The winning Rothmans Porsche crossed the finish line and pulled over, its engine kaput. The chasing sister car, running low on fuel, couldn’t have gone much further either. Both factory 956s almost didn’t make it around the final lap of the 1983 Le Mans 24 Hours. Had that come to pass, however, Porsche would still have won the race. It had another car six laps back in third place waiting to pick up the pieces. And then another and another, all the way down to eighth. In fact, Porsche’s Group C masterpiece filled nine of the top 10 places. The press ad that followed cheekily declared, “Nobody’s perfect”.

“Customers proved that they could beat the in-house team”

Nine out of 10 certainly wasn’t bad for the first year of customer teams running the 956. There were eight independent entries on the grid at Le Mans in June, though the privateers that were lined up against the three Rothmans cars failed to make much of a dent in the supremacy of the factory as it followed up on its 1982 1-2-3, notwithstanding its late-race travails. But the customers proved over the course of the 1983 World Endurance Championship and its allied European series that they could challenge and, on occasion, beat the in-house Porsche team.

It was they and not the other full-house manufacturer team on the grid, in the shape of Lancia with its new LC2, that provided the major opposition to the Rothmans cars. A third manufacturer, Ford, failed to show: the Mk3 version of its C100 was axed before the season started just as a troubled programme seemed about to turn a corner. The efforts of the likes of Joest Racing, Richard Lloyd, John Fitzpatrick Racing, the Kremer brothers and Brun Motorsport with the 956 and subsequently its long-wheelbase successor, the 962C, added quantity and quality to the Group C grid and remained an important component thereof long after Jaguar and then Sauber with Mercedes arrived to challenge the Porsche hegemony over the second half of the 1980s.

Porsche was always going to make the 956 available to customers. “It’s what Porsche always did,” explains Norbert Singer, the engineer who oversaw design and development of the car and then its racing exploits. Customer racing was and has remained one of the foundation stones of Porsche’s 75 years in motor sport. When the Porsche 963 LMDh – designed to race in today’s WEC and the IMSA SportsCar Championship in North America – was announced, Porsche made much of its availability to customers, and from its maiden season of competition in 2023 rather than one year down the line. There was another difference between ’83 and ’23, too. The chassis Porsche delivered to its customers 40 years earlier weren’t of the same specification as the factory machines against which they raced. Rather, they were delivered in the spec in which the works car finished the previous year; four decades later, customer and works cars had to be identical by regulation.

The homologation rules today mean the cars remain that way as updates come on stream: development is strictly limited and controlled in Hypercar in the WEC and GTP in IMSA (though the latter series has made an allowance for a customer to keep its car in an older spec on cost grounds). Not so in Group C back in 1983. The factory kept on developing the 956 even as it released upgrades to its paying customers through the season. But those customers were free to develop their cars as they sought to try to keep up with the factory. That quest spawned a cottage industry around the 956 and the 962 in their Group C and GTP configurations. Attempts to improve the breed stretched as far as the redesign of the aluminium monocoque of the car. Northamptonshire-based TC Prototypes alone built more than a dozen tubs in aluminium honeycomb.

“There was a cottage industry around the 956 and 962”

The privateers had to work hard to keep up because Porsche was taking strides with the 956 all the time. Developments in a car correctly known as the 956-83 — the following year’s car was the 956/84 with a slash rather than a dash – included a lighter monocoque, bodywork that had also been on a diet, and tweaks to the front-end aerodynamics. The shape of the nose was subtly altered to increase downforce. “The radius at the front got shorter; the leading edge of the nose became steeper,” recalls Singer. Understeer would remain the bugbear for the drivers of 956 and 962 for years to come thanks to the use of a spool rather than differential in the name of stability under braking.

The biggest change for ’83, however, concerned the 2.65-litre twin-turbo flat-six. The 956’s flat-six began life with Bosch-Kugelfischer mechanical fuel-injection, but in the Group C fuel-formula under which the cars were given an inviolable allocation of fuel for each race, an electronic system offered an advantage. Enter the Bosch Motronic engine control unit used for the remainder of the 956/962 design’s long and winding career. “The key with the Motronic system was that it was more precise; it could control the exact amount of fuel going into each cylinder through two rather than one injector per cylinder,” explains Singer. “It is what we call sequential fuel injection.”

The switch yielded a significant reduction in fuel consumption and continued to do so as it moved on from its initial Motronic 1.2 iteration. It was first used at Spa in 1982 and, in the three years to the same fixture in ’85, developments gave a 23.7% improvement with a 7.3% decrease in lap times. Singer dug the figures from his archive for Motor Sport.

There were also new pistons that increased the compression ratio to 8.0:1 and power went up with it. The customer cars initially raced with the previous year’s 7.5:1 compression ratio, or at least were delivered in that specification. Reinhold Joest knew the ropes and was well connected at Porsche. When the factory look a leave of absence from the prototype ranks in 1980, he was loaned the blueprints for the 936 Group 6 racer that had won at Le Mans in ’76 and ’77. No one was fooled that a car officially called the 908/80 was anything but a 936. Joest was undertaking mods of the 956 flat-six from the get-go under the eye of its engine man, Michel Demont. He had sourced new pistons from Mahle that might or might not have been the same as the factory’s.

Not every customer was quite so savvy, at least initially. British racer and team owner Richard Lloyd, whose operation was then known as GTi Engineering, ordered a car courtesy of a sponsorship deal with Canon’s European arm. When the team got to the first race at Monza, Lloyd was surprised that other privateers had the higher-downforce tail section, whereas his car had been delivered with Le Mans-spec aero.

“Richard strode up to Jürgen Barth [Porsche’s boss of customer sport] and asked what the hell was going on,” recalls Peter Stevens, the car stylist and an old friend of Lloyd’s who designed the liveries of his racers and provided engineering input. “He asked why other teams had a different tail, and was told, ‘Because that’s what the car comes with when you order it.’ Richard asked if he could buy the other tail there and then, but Barth insisted that they didn’t have any at the track. We had to wait a race.” Lloyd’s team learned quickly: it modified its car’s nose over the course of 1983 and the following year was the first to commission a honeycomb tub.

Joest pulled off what was hailed as an unlikely victory first time out in the WEC in ’83 at the Monza 1000Kms. Its Marlboro-sponsored car, running the high-downforce rear and driven by Bob Wollek and Thierry Boutsen, beat the best of the factory cars shared by Jacky Ickx and Jochen Mass by a full lap. Marlboro smoked Rothmans because Joest could go further on a tank of gas than the works team. Wollek and Boutsen established themselves in the lead around the halfway mark and had fuel in hand over the latter stages to repel any challenge.

Joest won again with Wollek and Stefan Johansson, this time in the European Endurance Championship, a series made up of five WEC rounds and three standalone events. The victory came at Mugello in October on a day when there were no factory cars present. Porsche did, however, send two 956-83s to the Brands Hatch round the previous month at the behest of its British-based sponsor – and was beaten for a second time by one of its customers, this time John Fitzpatrick’s team. And resoundingly so, with little unseen mods playing a part.

Silverstone-based JFR closed off the vents in the underfloor that provided cooling for the air-cooled engine block in the name of increased downforce. Fans driven off the turbos extracted the hot air instead. The team experimented with the idea, conceived by crew chief Max Crawford, while on a summer jaunt with one of its two cars to take part in a couple of Can-Am rounds in North America. “We tried it at Willow Springs [in California] and quickly realised it worked – it really did make a significant difference,” remembers Fitzpatrick. “Then we had to make sure the engine didn’t overheat in hot weather.”

Kent in September was far from hot. The opening portion of the race was wet, wherein lay another advantage for JFR at Brands: its Porsche ran on Goodyear tyres rather than the factory’s Dunlops. “I’d say the Goodyears and the Dunlops were evenly matched in the dry, but the wet-weather Goodyear was definitely better,” suggests Fitzpatrick.

JFR’s use of Goodyears wasn’t an attempt to gain the unfair advantage, rather a deal driven by pragmatism and forged on the golf course – Goodyear’s lead representative at the world championship races was a keen golfer, like Fitzpatrick. “When you were running your own team, the big question about tyres was whether you had to pay for them or not,” he observes. “We didn’t, and tyres were a big chunk of the budget.”

The third factor on that famous day was Derek Warwick. Fitzpatrick’s regular team-mate, David Hobbs, had a clashing commitment in Trans-Am, so ‘Fitz’ turned to the Toleman F1 driver: “He’d driven Kremer’s 956 at the previous round at Spa and was impressive. It was an easy decision to ask him to join us. He made the difference.”

“There is no strategy. Let’s see if we are still running after 18 hours”

The prowess of the 956 privateers very nearly came in handy at Le Mans. The previous year, Porsche had belied the lack of miles under a car that had only run for the first time at the end of March. Singer was far from expecting the largely trouble-free run it went on to enjoy. “I recently saw an interview filmed just before the race in ’82,” he says. “I was asked what our strategy for the race was. I replied, ‘Right now there is no strategy. Let’s see if we are still running after 18 hours, and then we can think about strategy.’” Singer adds that Porsche was “really not sure that we could finish the race”. All three 956s did.

Twelve months on, the updated Porsches ran into a myriad of problems. Singer has no idea why. “Just bad luck, probably,” he shrugs. Mass and mercurial young talent Stefan Bellof were slowed and then forced into retirement when an electronic issue made the engine run too lean. Meanwhile, Ickx and Derek Bell, winners the previous year, were playing catch-up nearly the whole way after the Belgian had a coming together with the Lloyd car – Jan Lammers at the wheel – at Mulsanne Corner on lap two. The Rothmans entry driven by Al Holbert, Vern Schuppan and Hurley Haywood, definitely the third car, wasn’t overhauled by Ickx and Bell until just after 6am. Twenty minutes later, Bell was sitting stationary next to the old signalling pits halfway around the lap, the car’s engine silent.

Bell had to haul the tail off to investigate: “Not really a one-man job; I left it resting up on the back wheels so I didn’t have to lift it up to get it back on. Luckily Norbert had told us what we had to do in that situation. I think I changed the black box; there was a spare one dangling inside the roof on a tie-wrap. I jumped in and it fired up. Then I got back out and ran around the back and picked up the rear of the tail and ran with it. Thankfully, it went clunk, clunk into its slots.”

“I banged the car into first gear and stood on the throttle”

A total of six laps were lost, while more time went west when an oil line needed replacing. There was surely to be no repeat win for Ickx and Bell. Or at least it looked that way until just over two hours to go when the left-side door flew off the leading Porsche. Two attempts at a fix were required, but there was a problem. The airflow to the water radiator was taken via a duct in the door. Schuppan did four slow laps to keep temperatures under control while a replacement was prepared. Worse still, the new one had to be jury-rigged in place. The engine was irrevocably damaged as the air failed to find the rad for the water-cooled cylinder heads.

Bell took over with 45 minutes to go. The brakes were on their way out, the pads needed changing, but Bell pushed on regardless. When Holbert made his final pitstop, Bell regained one of the two laps by which he trailed the leader; with 15 minutes to go, he passed Holbert in the ailing car to move onto the lead lap. Yet the chase still looked forlorn as the clock ticked down until Holbert saw the temperature needles flick to zero at Arnage. “I smelled the water leave the engine,” he told the press after the race. Coming through the Ford Chicane to start his final lap, the engine seized. Holbert’s technical acumen probably saved the day: “I banged the car into first gear and stood on the throttle. This and the forward motion of the car unseized the engine.”

Somehow the bone-dry flat-six survived another eight and a half miles to allow Holbert to take the chequered flag just over a minute before Bell, who’d seen the reserve fuel light go on halfway around his final lap. The official margin of victory, given in kilometres back then, is listed as 3.35km (2.08 miles). Bell reckons it might have been closer still. “My stepfather was watching from the grandstands and put a watch on the gap,” he explains. “He said it was less than the minute people said because as I approached the Ford Chicane I had to slow down because the track was being invaded, as was usual back then.”

Whatever way, it was close. And Porsche was also close to losing the victory. Another racing lap, and neither Rothmans car would have made it home and the first of the privateers, the Kremer 956 shared by Mario and Michael Andretti plus Philippe Alliot, would have been declared the winner. Seven out of eight still wouldn’t have been bad. But one of the great motor sport ads would never have made it into the papers.

‘Isn’t he wonderful?’

A look at the wild laps of Stefan Bellof at the Nürburgring in 1983

Derek Bell sidled up to the pitwall with a question for Helmuth Bott, the Porsche board member in charge of motor sport. Stefan Bellof, Bell’s co-driver, was lapping ever quicker as he cemented their 956’s place at the top of order. Would it be worth slowing him down, Bell asked? Bott’s reply: “Isn’t he wonderful?” The next lap the car didn’t come round…

Bellof was a man on a mission at the Nürburgring 1000Kms in ’83. The German, in only his second race with Porsche, had already posted a lap that has gone into motor sport folklore. The 6min 11.13sec with which he took pole on the 12.94 miles of the Nordscheife was 5sec faster than the next best, but it resonates because it was set over the identical lap that punters can pay their €30 to drive today, the one on which manufacturers chase records.

In the year after the demolition of the old start-finish loop to make way for the Nürburgring Grand Prix Circuit, races were held solely on the Nordschleife. The old link road that bypassed what was known as the Zielschleife was turned into permanent circuit for the first time to join up the two ends of the Green Hell.

Bellof had already claimed pole three weeks earlier at Silverstone. He was motivated to make it two in a row when the two Rothmans cars were given their solitary set of qualifying tyres. Jochen Mass, paired with Jacky Ickx, used his first, posting 6min 16.85sec before Bellof reacted with 6min 11sec. Mass told me in 2017 that he always believed that Bellof waited to see his mark before getting the quallies bolted on.

Bellof had starred on a damp but drying track initially, establishing a lead of 45sec over Mass. Back behind the wheel after a stint from Bell, Bellof could see the circuit was now in condition for records. His first flying lap was 7sec quicker than Ickx had managed while closing on Bell. Bellof got down to a 6min 25.19sec, which remains the real Nordschleife lap record to this day, not his pole time nor Timo Bernhard’s 5min 19.55sec demo in the Porsche 919 Hybrid in 2018.

Passing a slower car, Bellof took the Pflanzgarten yump slightly off-line. Air got under the car, it smashed down tail first and turned hard into the barriers. “It seemed so futile,” recalls Bell. “They could have asked him to slow down and we would have won that race.”

Two years later, Bellof’s fearlessness was implicated in his death. Now driving a 956 for Brun Motorsport, he speared into the foot of the old concrete grandstand halfway up Raidillon at Spa while trying to overtake Ickx’s 962C. “Stefan was quick and I enjoyed our time,” says Bell. “I think he needed to be looked after a bit better. No one tapped him on the shoulder and said, ‘Hang on, son…’” GW