Derek Bell at 80

I write this now because, implausibly enough, Bell turns 80 on the last day of this month. The last time I saw him earlier this year, he didn’t look a day past 60. His face is craggy, but has been for years, and that probably has something to do with the fact that it was briefly on fire after his Ferrari 512 exploded during the filming of McQueen’s Le Mans. The wolfish grin, which my wife remembers 25 years after she first saw it, remains. So too the steely eye, the outstretched hand and, if he knows and trusts you, the stories of racing drivers behaving badly that could never, ever make it onto the printed page.

The extraordinary thing about Derek is that he seems so unaffected by both the highs and lows of his racing life. Many of the highs I’ve already mentioned, but the lows include being in the F2 race at Hockenheim in which Jim Clark died. They’d had breakfast together that morning. He won the 1971 Buenos Aires 1000km race, but only after Ignazio Giunti had died in a ball of flame. That very same year his Porsche teammates Jo Siffert and Pedro Rodriguez would suffer the same awful fate. Naturally Derek counts himself as one of the lucky ones, for no one raced through a more dangerous era, but he considers himself unusually blessed even by the standards of those who not only survived but did so without life-changing injuries.

‘I don’t know why,’ he told me recently, ‘just good fortune I guess, but I never saw a driver die. Obviously I drove in lots of races in which drivers lost their life, but I was either in the pits, or retired, or waiting for my turn to drive when it happened.’

Though he excelled in Formula Two, when he finally made it to F1 with Ferrari, it was only a part-time drive with full-time teammates of the quality of Ickx and Chris Amon. When in 1971 he tried to return to the Scuderia top team after a break, Enzo told him ‘I don’t re-heat cold soup’. And that was that.

But he’d shared a works 512S at Le Mans in 1970 and done well enough to land a dream drive with the John Wyer Gulf Porsches for 1971. Teamed with Jo Siffert they won in Argentina and would probably have won Le Mans had the engine not blown. Thereafter his career progression faltered for a decade, though it was not without its occasional high points, winning his first Le Mans in a Mirage shared with Ickx in 1975 and that same year out-qualifying Ickx in identical flat-12 Alfas at the last 1000km to be held on the fearsome old Spa, and then winning the race with local lad Ickx just behind in second place.

But by 1981 Derek was in his 40th year and wondering what future in racing remained for him. The previous year he had done Le Mans in a 2-litre Porsche 924 owned by Porsche GB, nursing it round to a creditable 13th at the flag. But he wanted to be back in something powerful so when Pink Floyd manager Steve O’Rourke offered him a seat in a private BMW M1 for the entire year including Le Mans, he grabbed it with both hands.

It was a decision he was to regret almost immediately when he learned that Porsche was planning on returning to Le Mans as a full works team and then offered him a drive, partnering with Ickx once more. ‘I owe so much to Steve, who as soon as he was reassured he’d not lose his BMW factory backing if I left, released me to race for Porsche. Had he not done that, who knows how the future would have panned out?’

In the event Ickx and Bell won the race in a 936 that had literally been dragged out of the museum. In a textbook race, they finished 14 laps clear of the field. Its single longest pitstop, including fuel, tyres, driver change and a look at the gear linkage, required fewer than four minutes.

They won again in the brand new Group C 956 in 1982 and would have won in ’83 had Ickx not been punted off the track in the opening laps and Derek then being stranded out on the track with some malady he fixed alone at the side of the circuit.

What is interesting about the Ickx/Bell partnership is that by 1983 the accepted thinking was that you now needed three drivers for Le Mans, and you could see why: Group C had brought ground effect aerodynamics to sports car racing, placing unheard of forces on drivers’ bodies in an era before air conditioning or even power steering. The cars were exhausting to wrestle around for even a few laps, let alone 24 hours.

Which is why in that year’s race, of the top dozen finishers, Ickx and Bell alone decided not to have a third driver. So I asked Derek why: ‘It’s very simple. Jacky and I worked brilliantly together and if it’s not too big-headed to say so, at the time I think we were probably the best team in sports car racing. Almost by definition adding another driver would therefore weaken that team…’

More wins would come, in both 1986 and ’87 driving with Hans Stuck and Al Holbert. Indeed it is instructive to realise that while most racing drivers would dream of simply finishing Le Mans once, Derek was on the podium for seven years straight between ’81-’87, four times on the top step.

But by his reckoning he didn’t win either of his two greatest Le Mans. The first was that 1983 race where his fightback with Ickx saw him breaking the lap record in the 23rd hour in a car with shot brakes; the second came a dozen years later when he stood on the podium for the last time, having just come third overall in a McLaren F1 GTR, sharing with his son Justin and Andy Wallace. The F1 was quick, but with almost no downforce it needed a firm and skilled hand even in the dry. That year at Le Mans it rained and rained and rained.

‘It was such a tough race. The weather was awful. I remember Andy coming in and telling me it was all he could do just keeping the bloody thing in a straight line on Mulsanne. But we were leading and we should have won it, but then we had a problem with our clutch while the other car [the factory owned Ueno Clinic F1 GTR that won] did not. And that was that. But standing on the podium with Justin was one of the proudest moments of my life.’

What Derek doesn’t mention is that, aged 53, in the dark and rain, he’d matched the times of JJ Lehto in the rival F1 GTR, a man who the previous year had been Michael Schumacher’s teammate in Formula 1.

There are so many great Derek Bell stories and maybe I’ll tell a few more another time. For now however please join me in wishing him a very happy birthday. Aged 80 he’s still racing, still quick, still smiling. Still Derek, in other words; and to those with any conception of all he achieved and what he went through to achieve it, still an absolute bloody hero too.