Punching Above Their Weight

According to well-worn boxing lore, “A good big ’un will always beat a good little ’un.” Which is also usually true of multi-class sports car racing, in which prototype exotica shares the track with – and holds a performance advantage over – the production-based GT classes. But every rule has its exceptions, as these memorable feats of GT giant-killing attest.

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2003 ROLEX 24 AT DAYTONA

When opportunity presents itself, you must grab it. That’s exactly what The Racer’s Group did in a transitional year for Daytona’s enduro.

This was a race at which the quickest of the GT boys knew they had a chance. Grand-Am had replaced the full-house LMP900s with its own breed of pure-bred racer, the lower-tech Daytona Prototype, and a GT2 car wasn’t that much slower. What’s more, the DPs were unproven, plus there were only a handful of them entered. A betting man would have put money on a well-driven GT car creating an upset.

The Racer’s Group team of Kevin Buckler was one of those. Buckler had been loaned factory drivers Jorg Bergmeister and Timo Bernhard to share his lead car alongside himself and amateur racer Michael Schromm. Their Porsche 911 GT3-RS spent three quarters of the race in the lead and, with Bergmeister and Bernhard driving, was able to run at a similar pace to the DPs.

“Jorg and I weren’t cruising; we were pushing,” recalls Bernhard. “We knew that, when the DPs started having problems, we had a chance to make history.”

The Multimatic team’s Ford Focus-badged DP, which had been delayed early with a throttle problem, came back at the TRG Porsche. It got within seven seconds at one point, only to be tapped into a spin by a slower car and dropping to fourth.

It was, remarkably, a third win for a GT car at the Daytona enduro classic in four years. But it never happened again, as the DPs found speed and reliability.

2001 ROLEX 24

Lightning doesn’t strike twice, or so they say. It did at Daytona in the early noughties. Dodge and the French ORECA team did the unthinkable and beat the prototypes in 2000 (see page 64) and then Corvette Racing, the narrow loser in the first year of the decade, flew the flag for the GT brigade 12 months later.

Once again it was Dyson Racing that led the way for the prototypes, still armed with its venerable Riley & Scott MkIII. This time it was a massive 27 laps ahead when the pushrod Ford motor gave up with just three-and-a-half hours to go.

Step forward the Chevy Corvette C5-R of Ron Fellows, Franck Freon, Chris Kneifel and Johnny O’Connell to rumble to a win.

This one was a real race of attrition. When the GTS class Chevy moved to the top of the leaderboard an hour after the Riley retired, it enjoyed a lead of 19 laps over its nearest pursuer, a Porsche running in the baby GT class. That explains why the winning car spent a half hour in the pits in the closing stages, but merely adds to the surreality of the feat.

1994 24 HOURS OF LE MANS

Porsche claimed a 14th outright Le Mans victory with a racer-turned-road car-turned-racer. But the Porsche 962-based Dauer 962LM wasn’t conceived to beat the real prototypes entered in ’94, only to win the GT class.

Its conception was based on a piece of misinformation. Porsche was preparing to race an updated version of the GT class 911 Turbo S LM, but there was a problem – at least in the mind of Porsche research and development boss Horst Marchart. It was called the McLaren F1.

Marchart had heard that McLaren was preparing to take its new BMW-engined supercar to Le Mans and asked Porsche design legend Norbert Singer if his latest 911 derivative could beat it. The answer, after an inspection of a McLaren road car, was in the negative.

Singer turned to a road-going version of the 962 that Jochen Dauer had shown at the ’93 Frankfurt auto show.
Marchart gave the go-ahead, and the car was homologated and prepped in just three months, ready to take on the fictional McLaren challenge.

The two Dauer 962LMs weren’t as quick as the Courage or Toyota prototypes, but they were reliable. When the last pure racer hit problems with 90 minutes to go, the 962LM of Mauro Baldi, Yannick Dalmas and Hurley Haywood inherited the lead and the win.

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