12th - 13th June

The 1999 24 Hours of Le Mans was the 67th Grand Prix of Endurance

SUMMARY :

Anyone for charnpagne? Toyota had plenty to go around at the Friday press conference at Le Mans, with another few crates on ice for the seemingly-inevitable victory celebrations. But the greatest motor race in the world has a way of humbling such pretensions and, come Sunday evening, the remainder of Toyota's Moet was changing hands cheaply around the back of the hospitality unit.

With such a strong factory turnout, the last Le Mans 24 Hours of the century prornised to be the most spectacular in years. It didn't dis­appoint, as the much-fancied Toyota entries were goaded into a car-wrecking catfight by the (at times quite literally) flying Mercedes, leaving the way clear - almost - for BMW.

From the minute the green flag dropped, the action scarcely relented until night fell. Even as the Toyotas of Brundle and Boutsen peeled into the curve before the Dunlop bridge for the first time, it becarne clear that the pre-race favourites weren't going to have it all their own way. Runaway victory? Bemd Schneider must have been potholing in the Urals when the script was handed out, for try as they rnight, the Toyotas couldn't unstick the German ace fram their tail.

For almost an hour the leading trio appraached each bend like the last comer in a lO-lap sprint race, Schneider feinting and thrusting at the number two Toyota as if victory depended on getting past that very instant. And then things really hotted up.

At the first raund of pitstops carne the first sign of weakness from the Toyotas. Ukyo Katayarna pitted first fram an unspectacular eighth place, refuelled, then stalled on the way out, the engine. churning for almost 20 seconds before catching again. The tearn later identified the prablem as overheating fuel injectors. Boutsen also had difficulty getting away - then both Brundle and Schneider pitted on the sarne lap.

Brundle went in hot, almost driving over Michel Ferte's Courage in the pitlane entry. Schneider's tyres chirruped as he brought the Mercedes to a halt by his garage; Pedro Larny stood, seat in hand, ready to take over, but Schneider waved him away. With the fuel in, Schneider pulled away aÍld was coming up fast on the still-statiQnary Toyota as Brundle's refuellers disengaged.

The Briton's pit crew scattered as he gunned the engine and made a desperate lunge to the left to cut-off Schneider, but the German ace would not be denied and shot through the narrowing gap, rnissing the Toyota - and the pitwall - by inches. Brundle's engine then spluttered, stopped and took three attempts to restart.

Boutsen sneaked into a short-lived lead when Schneider was baulked by an uncooperative Yojiro Terada in the sluggish Autoexe shortly afterwards, but Schneider simply charged past at the next comer, locking up and slithering perilously close to Boutsen, then muscling past on the way out.

Toyota and Mercedes made a break at the start

"It's crazy," said Brundle after he'd handed over to Emanuele Collard after his first double stint. "Schneider was driving as if he was on a rallycross circuit. That's no way to tackle a 24-hour race."

This fierce three-way battle for the lead enabled the BMWs to stay in touch. But the key was their superior fuel consumption - the V12 LMR was able to stay out on the circuit for an extra lap in each stint compared with the rest of the prototype field. This; combined with slick pitwork - on average, their stops were eight seconds shorter than. other teams' - gave the German marque a impressive edge that would prove vital.

As the race progressed, the situation up front became more complicated. The Toyota pitstops were dogged by slow getaways, and both Collard and Suzuki, unable to match their co-drivers' pace, slipped down the order.

With Pedro Lamy playing catch-up after a poor pitstop in the number 6 Mercedes at the one-and-a-half-hour mark, 1998 winner Allan McNish stepped forward to provide the entertainment by reeling off a blistering set of fast lapso This culminated in a breath-takingly late outbraking manoeuvre on BMW's Jorg Muller for the lead on lap 45. Not bad for a . driver with barely a dozen laps' experience in the car before the race.

Later, Toyota's McNish was glowing With satisfaction. "The car got better and better as the run went on, and 1 feel more cornfortable with it now." Superstar status beckons.

Pity poor Peter Dumbreck, then. Not only did he have les s experience in the Mercedes CLR than his colleagues, he'd also barely had enough laps here to leam the circuit. And, in order to gain track position, the team had elected to give his first stint to the more experienced Bouchut. It was dusk when Dumbreck finally got in to the car for his first shift: make or break time.

The Japanese Formula 3 champion rose to the task, chasing down Boutsen's second placed Toyota and harrying him all the way down the Mulsanne Straight. But, on the run up to Indianapolis, disaster struck.

Tuckeq.. into Boutsen's slipstream at 200mph, Dumbreck's car lost downforce as they crest~<i the rlSe and shot into the air, spinninglike a frisbee through almost four complete rotations before crashing through the trees beyond the barrier. It was a horrifying accident, made palatable only by the news that Dumbreck had survived.

Mercedes irnmediately withdrew its sole remaining car - Mark Webber had flipped out of contention in the warm-up after a similar incident in Thursday qualifying - and barricaded itself inside the garage until the media scrum subsided.

In the course oí an hour, the form of the race had changed completely. Mercedes was gone, and the pre-race favourite had been hobbled by a hydraulic leak -losing Brundle more than half an hour in the pits - and a malfunctioning gearchange, which forced Kelleners to make a surprise stop.

Darkness wrapped the circuit and, as Brundle made a charge back up the field, he suffered a blow-out just before the second chicane on the Mulsanne and smacked into the barriers. With just one bank of headlights left to illuminate his path, Brundle tried to nurse fue car back to fue pits on three wheels.

Even at a crawling pace, the suspension and undertray tore itself apart against the tarmac and, just beyond Amage, the trail of sparks ceased and the headlights dimmed as Brundle accepted the inevitable: he wasn't going to get home.

Then, 45 minutes shy of the halfway mark, Brundle's tearn-mate Thierry Boutsen collided with Maisonneuve's Estoril Porsche at the Dunlop Curve and slarnmed into the tyre barriers, putting Toyota's cat-and-mouse chase with BMW temporarily on hold.

The pace car carne out for an hour-and-a quarter while marshals worked to remove the injured Boutsen - who sustained a fractured vertebra in the accident - and clean up a five-rnile oil trail left by Maisonneuve as he limped back to the pits.

All this left the previously-unfancied Audi R8Rs in the hunt for a podium slot. Off the pace they niay have been but, with the canny Reinhold Joest conducting affélifs from the pitwall, they were seldom out of contention.

Judging by the way both cars snicked through fth Ford chicane, handling wasn't fth problem. The sweet-soundiÍlg twin-turbo V8 could benefit from some; development, though - it couldn't match the". quicker cars down the straights or out of slo'Y; comers.

If the size of the fan base alone could propel a car to victory, the Panoz cars would have been untouchable. On its first visit to Le Mans, the new Roadster S, with its Batmobile styling and vocal Ford va engine, won over the crowd instantly.

The number 12 car of Brabham/Bemard/ Leitzinger looked good for third spot on the podium until a spate of gearbox problems consigned it to the pits in the small hours. When changing gearboxes twice failed to cure the problem, the drivers were told to soft-pedal the car to keep the gearbox oil temperature down. Despite this, they fought back from 12th to take seventh at the finish.

The second Panoz also kept the pit crew busy. Johnny O'Connell went gravel-collecting after an altercation with Kato's privateer BMW on the opening lap, and the car later suffered a split oilline which kept it in the pits for almost two hours. It finished 11th.

By dawn, JJ Lehto, in the lead BMW, sensed victory was in his grasp. "We're not pushing now," he said. "From now on it's about getting to the finish. "

Lehto's screne progress to the flag carne to a surprising end when, with five hours of the race to go, a roll-bar link worked loose and jarnmed the BMW's throttle open. Lehto slarnmed nose-first into the wall at the Porsche Curves and had to be lifted from the car, clearly in pain from a gashed knee.

Almost instantly the third Toyota - which had become so engrossed in its 'tortoise' role that Frank Biela's Audi was threatening to chase it down - picked up its pace and began to close in on the remaining factory BMW.

When ex-Grand Prix driver Ukyo Katayarna took the Toyota's wheel with two stints to go, there was everything to play foro It was possible, the tearn calculated, to come out of the final pitstop just half a minute behind the BMW with half an hour of the race remaining. Belying the car's sluggish early form, the Japanese driver set the fastest lap of the race as he reeled in the BMW.

But it was not to be. At 3pm, as Katayarna crested the rise which had launched Dumbreck into the trees, the Toyota's left rear tyre exploded and the car slewed alarmingly towards the Arrnco.

In an epic feat of car control, Katayarna kept the 200mph wobble in check, just kicking up a little dust as he rescued it from an appointment with the barrier.

Earlier that lap, an uncharacteristically unco-operative Thomas Bscher had squeezed Katayarna onto the kerbs at the Nissan chicane, and Toyota was quick to blame the owner-driver of the 1998-spec BMW. Bscher was unrepentant.

"1 slowed down in plenty of time - my car had no clutch. And 1 wasn't trying to help Schnitzer. They don't need my help," he said.

The four-minute stop required to fix Katayarna's car put the Japanese team out of contention for the lead, and allowed Pierluigi Martini to ease off and cruise to victory for BMW. The Italian driver was so overjoyed with his victory that he went on to drive an extra lap of honour - just for the hell of it.

"Two hours before the end of the race 1 thought to myself, 'You've waited to win this for a long time. Now you must push hard'," he said on the podium.

Katayarna cruised home to second, a lap adrift of the winner. "It's such bad luck that the other two Toyotas didn't make it to the finish," he adrnitted. "So much of this race is down to chance - just look at the near accident 1 had when my tyre blew."

Joest's Audi R8Rs carne home third and fourth, five and 11 laps adrift respectively. The Price- Bscher BMW took fifth, another laps behind. Sixth went to the Courage Nissan of Caffi/Montermini/Schiattarella, which had threatened to mug the Audis for the last podium position until it hit problems.

The 1999 race may not have been a case of the hare and. the tortoise, for the BMW is in no way a slow car. But it just goes to show that, at Le Mans, it doesn't always pay to get caught up in the wars at the very start.