1993 24 Hours of Le Mans
A consolation prize for Toyota was that their privateer teams claimed the Category 2 class-win, beating the Porsches and Courages, finishing 5th and 6th with Irvine's car making it back up to 4th.
Outside of Le Mans, the Sportscar World Championship in 1992 had very poor fields and in October the FISA (Fédération Internationale du Sport Automobile) Commission had officially cancelled the series that had been running, in various guises, continuously since 1953.
[1] The idea to run the premier class on F1-derived engines had proven to be a spectacular failure with negligible interest from the major car manufacturers, and the costs too high for customer teams.
[1] So, the ACO took the sensible step of drafting their own class-list similar to the previous year, but also augment it with the exciting new crop of supercars coming onto the market:[1][3] The Category 2 cars could now be allowed to run without the FIA fuel or weight restrictions.
[9] Finally, 1993 saw the first appearance of Bruno Vandestick as the official race announcer, which he has held now for over 30 years – a role that starts at 7am on Saturday until after the presentations on Sunday afternoon with only a 4-hour rest overnight.
Instead, when it was realised that Le Mans would be the only race in the calendar and a ‘last hurrah’, team director Jean Todt and his engineers adapted the existing gull-wing chassis to a C-variant.
Last year's winner Yannick Dalmas raced with Teo Fabi (latterly at Toyota) and F1 veteran Theirry Boutsen, while the third car was driven by young French debutantes Éric Hélary and Christophe Bouchut with Australian 4-time IMSA champion Geoff Brabham.
The second Joest car had regular team drivers Frank Jelinski and "John Winter" joined by Manuel Reuter, who had won the race in 1989 with Sauber-Mercedes.
Initially, Venturi bought a majority share of Gérard Larrousse F1 team, then an in-house competition department was set up, led by Stéphane Ratel.
Jacadi attracted much local media attention by signing former F1 hero Jacques Laffite and French TV talk-show host Christophe Dechavanne.
With the Lotus Formula 1 team in dire straits, a tilt at Le Mans in the revived GT category was seen as a good avenue for promoting the new car.
Smith had periodically raced Group C2 cars at Le Mans over the past 15 years, and was joined by a regular co-driver Stefano Sebastiani, a London-resident Italian, and Japanese Ferrari driver-journalist Tetsuya Ota.
[36][37] The Centenaire (named for the 100th anniversary of the Automobile Club de Monaco) had a 5.5-litre V12 Lamborghini engine and was the first GT car made of an all carbon-composite body and chassis.
Ballabio was approached by Georgian businessman Aleksandr Marianashvili, a fellow Monaco resident who offered to continue production in a factory in Tbilisi.
[14][37] Further tests at the Monza circuit confirmed the lack of performance, so it was decided to replace the engine with the 600 bhp 3.5-litre Subaru V12 developed by Motori Moderni for F1 several years previously.
In attempting to better their times, both teams damaged their chances: Alliot wrote his Peugeot off that evening in a big accident at almost 200 km/h (120 mph) in the Porsche Curves, while on Thursday Eddie Irvine spun at Mulsanne corner pushing with his car fitted with a special qualifying engine.
[41] Another driver to have a wild ride on Wednesday night was Andreas Fuchs, who suddenly found his Jaguar had no brakes approaching the first chicane on the back straight at full speed.
[8][43][7][45] The honorary starter this year was René Monory, President of the French Senate, who had started his working life as a mechanic and was an avid motor-racing fan.
[50][12] Getting back onto the pace, Sekiya had been running third, but then lost almost two laps in the pits for the most inane of reasons: a loose drinks-bottle, made more difficult with Raphanel's car also getting repaired.
[51][50][16][5] This left the two remaining Jaguars leading the class ahead of the Toison d’Or Venturi and the Monaco Média Porsche of veteran Jürgen Barth.
However, a wake-up call to the changeable nature of Le Mans came at 2.30am when Fabi brought the leading Peugeot into the pit with acrid smoke in the cockpit from faulty wiring.
The two Peugeots swapped the lead through the rest of the night, depending on the pit strategy, as the young drivers picked up their pace and started pushing harder.
Despite making it back to the pits and half an hour's repair, the cooling system had been damaged, and when Belmondo took it out again the engine overheated and the car was soon retired.
Nagasaka was not up to the speed of his team-mates, so Ratzenberger and Martini did excellent work through the night keeping the car leading Category 2 over the Trust Toyota (179), split by the third Peugeot in 5th.
[52][22] At 7am Hélary had his rear wing damaged by tyre debris thrown up, losing the lead, then at 8.50am Boutsen lost a lap with a fractured exhaust costing five minutes.
[18][43] Then Lavaggi had a wheel come off his CK6 in the Porsche curves at speed but did make it back to the pits, while the third car was nursing a faulty clutch and needed a gearbox change.
[33][44][12] Ironically, despite the failures, this was Toyota's best race to date, with both the turbo-cars finishing, in 5th and 6th beating their perennial rivals Porsche to take the Category 2 class victory, and the remaining works car in 8th.
A month later, Toyota bought out Anderson Motor Sports, running its rally cars, and set up Toyota Motorsport GmbH in Cologne for a European racing programme[12] This was still the time when top-class single-seat drivers would do endurance racing, and a few of the Le Mans entrants were moving into Formula 1:[57] Eddie Irvine started his F1 career with Jordan at the end of the year.
In 1994, Paul Belmondo joined Pacific Racing while David Brabham and Roland Ratzenberger were in the new Simtek team which ended terribly, with the fatal accident to the Austrian at the ill-fated San Marino Grand Prix that also saw the death of Ayrton Senna.
There was high anticipation on the upcoming GT rules, with a number of supercar manufacturers eligible and potentially interested, with an equivalency formula to provide close racing and a degree of parity with the prototypes.
