Ferrari’s sports car comeback after 50 years

Now compare that to its fortunes in sports car racing. True its 512S had offered scant opposition to the Porsche 917 in the early part of the decade, but once the 3-litre formula of 1972 sent Porsche scampering off to play in Can-Am instead, the Scuderia’s cars were, well, allow me to illustrate.

That year (1972) there were 11 rounds of what was then called the World Sportscar Championship and Ferrari won 10 of them. It didn’t win the 11th, Le Mans, because it didn’t enter. The Scuderia had attended the test day in April, Jacky Ickx putting in the fastest time of the day in the all-conquering 312PB, but in a 24-hour test with just one car, its clutch broke after 17hrs 30mins and that was that: the Matra team was piling all its efforts into an all-out assault on its home race and Ferrari didn’t want to come up short on the day.

The 312PB was deemed good enough to go racing again with only minor (mainly aerodynamic) changes in 1973, though with Matra now contesting the entire championship, it was anything but the easy ride of the year before. Indeed while Ferrari still ended up scoring more points than Matra, the rules said you could only keep points from seven of the 10 rounds that made up the season. Matra only scored in seven events so kept all its points, while Ferrari had scored in all bar one, so ended up dropping 22 points, the difference between first and second place in the championship.

Without that curious rule, Ferrari would have been champions with ease. And that was that: Enzo quit sports car racing, precipitating an immediate, staggering uplift in fortune for the F1 team: a second place finish in the Constructors’ championship in 1974 presaging a hat-trick of outright wins from 1975-77.

It is perhaps worth mentioning just how trick that 312PB was by the time it took part in Scuderia Ferrari’s last Le Mans for 50 years. Take, for example, the 3-litre flat-12 engine common to both its F1 and sports car machines. Colonel Ronnie Hoare, the famed UK Ferrari importer, was once shown a single conrod for one of these engines by Enzo himself. Machined from titanium, Enzo said it cost him £1000 to make and obviously you needed 12 per engine, and with who knows how many engines required to service the needs of usually six chassis used either for racing or as T-cars throughout the course of the season. £1000 in 1973 is almost exactly £10,000 today. So even if each car only used two engines all season long, according to Enzo, his bill in today’s money would amount to little less than £1.5 million for conrods alone… Now extrapolate that thinking across an entire car.

How fast? I’ve always found it instructive that the fastest ever lap of the original Spa-Francorchamps – longer even than Le Mans in that magnificent but lethal configuration – was made not by an F1 car, but a 312PB. It was set in qualifying for the 1973 1000km race by Jacky Ickx. Marshalling who knows what kind of courage, he did a lap in 3min 12.7sec at an average of just over 163mph. Now remember, this was a car with just 3-litres under its engine cover, over a lap that included a very tight hairpin, half a century ago. I can’t do a like for like comparison with an F1 car because the Belgian Grand Prix was no longer held at Spa, but the last time it had been was just three years earlier and Jackie Stewart’s pole time in his March 701 was over 15 seconds slower at an average of less than 150mph.

At Le Mans in 1973 the proper opposition came entirely from Matra, and a quick look at the rival driver line-ups gives an idea of just how serious sports car racing was in this era. For Matra came François Cevert and Jean-Pierre Beltoise in one car, Patrick Depailler and Bob Wollek in another. Jean-Pierres Jabouille and Jassaud crewed a third, Gérard Larrousse and Henri Pescarolo the fourth. In other words, just about every world-class French driver of the era.

Ferrari, as it had always been, was not in the least concerned about where its drivers came from, so long as they were the best of the best. And they certainly were: it only sent three cars to France but they were crewed by, respectively, Carlos Reutemann and Tim Schenken, Arturo Merzario and Carlos Pace, and Jacky Ickx and Brian Redman, six drivers from six different countries, all absolute legends, only one of whom was from Italy.

Predictably enough, these seven Ferraris and Matras qualified in the first seven places, but it was Merzario’s time in his Ferrari that claimed pole from Ickx in second place with the fastest Matra third, 1.8sec off pole-sitting pace. And it was Merzario’s task to play ‘hare’ and go out hard from the start in the hope of forcing upon the Matras a pace they’d struggle to maintain. Casting a sacrificial car in this role was a brave approach given Ferrari had fewer cars to lose than Matra, but it was a challenge to which little Art rose magnificently.

Despite an engine detuned and rev-reduced for longevity to 405bhp at 10,500rpm from the 470bhp at 11,800rpm used for 1000km races, he pulled out a lead of 40 seconds in the first hour, rising to 80 by the time hopped out after three hours to let Pace have a go. But he was soon back in the pits, drenched in fuel from a leaking valve in the injection system. With the other two Ferraris running to a very conservative schedule, three Matras now occupied the first three places.

But it wasn’t to last. The Matras started having problems – explosive deflations seriously delayed two cars while a third, driven by Depailler and Bob Wollek, retired. A third high-speed puncture put the Beltoise/Cevert car in the wall and suddenly things looked decidedly brighter for the red cars. By midnight the 312PB of Schenken and Reutemann held a healthy lead.

But the moment one team had become dominant, that seemed the cue for the gods that appear to control this most unpredictable of races to grab hold of the pendulum and give it a good swing in the other direction; in this case causing the engine in the lead Ferrari to eat itself. So it became a battle between Ickx/Redman for Ferrari and the Matra of Pescarolo and Larrousse, and it ground on for most of Sunday. The lead swapped continuously with each pitstop, both cars clearly struggling, but overall it was the Ferrari that stayed ahead. Then the same fuelling problem that had put Merzario and Pace out of contention hit the Ickx car. So Matra would win.

Or would it? With little more than two hours to go at a routine pitstop Pescarolo hit the Matra’s start button to be met with resounding silence. The now fixed Redman/Ickx Ferrari started to close the gap. By the time the Matra rejoined the circuit 20 minutes later its lead had all but gone and Ickx was hunting it down, just as he’d hunted down Hans Herrmann’s Porsche 908 in 1969 and pulled off the closest Le Mans finish of all time. Was history about to repeat itself? It was not: with just half an hour left on the clock, the Ferrari engine cried foul and quit, leaving Pescarolo to win by six laps from Merzario’s sole surviving Ferrari. It was ironic that the only Ferrari that lasted the distance was the expendable car sent out to break the Matras from the outset.

In the Maranello pit, insult was then added to the injury of losing the race: the reason Pescarolo’s Matra wouldn’t start was that its starter motor had jammed. Changing the starter motor was expressly forbidden in the rules and should have merited exclusion from the race. But the official line was that the starter motor had been merely ‘rebuilt’. Rightly or wrongly Ferrari smelled a rat, but knew it could do nothing about it. ‘Matra is French’ as the weary Ferrari team manager Giacomo Caliri put it.

And that was that. Until now. How will Ferrari do at Le Mans this year? We’ll know more after this weekend when its brace of 499P Hypercars take on the Sebring 1000 Miles in Florida. The team had a torrid time at the Sebring prologue last weekend, one of its cars only sixth fastest behind Toyota, Cadillac and Porsche entries, the other in the wall. Privately someone at Ferrari told me that its expectations for Le Mans are ‘not high’.

Then again, Ferrari could be massively sandbagging and there is still the issue of Balance of Performance to consider. The BoP guidelines have already been set and published for Le Mans and should now not change, except between classes, so that if the Hypercars turn out to be considerably faster or slower than the LMDh cars, they could all be penalised or advantaged accordingly.

That said, this year’s Le Mans is like no other: not just because Ferrari is back for the first time for 50 years, but also because this is the 100th anniversary of the very first Le Mans 24 Hours. And what a fairy tale it would be were Ferrari to win on that occasion. There must be a vast temptation among the organisers to skew things Maranello-wards for the race, a temptation I am sure they’ll resist with all the strength they can muster.