The McLaren F1 GTR entered the history books in 1995 having become one of only three makes to win the Le Mans 24 hours on its first attempt. It was also the last road-based supercar to win at Le Mans and it came about almost by accident.
The story has various versions according to whom you ask. Ray Bellm, a property developer who drove the cars in the BPR GT series in the 1990s says that he demanded that Ron Dennis build a racing version of the car; if he didn’t, Bellm would develop one himself.
According to McLaren, flagging sales of the supercar that it launched in the middle of a recession meant that it had to think of a new way to market it. Personnel attended a BPR race at Dijon in 1994 and, noticing that the grid was not that full, agreed that they could develop the F1 into a car to compete in the series.
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Whichever version is the truth, the car was developed in time to compete in the 1995 BPR series. McLarens were sold to Bellm, Lindsay Owen-Jones and Thomas Bscher and were run by the GTC team under Michael Caine, and by David Price. However, the owners wanted to race at Le Mans, and tasked McLaren with coming up with a car to do so.
“We said in that case we will have to do a kit, and a test and the customers were going to have to put up some money because it was not in our schedule,” remembers Jeff Hazell, McLaren’s competitions manager at the time. “They all put money towards a test and the only track we could get was Magny-Cours. There was little driver input because it was so smooth, so it wasn’t the place that you wanted to go for a 24-hour test. You want somewhere like Sebring, but it was all we could get.”
The team ran drivers from each of the customer teams and took no risks; starting the car slowly and using a new driver every hour to reduce the possibility of an accident due to tiredness. The test team slowly increased the speed of the car when one of the drivers, John Nielsen, complained that he was thinking about his gardening duties he was so bored driving, but despite a quick last six hours the car refused to break.
“The team managers said: ‘you have given us a really big problem,’ but we didn’t understand what they meant,” remembers Hazell. “They told us that they had planned to go to Le Mans, go around, something would go wrong, they would pack up and go home with the job done having gone there. Everyone would be happy, but now they would have to take it seriously and buy a lot of spare parts.”
“Customers were furious when McLaren raced against them”
McLaren set itself up to support the customers at Le Mans but the programme took an unlikely twist when a Japanese clinic, Ueno, wanted to back a car at Le Mans and none of the teams were able or willing to take it as their title sponsor. There was, says McLaren, no other option but to run its own car. This was a controversial move; for McLaren to compete against its own customers was not agreed and the customers were furious.
McLaren pressed ahead with plans and nominated Paul Lanzante’s team to run the car. Lanzante was involved in historic racing and was a friend of Dennis, but had no experience at Le Mans. The team also needed drivers, and Dennis asked Hazell who he would want to drive it.
“I said I wanted Yannick Dalmas as the car captain,” said Hazell. “He knows exactly what he wants. We were not that experienced, and we needed someone who could tell us exactly how it has to be. He said ‘OK, I’ll get him’. And he did. He then told me that Masanori Sekiya came with the sponsor from Japan and I knew that he was a safe pair of hands. But Ron said with Yannick he also got JJ Lehto. I thought ‘oh shit’. He was bloody quick, but he had had some problems and accidents. As it turned out it was a perfect driving crew.”
David Price Racing elected to run Goodyear tyres on his two cars, for Bscher and for Moody Fayed’s Harrods-backed car while the other McLarens, from GTC and from Jean-Luc Maury Laribiere and Fabien Giroix, ran on Michelins.
Le Mans in 1995 didn’t feature a classic entry, but the McLaren F1s still had formidable GT opponents
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Aware of Lanzante’s lack of experience, Hazell was given the choice of engineer to place with the team to help, and he picked Graham Humphrys. The Briton had plenty of Le Mans experience and was, as Hazell describes him: “[A] British standard race car engineer, just what you want.”
Humphrys entered the frame in an unusual fashion. He was technical director of RML running the Vauxhall Vectras in the British Touring Car Championship but agreed to meet with Hazell at the pre-race test.
“We were to fly from Cranfield and when Jeff knew I was coming I got a visit from McLaren the evening before to take down a wing and a bag of bits,” remembers Humphrys. “I got to Cranfield early in the morning and there was a twin-engine Cessna. On we get and they have bags of water to get the centre of gravity right, and they tried to fire it up but the battery was flat, so we had to jump start the plane. Then we got lost in the cloud and navigated by the railway lines and we eventually landed at Le Mans.”
The deal was done and the car entered, but McLaren’s customers continued to resent competing against the factory. The situation became worse when some of Lanzante’s crew went back to England to take part in a British club race. Short of personnel, there was little option but to put the McLaren test team onto the car.
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The prototypes were faster than the GT cars, but the GT cars had good fuel consumption, there were a lot of them including Ferrari F40s, Honda NSXs, Nissan Skylines, Toyota Supras, Callaway Corvettes and of course Porsche GT2s.
The run up to the race had hardly been straightforward for the Lanzante car. Preparations included changing the gearbox, the engine and employing whoever was around on Friday night to push the car onto a flat bed to run it at the airport at 2am. The only help available was drunk, but they helped to move the car around anyway.
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“On the last night of qualifying, Yannick said he had a problem changing from fourth to third,” says Humphrys. “JJ said he sometimes had a problem from third to fourth. We were having the debrief and then I turned to Sekiya and asked if he had any problems and he said ‘no’. Then he said, ‘well, occasionally…’ and that set off the alarm bells. We were told that the gearbox had been built at the factory and not to disturb it.”
Humphrys took the decision to open it anyway and was alarmed at what he found. “The gearbox was transverse, very wide across the car with long selector shafts and the third-fourth selector shaft had bent,” he said. “It was a synchromesh gearbox and the synchros were not sitting squarely. The gearbox guy came to apologise and said, ‘give it half an hour and it would have burned out’. That was Friday morning so we dismantled the gearbox and fixed that, then we had the engine issue.”
The engine had been revved to around 9,000rpm and needed inspection. BMW confirmed that it would be advisable to change it even though it could see nothing wrong with the original, and so that was added to the Friday job list. McLaren had also manufactured a strengthening of the wishbones after Lehto had ‘driven like a looney,’ according to Humphrys, and the car had one last surprise in store for the team.
“We were on the startline and there was a warning light on the fuel pump,” said Humphrys. “We actually ran the whole race on the reserve fuel pump.”
“The prototypes were faster but they struggled in the rain early on…”
The prototypes were faster, but didn’t have the reliability and struggled in the rain that was a feature for much of the early part of the race. However, it was not only them who were hitting problems. The McLarens all had clutch issues and the gear selection issue had returned. This time there was no option to take apart the gearbox.
“It was a cable operated gearshift system but the McLaren had a transverse gearbox so where the gear cables went in it was effectively a tin basin,” says Humphrys. “On a normal gearbox you have a selector inside the gearbox but this had it in this tin basin with two cables, one fore and aft and the other crossgate. Yannick said we had a problem with the gearchange. Water was getting onto the cables and pouring into the basin.
The Harrods-backed car of the Bells and Andy Wallace looked on for the win before clutch trouble. They still finished third
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“We got WD40, and when we changed the right rear we punctured the seal [around this basin] with the plastic tube and filled it with WD40. Other McLarens were coming past and struggling with the gearchange. Water and grit was going down the cables into the chamber, seizing the selector mechanism that led to other problems like the clutch. We got to it first, but others worked out what to do.”
There was also the issue of rain, which started at the end of the first hour and was a feature of the race throughout. It was in the wet that Lehto shone particularly during the night, maintaining a pace that no one else could match. Again, there are rumours of a special Michelin tyre that propelled the Finn through the puddles, but Hazell refutes that.
“In those days you were allowed to hand-cut tyres,” remembers the Briton. “The question was how many grooves and what pattern could be cut. Michelin developed a practice of doing something that they thought was right and then sticking it onto a Venturi [GT car] or something like that. If that looked good, they would put it on a McLaren that was further back and if that went well it went onto a lead car. The guys were cutting endlessly through the race. They had the perfect tyre the whole time – we had them stacked everywhere. Harrods were on Goodyear, so although you had JJ who was super, you also have got pretty ideal tyres from the French engineers and tyre fitters. They were fantastic.”
After Andretti crashed on Saturday night the two DPR cars led, but Bscher’s stopped during the night with a clutch failure, and later an accident, leaving Derek and Justin Bell, sharing with Andy Wallace, in the lead. By then, their nearest challenger was the Lanzante McLaren but it was clear that the Harrods-backed car could be vulnerable.
“[Senior Michelin staff] Pierre Dupasquier and Pascal Vasselon came to our pit, and there was a point where we didn’t decide which tyres went on, Michelin did,” says Humphrys. “Michelin looked at the conditions, and went to the one trailer that doesn’t open until the shit hits the fan. When Michelin go to Le Mans there are the tyres, and then there is this trailer, and if they have to open the trailer, that’s for the win.”
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At midday Lanzante’s inexperience came to the fore, and a story that was only established 25 years after the event came to light. Sekiya came into a crowded pit area in the Lanzante McLaren and the team discipline deserted them.
“I heard the jacks go down and knew there were no wheels on the car!”
“I was standing on the wall, I hear the jacks go up, the air guns taking the wheels off and the jacks going down and I knew immediately that it had no wheels on it!” says Hazell. “I didn’t have to see it; I never heard the wheel guns put the bloody wheels back on! What we were told at the time was that Sekiya had come running out of his motorhome in the rain and saw the guys putting slicks on, and said, ‘I am not going out on slicks’ and chaos ensued. I believed that for 25 years.
Dalmas, Lehto and Sekiya celebrate. McLarens finished first, third, fourth and fifth in what stands as one of the biggest Le Mans upsets ever
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“I walked into the pit after the stop, and James [Robinson] came to me and said ‘sorry about that’ but there was no damage to the car, it was all OK. I found out six months ago that when Sekiya came out and was about to get into the car, another voice on the radio came on and said ‘wets!’.”
Humphrys explains: “I was on the pitwall and communicating with the drivers and the deal was, ordinarily I would run the pitwall and the car, but Paul was in charge of his crew, and he was the guy who stopped the car and was in control of the pitstops. We were both on the radio and the problem is that when someone talks on the radio you expect it to be the person who should be on the radio! You don’t question and think ‘whose was that voice?’’”
It wasn’t the voice of either Humphrys or Lanzante. “This message came out, it caused complete pandemonium in the pitstop. It looked as though the team was in total chaos, but they were in full control. They just got side-swiped!”
The pitstop was completed and the car went out, but after the unidentified radio call, Hazell and all other McLaren personnel were told to leave the pit. “Paul was really upset and told us to f**k off, so we did but I didn’t know why he was upset,” says Hazell. “Off we went. James Robinson and I saunter up, hands in pockets to Ray Bellm’s garage, and Ray was on the timing stand. He came over to us and said, ‘what the hell are you doing here?’. We said we had been told to f**k off. He told us none of them [the privateers] could win; that [Lanzante’s] car was the only one that could and it had to win because it would put the value of their cars through the roof and we had to get back down there, now! So, we did, and the tempers had cooled by the time we returned.”
The Harrods car had, indeed, suffered a clutch problem and slipped to third behind the recovering Andretti in his Courage, and it was Lanzante’s car that carried the hopes of McLaren to the flag. It also carried quite a responsibility for the car company itself. “It rescued the company,” says Hazell bluntly. “It was fairytale stuff but the company was in trouble because the orders had dried up.
“Once we won the race, several things happened. We held on to the car because Ron had a line in the contract to say that we would keep it if we won; then BMW who had not really been involved, wanted to use the prestige in their advertising, so they came in for the next two years. There was a cost involved in them being able to come into the race programme. They also shovelled the BMW touring car development into my workshop because they were having problems with that; and it unlocked the wallets. People wanted the car and so we did McLaren F1 orange versions, sold them in five minutes flat, and then we went on to do the longtail. It helped the company because we were not in a good position before that.”
For Humphrys, the end of the weekend ended as bizarrely as his first encounter with the programme with the jump-started plane. Sitting outside his hotel for a post-race beer and pizza, his driver Sekiya emerged from the station opposite. “That road outside the station was a six-lane highway and he when he was only halfway across the road there was some screaming from my left down the hill,” he said. “They were Japanese visitors and they start ceremonial bows…at which point the traffic lights changed, and the cars and trucks started and the Japanese were running all directions. I thought this would be the first case of won on Sunday, dead on Monday.”
