Jaguar's Le Mans comeback: How Big Cat conquered 24hr race again

But at Le Mans in 1984 against the fully developed Porsche 956 it stood no chance despite a driver line up including Brian Redman in one car and John Watson in the other. In qualifying the quicker of the two was still 17 sec off the pace of the pole-sitting Lancia LC2. “Sadly, we just couldn’t get near the Porsche,” Redman told me. “The XJR-5 was a good car, but we were up against the most successful sports racing car ever built.”

“The Group 44 team were very impressive,” he continued, “the cars were the best turned out on the grid and immaculately prepared but really taking on a car designed by Porsche and to do so with a normally aspirated road car engine was never going to be an equal fight.”

The two cars were back in 1985, now over 20sec from pole and while one car driven by Tullius himself sharing with Chip Robinson did complete the race, it came home in 13th place, 50 laps down and minus one of its twelve cylinders. Winning the GTP category came as scant consolation given that the Jaguars were the only cars entered therein…

Besides by then Tullius knew the adventures at Le Mans with Jaguar were over. Jaguar had decided to continue the campaign, but contracted the work out to TWR instead. If Tullius was bitter he did a fine job of disguising it. “While I was disappointed that TWR was given the job, I wasn’t surprised,” he said. “I guess it would have been a little odd for an American team to do a works Le Mans programme for a British manufacturer.” He instead developed the XJR-5 into the composite chassis XJR-7 which raced in IMSA with some success for another couple of years.

The TWR Jaguars instead made their debut two months later at Mosport with one car driven by Martin Brundle, Jean-Louis Schlesser and Mike Thackwell winding up not only on the podium but best of the rest behind a brace of factory Rothmans Porsche 962s. It was a very encouraging start, followed by splitting the two Porsches at the season finale in Malaysia. But the first win didn’t come until Silverstone the following year when Derek Warwick and Eddie Cheever beat the factory Porsches and Lancias in what was, astonishingly, the first victory in the World Sports Car Championship by a factory Jaguar since that dreadful day at Le Mans in 1955, some 31 years previously.

But Le Mans was too high a hurdle in the first full year of the TWR programme. We should not pay too much attention to qualifying times in which Porsche could use boost levels unavailable to them in the race, but the fact is the Jags were never really in the hunt. Then fuel pump failure stranded one car, half shaft failure another. It is true that the third, driven by Warwick, Cheever and Schlesser, was in second place on Sunday morning when a blown tyre destroyed both its suspension and chances of finishing the race, but so too was it eight laps down on the leading Porsche at the time. No more wins came that season, leaving TWR with a lot of work to do over the winter.

So the following year TWR threw the kitchen sink at the race, with no fewer than five XJR-9LMs entered but the team was as fortunate in 1988 as some much argue it had been unlucky in 1987. For now it had a new opponent in the form of the works Sauber-Mercedes C9s which had hounded the Jaguar through the season to date. But then Klaus Niedzwiedz performed the biggest save of his life when a tyre let go at something around 230mph in the Mulsanne kink leading Mercedes to withdraw both its cars when the problem could not be identified. After the tragedy of its previous works effort at Le Mans in 1955, such caution was understood.

The rival instead was a very special Porsche 962C, built especially for this race and driven by Porsche’s best drivers, Hans Stuck, Derek Bell and Klaus Ludwig. Would it have won had Ludwig not run it out of fuel? Who knows but the gap at the flag was certainly far less than the time that had been lost. Remember too it was the only one of the five Jaguars to remain in contention, two retiring, the other two respectively 11 and 63 laps behind the winner.

But Mercedes was back in 1989 and, as if to prove a point, won every single round of the championship, scoring over three times as many points as the now outclassed TWR Jaguars. And even though Le Mans was not part of that championship thanks to one of those spats between the ACO and FIA that pop up from time to time, it made very little difference: the Mercedes simply ran away with it, finishing first and second with the best of the four works Jaguars down in fourth, beaten even by an old privateer Joest Porsche. Something needed to be done.

And the XJR-12LM was it. Throughout the 1990 season the Mercedes C11 was the class of the field, even against the new twin turbo XJR-11 it met at sprint events. But for Le Mans TWR deemed the old V12 to offer a better chance of victory even on a circuit with a straight now punctuated by chicanes. Victory seemed even less likely that the previous year however, not just because of the Mercedes menace, but no fewer than eight Nissans, including six works cars, one of which Mark Blundell used for one of the most ridiculous pole laps it has ever been my pleasure to watch on YouTube. The fastest of four Jaguars languished down in seventh place behind a gaggle of Nissans and private Porsches, fully nine seconds off its pace. Rumours were that Nissan had already printed its victory literature. But the Mercedes never turned up, the PR reason being it didn’t want to take part having won the previous year and while the race retained non-championship status. Privately people wondered if it hadn’t already decided it didn’t much fancy losing to a Nissan.

It is a decision the team must have come to bitterly regret. Nissan’s apparent vice like grip on the race fell to pieces in an orgy of unreliability leaving what should have been a straight run to the flag for the Jaguars. But even now they were hard pressed by the brilliantly driven and run Brun Porsche 962 which lay within striking distance of a Jaguar carefully managing its gearbox with just an hour to go. Walkinshaw was sufficiently concerned to parachute Brundle from a broken sister car into the leader for the final stint but in the event he need not have bothered: with three laps to go the engine of the heroically driven Porsche let go, leaving its driver Jesus Pareja literally weeping at the side of the track.

The 1991 running of the Le Mans 24 Hours was surely the weirdest in its history. It was a race in which some of the cars that took part weren’t meant to be there and others that were meant to be there didn’t take part. It was a race where the car on pole was over three seconds a lap slower than the car starting down in 11th place, which itself was almost 40 seconds a lap (yes, 40) faster than the car immediately ahead of it on the grid. It was a race that attracted the smallest entry in almost 60 years and was won by a car of a kind that had never won before, nor has since, and that would not come close to even troubling the podium in any other round of the 1991 championship season.