1983 24 Hours of Le Mans
Al Holbert took the car out for the final stint at a careful pace, with Bell closing in relentlessly, although he was suffering from damaged front brakes.
[1] With IMSA still using their own sliding weight-scale to balance engine capacity, the major American endurance races, at Daytona and Sebring, could not be part of the World Championship.
It was led by factory teams from Porsche, Lancia and Mazda and over a dozen specialist constructors meant there were 34 cars that could be classed as "works" entries.
The 1983 iteration was 20 kg lighter and had improved front suspension and the new Bosch Motronic engine-management system to modulate and tune the engine performance.
Jochen Mass was in the second car, paired with the new wunderkind, Stefan Bellof who had just stunned the endurance world a fortnight earlier with a blistering qualifying lap-record at the Nürburgring in its last year of full competitive use.
[16] The Kremer brothers had achieved Le Mans glory in 1979 and established a successful range of modified Porsche 935 specials for customer sale.
[16] German Jürgen Lässig had now formed his own team, along with Hans Obermeier and sponsorship from Hugo Boss fashion.
His regular co-driver in the WEC was Axel Plankenhorn and for this race they were joined by female single-seat racer, South African Desiré Wilson.
Fitted with twin KKK (Kühnle, Kopp & Kausch) turbos and a Weber-Marelli engine-management system, the engine could put out 650 bhp on 1.2-bar boost.
Three cars were brought to Le Mans, once again built around their Grand Prix drivers: Michele Alboreto/Teo Fabi, Piercarlo Ghinzani/Hans Heyer (on loan from Joest) and Alessandro Nannini/Paolo Barilla/Jean-Claude Andruet.
However, within a week of Karl Ludvigsen leaving as Ford-Europe VP, that program was also cancelled, as was improvement to the problematic Cosworth DFL engine.
[27] With limited resources, the small WM team opted out of running a full Championship season, instead choosing to focus on its home race, at Le Mans, with the new P83 model.
Another recent garagista, Alain de Cadenet, came on-board as a driver alongside Courage, bringing with him Murray Smith as team manager.
So there was only the American Lola privateer Ralph Kent-Cooke present, back for only his car's second race, after its first outing at last year's Le Mans.
Seger & Hoffmann kept the intellectual property of the cars and, together with Brun, upgraded the design and built a new C83 version with a 2.7-litre turbo Porsche engine.
Brun entered the polyglot threesome for Le Mans but he wrote off the BMW-powered Sehcar in a big accident that broke his arm at the Nürburgring round.
Swiss driver Max Welti crashed the car while testing at Monza, so it arrived at Le Mans repaired but under-prepared for their pay-drivers Garcia/Montoya/Naon.
[12] Having previously run BMW M1s at Le Mans, this year Steve O'Rourke (band manager for Pink Floyd) commissioned Len Bailey (formerly at Mirage) to design him a Group C car.
He employed Colin Bennett Racing (who had been running against Mason in the British F1 Championship) to upgrade the car with bigger brakes, a longer tail and improved cooling.
The new 717C was designed by the technical team under Takuya Yura at Mazda's in-house division, Mooncraft, the chassis was of aluminium with an aerodynamic Kevlar bodyshell.
Alan Docking was team manager in Europe, with British drivers Jeff Allam, Steve Soper and James Weaver in one car, while Japanese works-drivers Yojiro Terada, Yoshimi Katayama and Takashi Yorino had the new chassis, fitted with upgraded suspension.
Lester Rey designed the Harrier, with a very light aluminium monocoque chassis, and the 13B rotary was assembled at Engine Shop, Silverstone.
He was asked by the Jolly Club team principals Martino Finotto and Carlo Facetti (latterly racing Lancias), to build a car for the new Junior class.
These included former 935-owners Swiss Claude Haldi and the Spanish Alméras brothers (with 3.3-litre cars) while German Edgar Dören ran the smaller engine version.
[41] There was a bad omen for Roger Dorchy, whose WM had to be pushed off the grid to fix an oil-leak, and costing him almost half an hour.
[42][18] Casualties in the first hour included Jaussaud's Rondeau (oil leak), Richard Cleare's Kremer (blown turbo) while Birrane's Ford ran out of fuel when Migault drove too hard in the opening shift.
Behind them was the best of the rest, with the Cooke Lola now the leading non-German car in 11th, just ahead of Vic Elford's older Rondeau M379, the Sauber and the WM in 14th.
Bell finally took the lead at 6.30am, but held it for only fifteen minutes, when he came to a stop at Mulsanne – a wire from his Motronic engine system had come adrift.
[26][44] French hopes had taken a dive when the Pescarolo/Boutsen Rondeau retired at breakfast time with engine failure, while the British fraternity lost the Nimrod due to a broken connecting rod later in the morning, after running as high as 13th.
[35] They had spent most of the afternoon in close proximity to their stablemate, which had lost over an hour early in the race on Saturday fixing bodywork after a tyre exploded at top speed on the Mulsanne straight.
