Another day, Another Dollar.
I am very pleased to welcome prolific author and columnist, Bill Oursler, to the DoubleDeClutch crew.
Bill kicks off his contribution to this blog with a look back at the man known as “Brilliant Bob”. Today marks the French Champion’s tenth anniversary.
Bob Wollek 1943-2001 RIP
Stay in this business long enough and you will, more often than you might want, find yourself remembering the good guys who are no longer with us. In the case of Frenchman Bob Wollek those memories are particularly bitter sweet since he was killed not on a race track, or even in a car, but rather on a bicycle riding down a local road in Sebring, the victim of an improperly driven motor home.
This week is the tenth anniversary of that senseless and ironic tragedy. Therefore, on it I think it is more than appropriate not just to take note of his passing, but to celebrate the man.
And celebrating Bob Wollek is not difficult to do. Although he never won his country’s greatest sportscar race, the 24 Hours of Le Mans, and while he wasn’t a regular for the Porsche factory for most of his time in motorsport, Wollek’s record was, to say the least, spectacular. Indeed, one could argue strongly that he was perhaps the greatest ever French sports car driver, a truly high accolade given the number of superb two seat racers that country has produced throughout the years.
Wollek was a highly competitive individual; a trait he showed in the mid1960’s when he was a winning member of his college ski team. In fact, Wollek was in training for a spot on the French Olympic squad in 1968 when he suffered an injury that forced him to quit the sport. Still, even by then he had already dabbled in motorsport, running a few rallies in a 911 the year before. However, with a career in skiing now denied him, he then took up racing on a serious basis, running primarily in the French national open wheel arena before switching to the sportscar world.
Once there, he spent the next three decades compiling a phenomenal record, that included his 1982 crown winning performance in the hotly contested German National Championship, as well as his four Daytona 24 Hour victories, and his Sebring triumph in 1985. Interestingly, in the mid-1980’s one of his regular partners was A.J. Foyt, a man Wollek was introduced to at Daytona in 1983 when the American was abruptly added to the Swap Shop 935 team, of which Wollek was a member, during the race.
Miller High Life
The Frenchman expressed his far less than enthusiastic attitude about Foyt’s presence to a television reporter in a pit interview on Sunday morning, using expletives that had to be deleted before it aired. In spite of that outburst, Wollek grew to respect Foyt, especially after the four-time Indy 500 winner helped in bringing the Swap Shop 935 to Daytona’s Victory Lane in what was Wollek’s first 24 hour triumph there.
Although determined on the track, Wollek could be introspective, once nearly coming to tears in the press-room at Le Mans in 1997 when explaining he caused the retirement of his factory 911 GT1 by losing control and and wrecking the transaxle on one of the high curbs surrounding the Sarthe circuit. In reality, though, it turned out that there was nothing Wollek could have done, the cause being a half shaft which failed on its own.
With the factory’s withdrawal from the sport at the end of 1998, Wollek again found work, driving for privateer Porsche teams, and was scheduled to race at Sebring in the highly competitive Petersen-White Lightning 911 GT3 on the weekend of this death. Today ten years later, Wollek is remembered as a hard nosed competitor and a good man. Surely that speaks all that needs to be said about him for those of us who still miss him.
Bill Oursler, March 2011
