Latest news with #CircuitdeLaSarthe
Car and Driver
10 hours ago
- Automotive
- Car and Driver
Kremer K3 and Other Famous Le Mans-Spec Porsches for the Street
The 963 RSP is just the latest in a long line of Le Mans-spec Porsches taking to the public roads. Whether it's the roar of a flat-12 or the hiss of turbocharged boost, these cars are monstrously powerful. Here are three of the best to escape the bounds of the Circuit de la Sarthe. Part of the great charm of the Circuit de la Sarthe, where the 24 Hours of Le Mans is held each year, is that sections of the course are actually public roads. You see the top-level endurance racing monsters roaring around, the twilight of early dawn just beginning, and you can't help but wonder what it would be like if one of these beasts should escape the circuit and be driven on the road. It's a thrilling thought, and it seems to happen pretty consistently. The latest Le Mans race car for the road is the Porsche 963 RSP built specially as a one-off for Roger Penske. It's a wonderful machine, but it does come with an asterisk, as driving it in France is restricted to a set route. How street-legal it'll be back in the United States is up for some debate, though someone like Roger Penske has pretty effective leverage. Porsche And this isn't the first time a Le Mans-grade Porsche has been released onto the road. In fact, the 963 RSP is part of something of a tradition of racing-spec Stuttgart endurance racers hitting the public tarmac. Here's a look at three times it has happened before. Count Rossi's Porsche 917K In 1974, Count Gregorio Rossi di Montelera arrived at the factory gates of Porsche with an unusual request. One year earlier, Porsche had released the monstrously powerful 917/30 as the final iteration of the 917 available, and the automaker was moving into experimenting with a different chassis for racing. Might one of those old racing 917s be available for conversion to street specifications? Porsche Yes, one was: specifically, test chassis 030, as used for shaking down the then-new anti-lock braking systems. It had qualified in an Austrian endurance race but had been sitting around in storage since then. Porsche removed the fins and fitted a huge muffler to try to keep the 5.0-liter flat-12 to a bearable roar, the interior was covered in tan leather, and side mirrors were added. Porsche Were the European authorities ready to accept this barely modified racing machine as street-legal fare? They were not. Instead, Count Rossi somehow managed to talk officials in Alabama into sending him a registration as an antique vehicle. So-equipped, he hopped in the car and drove a 620-hp, sub-2000-pound race car from Stuttgart to Paris. What a hero. Walter Wolf's Kremer K3 Le Mans Speaking of heroes, the 1979 running of the 24 Hours of Le Mans was abuzz with the presence of actor and racer Paul Newman in the pits. Part of the Dick Barbour racing team campaigning a turbocharged 935, Newman very nearly won the race, but a stuck wheel nut meant a second-place finish. The winning car was a Porsche 935 prepared by the Kremer brothers of Cologne, Germany. Kremer Racing That same year saw Walter Wolf winding down his F1 racing efforts and looking for new adventures. If you've not come across Wolf before, he's basically the Dos Equis Most Interesting Man in the World, but for real. He came up from post-war poverty to multimillionaire status, starting as a diver on deep-sea oil rigs. He once won a Ferrari on a handshake bet with Enzo on the outcome of the 1977 Monaco Grand Prix. He's the reason the Lamborghini Countach got its wing and huge rear tires. He even had his own cologne. After owning a series of prototype Countach models, Wolf saw the results of the '79 Le Mans and thought one of those 935 K3s sounded like a pretty good commuter. So he commissioned one, complete with a full leather interior and air conditioning. It rode higher than the factory racers and ran on shaved wet-weather tires rather than full slicks. It ran a turbocharged flat-six that made 740 horsepower at 8000 rpm. Kremer Racing Eight years before the Ferrari F40 debuted, the Kremer K3 went 210 mph on the unrestricted autobahn. Wolf said that he used to have a small aircraft fly ahead with spares when he drove between Cologne and his home in the south of France, as it would burn through a set of rear tires on the trip. Schuppan Porsche 962LM In 1984, Australian/British racing driver Vern Schuppan won the 24 Hours of Le Mans in a Porsche 956. At the same time, he won the All Japan Endurance Championship in, you guessed it, Japan. Soon enough, he had set up his own racing team and was building a carbon-fiber variant of the 962, the 956's successor. One day, a Japanese racing enthusiast inquired if a road-legal version might be possible. It was, and here it is. Boutsen Classic Cars Built in 1991, the 962LM received a carbon-fiber chassis and used a turbocharged flat-six with quad cams and four valves per cylinder. It made around 600 horsepower, slightly detuned from the racing variant but plenty for punting its approximately 2000-pound curb weight down a billiard-table-smooth Japanese freeway. Boutsen Classic Cars Schuppan planned to sell multiples of the 962LM and the more GT-styled 962CR that followed, but the financial state of things in the early 1990s was more than a little wobbly. A handful were built, and this 1991 example was quite famously pictured parked up on street plates in front of one of Japan's ubiquitous Family Mart convenience stores. Pure Le Mans, totally street legal. Brendan McAleer Contributing Editor Brendan McAleer is a freelance writer and photographer based in North Vancouver, B.C., Canada. He grew up splitting his knuckles on British automobiles, came of age in the golden era of Japanese sport-compact performance, and began writing about cars and people in 2008. His particular interest is the intersection between humanity and machinery, whether it is the racing career of Walter Cronkite or Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki's half-century obsession with the Citroën 2CV. He has taught both of his young daughters how to shift a manual transmission and is grateful for the excuse they provide to be perpetually buying Hot Wheels. Read full bio
Auto Car
21 hours ago
- Sport
- Auto Car
Early bird catches the WEC: why Le Mans mornings are the best
Common logic holds that the Le Mans 24 Hours is at its most magical at night. And sure, it's incredible watching hypercars blast past in the dark at close to 200mph – but the rest of it can be a bit much. On Saturday night, the Circuit de la Sarthe morphs into a big party venue, and it can be an overwhelming sensory experience. The humidity that can build over Le Mans in mid-June clings on after nightfall, making it stifling and uncomfortable. And there's a mass of humanity everywhere, drinking, partying and swirling in and out of the spectator zones, funfair and campsites. With all this and the bright lights, loud noises and smells of various foods being cooked, it's loud, bustling and boisterous. For someone who isn't much of a partying type, it's a lot, and I'm always relieved to escape the mayhem. Besides, there's a much better time to enjoy Le Mans. You just need to get up early: because compared with Saturday night, Sunday morning at Le Mans is a different world – and, in my mind, an immeasurably better, more pleasurable one. The humidity fades overnight, and as the sun breaks under clear skies, it's usually fresh and welcoming. And, aside from the 50-plus high-powered race cars roaring round, it's peaceful. The throngs of fans have melted away, aside from a handful of fellow early starters (and the odd late-night reveller asleep on the ground), so you have your run of prime spectator spots.
Top Gear
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Top Gear
Ranking iconic gaming characters by their chances of winning Le Mans
Advertisement It's that time of year again. As the WEC's finest machinery assembles at the Circuit de la Sarthe and laps the famous layout at speeds that shrink its 8.4 miles down to karting track proportions, it's hard not to feel – well, a bit left out. Deep down, we all suspect ourselves capable of driving to a stunning Le Mans victory, and what's especially appealing about that shower thought is the certainty that it'll never be disproven. What's even harder to disprove, though, is the utterly abstract concept of strapping in a gaming icon and assessing their chances of taking the win, based on, er… Advertisement - Page continues below No no no, absolutely not. While at first glance he might seem ideally positioned to translate his credentials as 'notoriously fast eulipotyphla' to on-track performances, the fact is that Le Mans Prototypes are designed to be driven while seated, and maintaining this position for extended stints would cause unbearable agony for Sonic given that his back is made of needles. This would also create a hazard for his co-drivers when swapping seats, and safety must take priority. We know Sonic has a passionate and fiercely protective community, but we simply can't look past this fundamental incompatibility. Sonic ranks last. You might like If we're talking about stamina, a game character who's been around since 1980 deserves at least a passing mention. Most protagonists would be thoroughly sick of chasing after little white spots and being chased by ghosts by now, but given that Pac-Man finds a way to re-release himself as a new 'remastered collection' almost hourly, that's clearly not the case here. However, the cold, hard truth of the matter is that no one's sure what Pac-Man actually is, and that makes it impossible to imagine the logistics of even getting him into a Le Mans prototype and ensuring he can reach the wheel and pedals, let alone racing to a decent competitive standard. We're talking about a sentient yellow circle here. Stop being silly. Advertisement - Page continues below Lara Croft - Tomb Raider series It's bad news for fans of shooting monkeys and figure-hugging expedition attire: we don't fancy Lara's chances as a WEC competitor either. Although her later instalments handle much more compliantly, for most of her life Lara Croft has had the turning circle of a wardrobe and guiding her along even simple corridors felt like performing keyhole surgery with a PlayStation 1 pad. And did you ever get her to drive the boat in that Venice level from Tomb Raider 2 ? Yeah, good luck round the Dunlop chicane with those deft inputs. Kratos - God of War series Gaming's own Dan Ticktum has undeniable physical prowess, and could probably shoulder press a Ferrari 499P and run it around the track above his shoulders as quickly as he could drive it. However, we're talking about a character famed for going to extreme and ruthless ends to enact vengeance on all who slight him. A guy who rips the key off a ship captain's neck and kicks him into the jaws of a hydra, and then double-kills the captain's soul again in a subsequent game. At no point did the captain even shoot Kratos a hard glance. It's just hard to see how he's going to get around turn one without a race-ending incident, much less stay on the good side of the stewards for an entire 24 hours. Nathan Drake - Uncharted series 'Hoo boy! This thing's fast!' Understood Nathan. Positive deltas this phase please. 'They should call this place the Circuit de la awesome sauce!' Copy that. 'Who left that chicane there?!' Haha. Do try to concentrate please, Nathan. Link - Legend of Zelda series Link lies somewhere in the middle of this empirical hierarchy, not because his pace is likely to be mid-pack but because he's so difficult to assess. On one hand, he demonstrates both instinctive driving skills and a sound understanding of automotive engineering in Tears of the Kingdom which would surely come to the fore over the full span of the iconic endurance race. He's also an able competitor during his unlikely cameo in Mario Kart 8 . On the other hand, he also has a proclivity for going off and doing his own thing for many hours, regardless of how world-endingly pressing the task he's been entrusted with may be. Ganon is literally planning to dominate the entire kingdom, Link . Is now really the time to refine your vegetable kebab recipe? That, along with his tight-lipped comms approach, means we simply can't trust him to stay on task and keep plugging away with competitive lap times for a full stint. A real shame. Advertisement - Page continues below Ellie Williams - The Last Of Us Another tricky character to pin down. In the pros column, as a young child she survived countless combat encounters with survivalists, furious mushrooms and falling buildings and remained impressively unphased throughout. A multi-car pile-up would barely raise her heart rate, after the things she's seen. Her guitar playing would also provide a soothing garage atmosphere, so there's that. In the cons: she has a small sliver of that Kratos -like lust for vengeance which may cause some steward-troubling overtakes or over-zealous, Fernando Alonso-style overtakes which redefine track limits. Master Chief - Halo series Speaking of the great Alonso, there's a striking quote of his during a particular podcast appearance in which he describes his approach to racing as 'executing as a robot'. And who exemplifies that approach better in gaming than cyborg raconteur and Warthog terroriser, Master Chief? Master Chief is not a robot. His precise anatomy under that familiar green armour is unclear, but it's not quite human. Neither is his reaction to stressful and traumatic events, in which he finds himself roughly every 40 seconds. He simply thinks of a cool deadpan line, vocalises it with all the inflection of a tranquilised Jack Dee, and continues along his way. We feel sure this will yield results over the course of a full day and night of racing. As such, we're willing to look past the millions of times Master Chief has written off a Warthog Jeep. Advertisement - Page continues below Princess Peach - Mario Kart series Definitely not Mario . Too obvious. Too cheerful. No, instead it's someone from the Mario Kart roster who often flies under the radar. Who makes you think twice before firing that red shell, because it would seem a bit unkind. It's Princess Peach . With those cutesy voice lines, her approach to racing seems so earnest, it's impossible not to feel a pang of guilt for launching her into orbit with an item. And yet how quickly we forget when it's Peach herself behind the blue shell that orchestrates our downfall within sight of the finish line. Like Alex Albon, she's an agent of chaos masquerading as pleasantness personified, able to pick her way through a wreckage of her own making without putting a target on her exhaust. That's a skill that will serve her well around the Circuit Bugatti. Solid Snake/Big Boss - Metal Gear Solid series Mystic supersoldier and LMP-spec hypercar isn't a logical match. But the more we think about it, the more we're convinced that Metal Gear Solid 's various and confusingly similar protagonists could absolutely win at Le Mans. For starters, few game protagonists display levels of patience or stamina akin to Big Boss's. Anybody who can prevail in that legendary sniper battle against The End in MGS3 surely stands a decent chance over a 24-hour endurance race, and that's before we even factor in all those times we made Big Boss drive a Jeep at full speed through the desert while ducking down into the footwell. He's also perfectly happy to subsist on unspecified 'rations' over the course of his deployments, which is a real mark of the man's stamina, and his aptitude for radio communication simply can't be called into question. If there's any small blotch – and it's barely a smudge, really – on his otherwise gleaming application, it would be the likelihood that upon winning he'd force us to watch four and a half hours of cutscenes revealing that Alpine was actually FOXHOUND, all the pit mechanics had been replaced by AI and that the whole event was a giant conspiracy in which both a ghost and a giant nuclear mech were somehow involved. See more on Gaming
Telegraph
2 days ago
- Automotive
- Telegraph
Iron Dames: Why only all-female team racing at Le Mans have ‘advantage'
Once the sun has set at the Circuit de la Sarthe in the Pays de la Loire region, all that is visible are the slivers of light from headlight beams and the track LEDs. Driving around the 8.47-mile track, concentration cannot waver for a second and when news comes over the radio that rain is falling, Le Mans 24's greatest test begins. 'Everything about Le Mans is challenging,' Iron Dames GT3 racing driver Rahel Frey tells Telegraph Sport. 'The most difficult part is when it starts to rain during the night because you cannot see how much or where exactly [it is falling] in Le Mans. With such a long track in some corners it's already a lot of rain, some parts of the track is not raining yet at all. 'Then everybody gets stressed about communication, [it's] super important to make the right call, so rain during the night, that's the real challenge for me.' Endurance motorsport is like nothing else and Le Mans is the pinnacle. Formula One drivers and Moto GP riders might test themselves at the highest speeds, putting their nerves and bodies on the line, but racing for a team in a 24-hour event is different. Cars have been known to reach over 200mph in a battle to complete the most laps in the time limit on the circuit that has hosted the event since 1923. Drivers must pit themselves against each other without breaking the car and while sharing stints behind the wheel as part of a three-person team. The length of the race involves sleeping in bizarre stints and eating bowls of pasta at 3am. It is far from a sprint to the finish line. 'Not here just to be female in male-dominated sport' On Saturday, 62 cars and 186 drivers will line up to take to the start line across three disciplines – Hypercar, LMP2 and LMGT3. Of those 186 drivers, only five are women, including three from Iron Dames, the only all-female team at the event. There is no missing the Iron Dames on track, nor what they stand for. The bright pink rear wing and driver race suits make sure of that. Founded in 2018 by Deborah Mayer with the goal of supporting and promoting women in motorsport, the team have focused on endurance racing from the outset, competing in their first Le Mans in 2019. Frey, who first started karting in 1998, had never envisioned going into the endurance side of the sport before the opportunity presented itself and while she is a proud member of Iron Dames, first and foremost she is a racing driver. 'When we are in the car and we race, we don't feel that we are females. We are a driver and we want to go as fast as possible. We want to do our very best,' Frey says. 'We are here to compete, we are not here to be the Iron Dames, we are not here to just be female in a male-dominated sport, we are really here to be competitive.' Frey also thinks being an all-female team can also come with benefits, adding: 'I believe that we females who do endurance racing, we have an advantage. Because we communicate openly with each other but also with the team I would say – so far it has only helped me in endurance racing.' 'The biggest race of the year' Le Mans 24 is part of the 'Triple Crown of Motorsport', with the Monaco Grand Prix and Indianapolis 500 – and the Iron Dames will be racing against several drivers who are familiar with a Formula One car, including Jenson Button, Kevin Magnussen and Mick Schumacher. 'There is so much hype around the fact that it's Le Mans,' says Michelle Gatting, who has raced for six years with Iron Dames. 'I hype myself up because I know it's a little more. It's the biggest race of the year. Then I put a lot of expectations on myself, I want to prove, I want to deliver, but it's a lot of pressure to manage.' Gatting and Frey both have the drive and desire to continue to improve, eventually perhaps competing in the Hypercar discipline. Unfortunately for Gatting, she was forced to withdraw from this year's event after suffering a freak pit-lane injury and fracturing her foot during a test day. She has been replaced by Sarah Bovy but she is still well-placed to discuss the unique aspects of Le Mans. 'Endurance racing is special because it's really a team sport,' explains Gatting. 'Some people would say [we] drive around in circles. I would not really say it's driving around in circles, but we just really love what we do. 'We love our sport and it's so special going in those races, the 24-hour races, when you go into the night and it's such a special atmosphere. You see the sun set, you see the sun rise and it's quite unique. It's just the passion and the love for the sport and I think that's why we love endurance racing.' That message is echoed by the youngest driver on the team, 33-year-old Frenchwoman Celia Martin, who hopes to have the home crowd on her side at her first Le Mans. 'I'm just living the dream,' says Martin. 'I finally get the opportunity to race in a GT3, to race amazing championships and to race with super cool team-mates with a lot of experience, especially now for Le Mans – I could not have asked for more.'
