more than an hour and the pilotes get progressively more restless.
When, at last, it’s over, Brock quips good naturedly that he’ll “have trouble keeping Graphmeister out of the car”.
He is correct. For, at a few minutes to six, it is the aforementioned Perkins who wheels out of Pit 34 to give his baby its first run in anger.
The pits are hopelessly overcrowded and dangerous. A photographer was killed here a couple of years ago, and it’s easy to see why. It seems anyone can get access. And the noise is unbelievable. The engines, the non-stop French diatribe from the PA, the whistles and sirens of the marshals, the rattle and whine of the air guns.
Perkins and Brock do a half-dozen laps each and the bugs begin to show. The rear bodywork isn’t secured properly, the wheels are badly out of balance, the brake pedal isn’t good, and there’s a disconcerting high speed float. Worse still, the engine isn’t spinning out cleanly.
But both the drivers have now qualified, albeit well down the list in 17th place with a time of 3min 41sec. The Lancias are quickest (with qualifying engines and rubber) with 3min 17sec.
Messrs Perkins and Brock are not the only Aussies with problems. Allan Grice is quickly made aware that the standard of car preparation from the Ivey team isn’t what he’s used to: “I’ve got a high-frequency vibration somewhere,” he tells Brock.
“Better start chasing it, mate,” replies Brock. “It shouldn’t bloody be there. Something’s likely to fall off.”
Grice lights up a smoke, shaking his head slowly, no doubt contemplating “something falling off” on Mulsanne Straight. It’s the last time anyone sees him smile – save for a grimace on Friday – until it’s all over.
At the end of that two-hour practice, the Porsche engineers are asked about the engine’s reluctance to rev. LP and Brock agree that the spring rates are too soft and at least one of the Billies has gone “a frag off”. Despite the teething troubles, it hasn’t been a bad session. Three sets of tyres are scrubbed in, a set of discs and two sets of pads. The price for missing that test day at Silverstone is being paid.
Yet the ignominy of a DNQ is almost behind them. All that remains are the compulsory four night laps each and they’re assured a spot on the grid come Saturday. The second session is more bedding-in work and, as Brock puts it so scientifically, “getting the car feeling nice”.
Team Australia is no faster, and at 11pm, after it is finished, there are some concerned faces.
Brock, at his technical best, explains the problem: “The puffer isn’t puffing. So we’ve gone to Porsche and got the sequence for testing to see if the engine’s a bit knackered – and it isn’t, the comps are within cooee of each other. We’ll throw in some new wastegates and turbo bits and that should cure it.
“We’re also going to put the right springs back in and some new dampers from Bilstein. It’s been a bit of a handful today, you could hang the tail really easily, and with no boost, it got a bit handsome out there.
“We know we can haul seconds off our time. Using second, instead of fourth, through the back section will help. Having some boost will be good, too, because I was losing bulk time. And the headlights were real possum-hunting models.”
Any problems driving at night?
“It’s a bit like driving a Group 3 down the Hume at night – the car is faster than the headlights.”
With the mechanics “muling”, we leave the track for the run home to the chateau. At the end of Mulsanne, with a full moon hanging dead ahead in a clear sky, Brock flashes past in the Opel, followed soon after by Perkins in a fully loaded Renault 5. The lap record is in jeopardy.
It’s during that ride home that two of the crewmen in my car venture the opinion that if the deal was to be done again with Mr Fitzpatrick, then there would be a lot more fine print in the contract relating to exactly what bits would be provided.
At 2:00am, I collapse into bed in the mule’s quarters – a converted servants’ sleepery. St Vinnie De Paul probably wouldn’t cop the fold-out divan. The gas hot-water heater isn’t working and the shower is overflowing. But after a long day at Le Mans, it feels like The Ritz.
THURSDAY, JUNE 14
Daybreak brings with it a chorus of birds. This is rural living, French-style. In that 300-year-old kitchen, with its vaulted ceilings, Ray Dahl, the Aussie cook, has got eggs sizzling in the pan and coffee brewing. All is well.
Brock is relaxed and talks freely about the 13.6km circuit that is Le Circuit de la Sarthe. A cup of steaming hot tea in his hand, a cigarette in the other: “It’s sheer pace and wide open spaces,” he says, and it’s very difficult to attune yourself to it. I’ve driven it before, in the BMW and a couple of laps in the 924. Then you’d be sitting there waiting for a corner to arrive. In a 956, it seems to flow. Where other cars are on the brakes, you’re on the power.” And their grid position? Somewhere in the Top 10 would be nice, something around a 3min 30sec. But it’s not all that important. We’re trying to do race times, not practice times.”
Perkins wanders in, and while demolishing breakfast, sets the record straight. Some of the visiting pressmen have noted that it’s him, not Brock, who’s been doing the bulk of the driving and posting the times.
“Brock’s been doing the same times as me, but we really haven’t had a run. If it was any other race, we might screw up the boost and go for it, but with one engine, it’s a pointless exercise. It might cost us $80,000 for a rebuild to move up a few places on the grid. And for what?”
Thursday grinds by in the paddock at Le Mans. The place is now chock-a-block and you can feel the build up of tension, the sense of occasion.
Bill Tuckey says that Le Mans is just like the Bathurst 1000, only it’s not as well organised. In one sense, he is absolutely correct, for what surprises me, a novice at Le Mans, is the level of preparation.
There are maybe a dozen really professional outfits. The Joest Newman team, the Kremer Brothers, Fitzpatrick Racing, the works Lancias and Jaguars, the Mazdaspeed and Goodrich teams, and to a lesser extent, the Aston-Martin Nimrod equipe. Team Australia, despite the handicaps, fits in there somewhere too. For the rest, it’s amateur hour, the sort of stuff you see in the back of the paddock at Bathurst. Blokes you know have got Buckley’s of finishing.
The Thursday night sessions produce few surprises. Graphmeister goes out for some more bedding-in laps, returning to the pit hot but happy. Bloody hot,” he says, “Sweating like a pig I am, but the car’s good”.
He has done a few 3.37s on race rubber before handing over to Brock, who repeats the performance, almost to the last hundredth of a second.
“That’s nice,” he says. “Now we’re pulling 7500 down the chute and it’s honking. Still got a bit too much understeer, but we can dial that out with the front bar.”
LP straps some Dunlop qualifiers on, and sets off to post a couple of times. He’s still going to use low boost, but he’s looking for a clear lap.
He gets one – a 3.35.34 – fifth-fastest for the session and 10th fastest, overall, to date. Then word comes to the pit that Larry has been involved in an accident. A Big One. While the shock is still being felt, Graphmeister calmly wheels the orange car into the pits. It looks remarkably intact, save for a few tyre marks down the left flank.
What happened? He looks at me, as if mentally scratching his head, trying to work out what I’m talking about.
“What happened?” he says slowly. “Bugger all happened.”
But Brock knows of which I speak.
“He launched an ethnic.”
“Oh yeah,” says the laid-back LP. “That...” as if recalling some trifling incident that occurred in 1968.
“I was on a lap, one of the few where I was having a bit of a go, and I came across another Porsche in one of the fast parts of the track. He was going relatively slowly, wandering along in the middle of the road. I’m flashing my lights and thinking, ‘where are you gonna go – left, right or stay where you are?’ He looked like staying where he was, so I committed myself to the corner. Just as I passed him he decided he needed more room, so he pulled his nose into the back of my car. And that spun him off: it was a pity, because his car was badly damaged.”
Then with a look that reinforces the words, like steel reinforcing in a concrete pour: “Ours isn’t.”
Brock, despite the levity, isn’t happy. That was far too close.
So now they’ve qualified, LP has posted a respectable time and the car felt “nice”. Good sense dictates there is nothing to be gained from the 9-11pm final practice session. Nothing that is, apart from Peter Brock laying down a time to equal Larry’s, to silence the so-called experts who are muttering that the transition from driving taxis at Bathurst to a 956 at Le Mans has found a chink in Peter Perfect’s armour.
The easy solution would have been to bolt on the second set of Dunlop qualifiers and do a time. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that Brock could have done it.
To his eternal credit, Brock tells the crew to put the car away.
“We’re not going to achieve anything,” he says matter-of-factly, “every lap we do tonight might be one we don’t do on Sunday afternoon”.
There spoke the voice of a mature racer, a professional pilote who wasn’t about to let ego get in the way.
It must have been tempting, nonetheless. All week, the European press had wanted Perkins. Brock was very much the bit player, as they saw it.
“Peter Broke” (as the local paper Ouest France, called him) was “the numero 1 des courses de Production en Australie.” The italics are mine, but the emphasis is theirs. You see, production drivers aren’t really as well-regarded as ex-European Formula 3 champions who’d driven Fl with both Brabham and BRM.
The preliminaries are over as midnight arrives. Friday is a rest day, then, at 3:00pm on Saturday, it’s a dog-day afternoon at Le Mans.
But Thursday isn’t quite over. Yet.
We’re driving home, that big moon bathing the fields in a soft glow. There are headlights up ahead. Gary and Scott Campbell, a father and son combination here as re-fuellers to Car 34, opine it must be Larry.
We’re in a de-toxed Alfa 33. Perkins is in the R5, loaded to the gunwhales. We suck on to the back and LP tries that little bit harder. What we lose on the twisty bits, we can easily make back on the straights. It is moderately rapid, yet safe as a bank.
With a few kays to go, LP overshoots a left-hander in the town of Vass. We reverse, he turns around. We hold him off to the finish and it’s a good natured jibing in the car park: “Why didn’t you take me earlier,” says LP. “You obviously had more grunt.” I didn’t tell him, but I’d thought about it, and considered the prospect of having Perkins in a Renault 5 up my arse, ready willing and able to pull much more desperate acts than I ... as not being conducive to good health.
But here’s the punchline: 40 minutes later Brock arrived, and got straight to the point.
“Did you get pulled up at the roadblock by the coppers?” Um, what road block? “They were pulling over anyone with foreign plates.” Then, when realisation dawned, he got a knowing smile on his face and said simply: “LP, you bastard.”
FRIDAY, JUNE 15
It’s a rest day at Le Mans, so there’s nothing much of a race-nature to report. But a conversation with Brock, over breakfast, cannot go unrecorded. We’re talking about the concentration required to keep it on the island, lap after lap, at those speeds, with the precision that a Porsche 956 demands. Brock is matter-of-fact about it. He says when he’s really driving well, even in the Commodore, he has a sort of out-of-body experience.
“You get to the point where your mind is in total control of your body. It becomes detached. You can almost look down at yourself operating, as if you’re casually observing your body doing the work. Your mind seems to have a power and a perspective totally removed from the physical. I feel it often, particularly at Bathurst. When it happens, I know I’m on the ball.” It’s a subject I want to explore further, but the signals suggest that now is not the time.
Friday ends with a big dinner in the grand dining room, hosted by sponsor Bob Jane and attended by the ‘Melbourne Mafia’ – businessmen, car dealers, advertising men, even a man from the Collingwood Football Club – who form a tight-knit circle of money and influence. There’s a Merc SEC in the car park, and a black Porsche 930 that has seen the inside of the Kremer Brothers workshop in Cologne.
And then there are the T-Mart men in their white sweatshirts. They’ve sold enough tyres to win an award trip to Le Mans with their wives.
Through the good-luck toasts and hearty humour, Brock and LP seem to genuinely enjoy themselves. I can’t help but think where they will be, what will have happened, in 24 hours...
SATURDAY, JUNE 16
Another hot day, and Dr Hugh has a frown on his face. I ask Brock about the wisdom of ignoring his counsel.
“He means well,” says Peter, “but we’ve done this sort of thing before; we can handle it, no worries.”
With Perkins working on (you guessed it) a graph – this one about fuel consumption – the mood is anticipatory, but relaxed. LP is grinning for the first time all week.
He wants Garry Campbell to plot each fuel fill against a moving trend line. He wants to know at every hour whether they’re above or below the statutory limit of 2500 litres for the 24 hours. The graph is tabulated for 376 laps – seven more than Schuppan’s race-winning distance last year.
Then they carry out a question-and-answer drill, like two schoolkids learning their times table by rote: “Equal flashes, two a second, independent of revs,” says Perkins.
“Air temperature sensor problem,” answers Brock.
“Four longish flashes. Goes out for 7-10 seconds then returns?”
“Water temperature sensor problem.”
“Light on permanently, glowing brighter with more revs?”
“Check timing sensor for dirt. If the engine doesn’t rev past five grand, check mixture switch.”
And on it goes. Brock checks to see if a set of spanners, a torch and the three spare black boxes that control the Motronic engine management system are in the car. Then, perhaps to relieve the mounting tension, the conversation swings to LP’s newborn child. When was she born?
“Um, I dunno ... the 2nd of June,” says dad.
“No it wasn’t,” says Brock.
“Must’ve been Sunday the 3rd,” confirms Perkins, only to be corrected by Peter. “The previous Sunday, LP, the Oran Park round.”
It appears LP’s wife is “lurking with the new unit” back home and there’s a competition on to name her.
“So far we’ve got Gertrude, Murgatroyd and Hazel,” says Brock, “but LP doesn’t fancy any of those.”
At 12:54pm, incredibly early for a 3pm race-start, the cars are called to the grid. The anthems are played, the drivers presented, the parachutists do their stuff and the Hawaiian Tropic girls strut their tans. At 2:54pm, the pace car takes the field on the traditional warm-up lap prior to the rolling start.
Thus it begins. LP stays well clear of the start-line fracas, but within three laps has improved his 15th grid position by four places.
In the pit, there is nothing to do but wait, something that happens a lot at Le Mans. But the wait is shorter than expected. On lap 12 – three before it’s expected – the fuel warning light comes on in car 34 and LP is in, handing over to Brock.
Graphmeister emerges from the car in a right state, sweating profusely and issuing a torrent of expletives. The driver’s door isn’t sealing properly; it’s understeering, the Cool Hat isn’t operating and the bottle of Gatorade is so hot “it’ll make Brock sick.”
Dr Hugh dispenses two cups of his brew which Perkins scoffs without complaint. The doc shakes his head. Bevo takes away the sodden suit.
Then there’s news from the adjacent pit. The Charles Ivey car has lost another of its BBS wheels – the second this week. The wheelmen consult as Grice silently suits up. How must he feel?
Yet after that first hour, Team Australia is running in a solid 11th place while Vern Schuppan cuts his way through the field to take the lead.
Brock is punting the car around in consistent 41s – bang on the plotted pace. At 4:35, Perkins suits up again, the Cool Hat tubes hanging from his helmet like something out of NASA.
The second stop is a slow one – 35 seconds above the statutory two minutes for 100 litres of fuel and four tyres. But Brock is in a much healthier state than his co-driver after those first, frantic laps.
He complains of “wankers doing 40 miles an hour” and the Cool Hat still won’t work properly. Siddle says: “Larry was stuffed when he came in ... sick.”
Brock reacts with surprise, but confirms that “the stuff in the bottle is so hot you could make a cup of tea with it”.
In that grey, prison-like concrete corridor behind the pits, Brock strips to the waist and drinks several cups of Mr Lipton’s best. The understeer is getting worse, but apart from that the car is running like a bought one.
On lap 29, word comes through that LP has spun. There is a pregnant, awful pause until he comes by. Grant Steers checks his stopwatch and immediately turns to Brock and says: “He’s lost 9.6 seconds on the road. How many spins is that?”
Brock, stone-faced, replies: “One.”
After two and a half hours – more than a Grand Prix – the leading four cars are split by a mere 12 seconds. And Team Australia is moving steadily upward in the computer rankings.
When Perkins hands over to Brock for the second time, he’s sweating just as heavily, but says he feels fine and the balance of the car is great. “No worries, I could’ve done another stint.”
At six o’clock, the computer says Team Australia is lying fifth ... but then amends that to eighth. No matter, it’s still excellent news. The team’s spirits are up.
Then the pendulum swings. On lap 53, just one before a scheduled stop, Brock is on the fast section of the course near Virage Porsche. His front wheel parts company with the car. “I thought, gee, this is feeling dodgy under brakes,” he says later. “Very heavy and lots of vibration. I went through a left-hander then into a long right and it didn’t feel too handy at all. Next thing there’s a thump and I’m on three wheels. I just kept my boot into it, accelerated past the wheel and came very gently back into the pits.”
He was doing fully 180km/h when the wheel came adrift, but makes light of it: “We’ll be talking to the Porsche people,” he says with a shrug. The resulting pit stop costs 28 minutes, as the spanners struggle to replace the damaged hub and send Perkins out.
As it turns out later, Team Aussie learns the wheel-throwing is a regular 956 trick when shod with BBS rims. Most other teams use Momos for that reason. Including JFR. Perkins is seething, because he chose to run BBS in deference to his sponsor, Australian importer, Bob Jane. Nobody told him about the difference in expansion rate between the alloy centre and the steel insert. But what’s done is done, and now the fight back from 35th place must begin.
After five hours, they’re back up to 23rd spot, and the gloom is lifting.
A hundred metres down pit lane, Vern Schuppan’s Wednesday prophecies have unfortunately been fulfilled. At 8:30pm, he pits, the left front corner of his Kenwood 956 showing the scars of a coming together. He sits impassively in the car, sucking fluid through a plastic hose. Alan Jones surveys the damage to the leading car, says someone’s had a spin in front of Vern, then opines, with some relish, that he’d “better put the eyes on”.
In AJ-speak that refers to a state of mind when he’s at his aggressive, fighting best. It has been a long time since Jones has driven something as quick and challenging as a big Porsche at Le Mans. One look at his face, suffused with energy and light, is enough to confirm that the competitive fire still burns as strongly as it ever did. It will be a different story tomorrow afternoon, however.
At 9:00pm, according to my crumpled, stained notebook, Larry Perkins limps into the pits. The rear rocker arm has sheared like a piece of low-grade pipe.
It happened on Mulsanne Kink, and as Perkins says, it was as close to a spin at 350km/h as he’s ever been. As the mechanics swarm over the rear of the car, the two Aston Martin Nimrods enter the Mulsanne Kink, separated by just 300 metres.
There is no firm indication as to why, but the leading car of Sheldon goes out of control at 300km/h. The Nimrod spears off the left-hand side of the track, spinning back across the road to charge the barrier on the other side.
The second impact sparks off a fireball so intense, it sets the forest alight. The second car, driven by Olson, swerves to avoid a piece of wreckage and it too, slams the barrier.
Sheldon pulls himself from the blazing wreck, suffering burns to the chest, throat and hands. Olson survives unscathed, but track marshal Jack Loiseau dies, a victim of the flying debris. His colleague, Andre-Guy Lefebre, is seriously injured.
Back in pit lane, nobody knows quite what happened. The four pace cars are out and so they stay, with the race cars circulating slowly under the yellow, for 62 minutes.
The accident brings into sharp focus what this business is all about. The laid-back Perkins and his smoothdriving partner are laying their lives on the line. As Perkins says: “That could easily have been me, when that bloody rocker broke.” He’s cold about it, though, matter-of-fact, almost brutal. “It’s part of the game, mate, you know the risks when you get in the thing.”
I don’t know how, but Perkins has established that the failed rocker, another noted weak point on the 956, is not a genuine ex-factory, specially reinforced item. He knows from whence it has come.
Meanwhile, the hapless Grice is at his cutting best: “The gearbox is pretty bad, the wheels are so far out of balance that I can’t see, the brake bias is wrong and the seat’s broken, so I’m sliding all over the car. Apart from that, it seems pretty well prepared.”
At midnight, the Bob Jane car has settled back into a rhythm, regaining 21st place. Perkins has his little chat with me in the gloom of the corridor and I decide to try and catch an hour or two of sleep in the front seat of the Alfa. It is a mistake.
While I sleep, Perkins ventures out, just after 2am. On lap 146, it all came to a shuddering halt in the catch fencing at Tetra Rouge.
Perkins later explained what happened: “I came across three slower cars. She went to pass the other one and I went for a third lane and misjudged the situation, didn’t allow myself enough room and ran out of road. I wasn’t tired, not in the slightest, which is why I don’t even have a good excuse.
“I misjudged it in terms that I was trying to keep on a good pace, around 37s, when I should have read it earlier that I was facing a hazardous situation and backed off. We might still be driving around. But these things happen. We were behind schedule and I was driving full bore, well in top gear. I suppose I went off at something like 240 kays ... but the catch fencing is pretty efficient.”
The remaining 11 hours of Le Mans 1984 pass in a fatigued, unshowered, unshaven daze.
With a little less than an hour to go, the last Australian hope, the second-placed Porsche of Schuppan, Jones and Jarier, expires with a bent rod. It sits silent and unattended in the now-deserted pit row until Vern restarts it with one lap to go. He struggles around, headlights ablaze, and is credited with sixth place.
Jones is quoted as saying: “That’s it. At least I can tell my children I’ve done Le Mans, but I don’t think I’ll be back.”
Le Mans 1984 is over. The Team Australia members, from Brock to Ray Dahl, the cook, are packing up.
Bob Jane, the man who has footed the bills, sits in the sun and says yes, he’s very happy with the effort and the publicity return on his investment. Of more significance, he says he’ll be back; “probably with two cars” and it will be “an all-Australian effort”.
He’s happy too, he says, with the support from John Fitzpatrick Racing, but thinks to win this race, you must start with a brand-new car.
“Survival is the name of the game here. We’ve learned that – and a lot more. After all, we didn’t win the America’s Cup on our first try.”
PS: Larry Perkins’ daughter, after four weeks without a name, is now Nichola Louise Perkins.
__________________________________________________________________________
Little article? Little article my foot. 
Order a giffgaff SIM from my link and get £5 credit, free!
Season 1 and Season 3 GPGSL World Champion!
Member of CTDP - Cars Tracks Development Program - 3D Carshaper
Order a giffgaff SIM from my link and get £5 credit, free!
Season 1 and Season 3 GPGSL World Champion!
Member of CTDP - Cars Tracks Development Program - 3D Carshaper
Sorry, only registered users may post in this forum.