Derek Bell’s first Le Mans victory, 50 years on | Frankel’s Insight

It was not always this way. As my mind spools back half a century, I am reminded of the circumstances in which Derek Bell took the first of his five wins in the French classic. I am reminded too, that to this day only Jacky Ickx and Tom Kristensen have won more. Only this week Gordon Murray told me that in his view it should have been six, the Harrods-sponsored McLaren F1 Bell shared with his son Justin and Andy Wallace being the best package for the race and denied victory by a clutch that had been modified from standard.

But back to 1975, and you can tell from the fact it barely merits a mention in Bell’s autobiography My Racing Life what kind of race it was. Even so, the background to the race is interesting, and shines strong light on why it is so little remembered today.

The race has to be seen in the context of the 1974 OPEC-induced oil crisis after which there was no shortage of people questioning the wisdom of driving round and round in circles to no great effect, burning the planet’s precious, dwindling and now ruinously expensive supply of fossil fuels.

As some form of acknowledgement, the Automobile Club de l’Ouest (ACO) and made the race run to a fuel consumption formula. In short, unless your car could manage around 7.5mpg, you weren’t going to be able to race, which led both the Alfa Romeo team with its thirsty flat-12 engine, and Renault Alpine with its probably ever thirstier V6 turbo engine, to withdraw their entries. Additionally, Matra had finished its sportscar programme having won the previous three Le Mans on the trot, while Ferrari had withdrawn at the end of 1973.

Which left… Well, not very many, and not one from a recognised works OEM car manufacturer. It also meant the ACO was no longer aligned to rules of the governing body of sportscar racing, which led to Le Mans being excluded from the World Sports Car Championship to which it would not return until 1980.

But where many saw disappointment, one man saw opportunity. Teams managed by John Wyer had won Le Mans in the 1950s (Aston Martin in 1959) and 1960s (JWA Automotive Ford GT40s in 1968 and ’69), but despite dominating Porsche’s two World Sports Car Championship wins in 1970 and ‘71, had not yet done so in the 1970s. For the previous three years Wyer campaigned his Ford Cosworth DFV-powered Mirages, but against the mighty works Matras, Ferraris and Alfas he had scored just one lucky win (at Spa in 1973) and otherwise rarely even troubled the podium.

Wyer was meant to have retired, but with all the major opposition gone, the opportunity to have one last throw of the dice was just too enticing. The Mirage team would contest Le Mans, and Le Mans alone.

This meant a car could be built specifically for this race, and the new GR8 was precisely that, with a longer wheelbase, more slippery bodywork and a DFV detuned to around 375PS (276kW) at 8,000rpm to make sure it was within the fuel consumption limit. Bell was teamed with Ickx — not the first time they’d driven together, for they’d shared a Mirage to reach third place at Paul Ricard the year before — but this was the first of three occasions when the pair would win Le Mans together.

The story of the race is simply told. Ickx put the car on pole, it slipped briefly to second at the start of the race, regained the lead after the first pitstop and was never headed again. Its one lap margin of victory would have been more like six had the car not been delayed by a broken exhaust near the finish.

Yes, the win was against one of the weakest entries in Le Mans history, with only a couple of Ligiers to make life interesting, but the record books recall only that Ickx and Bell won their respective second and first Le Mans 24 Hours.

Bell was involved in many, far greater races at that track. His first, sharing a factory Ferrari 512S with Ronnie Peterson given no guidance from the team at all; his epic fightback with Ickx in 1983 having been several laps down only to lose the race by a single minute; the 1987 race he lost only because team-mate Klaus Ludwig ran their Porsche 926C out of fuel, or indeed that extraordinary race in the McLaren in 1995, which was leading with over 22 hours of the race run.

Even though Bell was 28 when he raced at Le Mans for the very first time, he still managed to race in all but one of the next 27 races, missing out in ‘84 when the Porsche factory team withdrew in protest at a last-minute rule change. In that time, he chalked up five wins, three second places and two thirds, a fitting record for Britain’s most successful participant in the world’s greatest motor race.

Images courtesy of Getty Images.