Raymond Sommer: the racing hero with an independent flair

From the start, Sommer held back, watching with incredulity as the other Alfas tore each other to pieces in an orgy of overtaking and lap records. The result was that, before half-distance, the race was between Sommer and the sole surviving works Alfa 8C of Franco Cortese and Giovanni Battista Guidotti. That was the good news; rather more worrying was the fact that Chinetti — either through exhaustion or illness — had retired hurt after just three hours at the wheel. Imagine what confronted Sommer: in only your second Le Mans, and with just a handful of races under your belt, you know you will have to drive solo for 21 hours just to reach the flag.

He won.

Sommer was clearly a master of understatement and described his epic drive as “a tiresome task” and likened it to “driving along an endless road through a desert”. He failed to mention he was also being slowly gassed by a broken exhaust. No wonder he became known in his homeland as Coeur de Lion, a title more famously conferred on the Francophile King Richard I. Sommer had single-handedly defeated the might of the greatest racing team on the planet. It was something, he felt, he could develop a taste for.

In fact, he had the nerve to do it again before 1932 was out, in the Marseilles Grand Prix at Miramas. This victory dwarfed even that of Le Mans, for while he had by now traded in his Le Mans-winner for a Monza Alfa, he beat the works monoposto P3, the greatest race car of its era. Moreover, and most staggering of all, it was being driven on this occasion by Tazio Nuvolari. In a straight fight, and using a two-seat sportscar, Sommer beat one of the five greatest drivers of all time in the quickest grand prix machine the world had ever seen.

Of course, there were excuses, the most popular being that the Alfa team had become confused and let Sommer by, believing him to be a lap down. The result, however, speaks for itself.

The 1933 Le Mans 24 Hours was to be Nuvolari’s first and only appearance at the Sarthe and, being nobody’s fool, he asked Sommer to drive with him; it was an opportunity the Frenchman could not pass up. Eschewing his preferred role as a privateer who beat the hell out of works teams, he accepted and formed a one-off Le Mans dream team the likes of which we’d not see until the days of Jacky Ickx and Derek Bell.

Nuvolari set the tone by breaking the outright lap record from a standing start on the first lap, a feat Sommer countered in the only way possible, breaking Nuvolari’s lap record to set fastest lap. In truth, however, this was Nuvolari’s race, as a relative cakewalk was turned by shot brakes and a leaking fuel tank into a last-lap thriller against Chinetti’s similar Alfa. It was left to Tazio to win by just a quarter of a mile. Despite their troubles, it would be four years before anyone travelled further, or completed a quicker lap, at Le Mans.

Elsewhere, however, Sommer’s dogged determination to race only what and where he wanted meant that he remained at a perpetual disadvantage to his many less talented, works-employed rivals. He may have been able to buy the best that was for sale, but then as now, works teams kept the best for themselves, and there was no more notorious protagonist of this policy than Alfa’s race boss, Enzo Ferrari. Neither Sommer’s Maserati 8CM nor the Monza allowed him close enough to the big boys for his talent to make the difference.

The next season, with its inaugural driver’s world championship, was to be Sommer’s last He started it as a works Ferrari driver, coming home fourth in Monaco behind Juan Fangio’s Alfa, team-mate Ascari and Louis Chiron’s Maserati 4C LT/48. It would be the last world championship GP he’d finish. Yet his finest hour was still to come.

By the time the circus arrived at Spa in June, he was back in a private Talbot, a car slower even than the works Talbots, and something of a joke compared to the Alfa 158s, which travelled around 30mph faster all the way down the straight from Malmetly to Stavelot But Sommer was convinced that in the Alfa’s fuel consumption lay their fatal flaw. And where better to prove it than among the flat-out swerves of Spa?

He outqualified all three of the works Talbots to claim fifth on the grid behind the three Alfas and Luigi Villoresi’s Ferrari. At the start, to the astonishment of Alfa, Ferrari, the crowd everyone except Sommer he kept station with the Alfas and even dispatched Villoresi in a dazzling move through Burnenville, perhaps the scariest corner in motorsport. Then, as the Alfas came in for fuel, Sommer stayed out, taking the lead on lap 13.

In the Alfa pit, they did their sums and realised their cars would have not only to catch and pass Sommer but that they would all have to stop again. Panic broke out and this time, instead of becoming confused as to Sommer’s position as they had at Miramas 18 years earlier, it was confusion they sought to create. A team was sent to the timekeepers to tell them Sommer was, in fact, a lap down. They returned with fleas in their ears.

Who knows if Sommer would have won? His Talbot let him down, as it would in every other GP of the year. And when he was asked by Raymond Mays to drive the BRM V16 in its maiden race, at Silverstone in August, that broke too.

Sommer’s last race came on a 3.44-mile track at Cadours, near Toulouse. Driving an 1100cc Cooper, he shot off into the lead, only to overturn on a quick corner, with fatal consequences.

So often, talk of drivers who never quite made it to the top suggests that bad luck alone prevented their true talent from being realised. Such is not the case with Sommer. Sure, a lot of cars broke underneath him, but he was hard on them and raced as a privateer and therefore without works engineering entirely out of choice.

The demonstrable truth about Sommer is that he never wanted to make it to the top enough to put up with the politics and bullshit that, even then, went with the job description. He made his own way and derived his particular pleasure from racing on no-one’s terms but his own. He had nothing to prove, he just wanted to race. And if, in the process, he could send a works team scuttling in disbelief back to its time-sheets, so much the better.

If you want Sommer in a nutshell, he said more about himself in one quote than you’d learn in a lifetime reading the opinions of others. On the same day in 1950 that he was supposed to race the BRM at Silverstone, he replaced the injured Lance Macklin in an Aston Martin DB2 in the one hour production car race. Having never hired him before John Wyer asked Sommer how he’d liked to receive his pit signals. Sommer replied: “I don’t want any signals. I always go as fast as I can anyway, so it’s no good signalling me to go faster because I can’t. And it’s no good signalling me to go slower because I won’t.”

Flat out and on his own terms the only way Sommer knew.