The 24-hour race at Le Mans is now six weeks old and the vast American armada that came over and slaughtered “poor little Ferrari,” to use Enzo’s own words, has long since returned to the United States. But for numerous reasons I feel justified in referring back to that event and to the report that appeared in the July Motor Sport. With the race being held at the time that our printers normally have the magazine on the printing presses, everything was done in a rush, and older readers had to get out their magnifying glasses to read the tiny print.

Even so, the report was skimped and there was no room to express opinions or enlarge on any of the interesting points that arose during the 24 hours’ racing, while the inevitable inaccuracies crept in, that might have been avoided a day or two afterwards. When you have been up all night the brain is not all that clear and by 7pm on Sunday evening, when the weather had turned wet and dismal, it was easy to overlook things.

The big thing that was overlooked by a great many was that it made no difference what the Fords of McLaren/Amon and Miles/Hulme were doing as they got the chequered flag, for the race had finished at 4pm exactly, not when they arrived at the finishing line. Timekeepers can only work on car numbers and time readings as recorded at each crossing of the timing line, so with a race that is measured on time and not distance they cannot hope to know exactly where all the competitors are as the official clock reaches 4pm.

In such a long race it is unusual for the first and second car to be on the same lap so there is seldom any discussion about who is the winner, but it is open to calculation or estimation as to exactly where each car is at precisely 4pm on Sunday afternoon. Unless a car arrives at the timing line exactly at 4pm it must have covered a certain number of whole laps plus a portion of a lap, and most drivers try to judge their last lap to make the portion as near as possible to a complete lap. The timekeepers calculate the position of each car on the last lap by taking the time for the penultimate lap and assuming that the car keeps up the same average speed for the last lap.

If a car arrives at the finishing line one minute after 4pm then it is credited with its total number of laps recorded at 4pm, plus the portion of a lap it would have covered during the time of its penultimate lap less one minute, at an average speed the same as its penultimate lap. All this is written in the regulations and the numerous loop-holes or errors in the system are covered and generally speaking it gives a fair result.

In the case of the two Fords their penultimate lap was done in close company so their lap times must have been identical. As they were on the same total number of laps the timekeepers could only credit them with the same extra portion of a lap, so that as far as the timing clocks were concerned at 4pm the two Fords were somewhere between Arnage corner and the finish and since 4pm on Saturday they had covered exactly the same distance, except that they had not started side-by-side, Miles had been 20 metres ahead of McLaren on the line-up at the start, so therefore McLaren had covered that 20 metres more than Miles as 4pm on Sunday was reached.

“McLaren was the winner, whether he wanted to be or not”

What happened at 1sec or even 1min after 4pm on Sunday was of no interest to the timekeepers, for the race had finished. In actual fact the McLaren car crossed the finishing line something like a length in front of the Miles car, but Ken Miles was making it very obvious that he was holding back on orders. One of our keener readers was above the pits of the Shelby team, which is closest to the finishing line, and wrote very strongly to point this out, but, as I have said earlier, the race was officially already over, and McLaren was the winner whether he wanted to be or not. In the Shelby pits the team knew about the rules regarding “portions of the last lap before 4pm” and about the dead-heat rule, so there should not have been any confusion, but when you have been awake from 8am on Saturday morning it is not surprising that one’s thoughts are not too clear by 4pm on Sunday.