Category Archives: Notes from the Cellar

I have no good answer to that question……………

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1998 Rolex 24

The first trip to the Rolex was back in ’98. I was invited by the charming Laurence Pearce of Lister Cars fame. Back then the WSC rules allowed for some pretty strange contraptions, certainly The Cannibal was right right up there in the Wacky Racers stakes.

1998 Rolex 24

Then there was this Sci-Fi effort from Mosler, the Raptor…………they missed Captain Nemo’s name off the roof.

Rather than plagiarise anyone else’s work I suggest that if you want to know more about these unusual racers you could do worse than read this excellent piece on the Daytona International Speedway website;

HERE

I somehow doubt that we witness anything quite like this pair on the banking in the next week, but you never know…………

John Brooks, January 2014

 

The Stig Prowls the Infield

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1998 Rolex 24

1998 Rolex 24 saw the original Stig, Perry McCarthy, as part of the line up for Dyson Racing. As usual the Daytona International Speedway was not kind to guys from Poughkeepsie with both of their Riley & Scott MK111 prototypes going out late in the race. For #20 it was especially cruel, they were cruising towards Victory Lane, with a handy lead over the Momo 333SP, then the Racing Gods decided otherwise…………..

John Brooks, January 2014

Lawn Feed

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2002 British GT Castle Combe

Keeping up the New Year’s Resolution to get DDC back up into seventh gear and keep it there, even with the pressures of the Real World intruding……….on a picture search this morning I came across this forgotten moment from 2002. Yes it is the Castle Combe British GT round, lap one approaching Quarry, the second placed Geoff Lister slightly overcooked his braking and ended up spinning to the back of the pack. I imagine the moan of photographers standing with me all took evasive action as the sequence ends at this point……..I certainly would have ducked.

Geoff got the Saleen back on track but probably wished he had not. Storming through the field a few laps later he was unsighted in traffic and, at high speed, ran straight into the stationary Porsche of Tony Littlejohn, who had just been knocked into a spin. Both cars were severely damaged and Geoff was hospitalised, though thankfully without serious injury, he never raced in GTs at International level again.

John Brooks, January 2014

The Way We Were

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1983 Silverstone 1000kms

May 1982, 31 years ago we did things a bit differently.

Social media is full of images from the pit lane fire in Shanghai that took place yesterday. Thankfully no one was injured, I doubt that the same happy result would have happened if something had gone wrong at the above refuelling stop, we have come a long way since then. The car was the Janspeed Lotus Elan driven by Max Payne and Chris Ashmore and entered by ARK Racing. The race was the Silverstone 6 Hours, the second event run to Group C rules.

The Lotus was disqualified after 173 laps for a push start…………..well you have to draw the line somewhere, Old Boy.

John Brooks, November 2013

Corkscrewed

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1998 Petit Le Mans

Bill Auberlen leads JJ Lehto down Laguna Seca’s Corkscrew in their BMW V12 LMRs. It is October 1999 on the Monterey Peninsula, a very agreeable time and place as I recall. Their main opposition came from the Panoz Roadsters, those rumbling beasts who have passed into legend.

1998 Petit Le Mans

The Williams-built V12 LMR prototypes raced during 1999 and 2000, racking up a Le Mans triumph in the first year but they failed in their quest to win the drivers’ or teams’ or manufacturers’ titles in the American Le Mans Series. A paperwork snafu at Sebring and the team’s withdrawal from Mosport on safety grounds let others slip in front the first season. Audi’s arrival with their new R8 accounted for the following one. Then Munich set sights on Formula One, their endurance prototype campaign was dropped and we all know how that cunning plan panned out in the long run.

John Brooks, November 2013

The Final Run in the Majors

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1998 Le Mans 24 Hours

The Le Mans 24 Hours had been a happy hunting ground for the Porsche 956/962 dynasty, seven outright victories at La Sarthe, but even the greatest monarch’s reign must end. In 1998 three Kremer K8 cars were entered but only one made it through the Pre-Qualification weekend, the Rocky Agusta/Almo Coppelli/Xavier Pompidou, example.

1998 24 Hours of Le Mans

Come race week the young Frenchman qualified the K8 in 3:57.814, 29th on the grid and 14th in class, some 22 seconds off pole sitter Bernd Schneider’s AMG Mercedes. However the race would be a different matter.

1998 Le Mans 24 Hours

There was no point in trying to set lap records, the car was too slow for that, so the old virtues of reliability and slick pit work were the weapons that would be best employed by the Kremer squad. Incredibly the factory teams started to implode, AMG Mercedes and BMW gone before sunset on Saturday. When the factory Porsche LM P1 pair also retired by dawn on Sunday a good finish seemed a possibility.

1998 Le Mans 24 Hours

The other privateers prototypes joined in the lemming-like self destruct impulse, all of which propelled the Kremer up the leader board. The race went to plan, just tyres and two brake pad changes, it would another year before HITCO and BMW would go the race distance on one set of carbon pads. OK there were a couple of spins, particularly early morning Sunday morning, but I recall the conditions being especially foul and slippery, catching out the leading Porsche 911 GT1-98 for example.

1998 Le Mans 24 Hours

The upshot for Kremer was second place in LMP1 class and 12th overall, covering 314 laps or 4264.196 kilometres, a fitting way for the Porsche 956/962 family to bid farewell to Les Vingt-Quatre Heures du Mans

John Brooks, November 2013

 

The Last Lap

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1999 SRWC Donington

The Porsche 956/962 is one of the truly great cars in motorsport history. Even when Group C and IMSA were assassinated by the forces of darkness it continued as the platform for such evolutions as the Kremer K8. However eventually all things must pass and so on July 18th 1999, the last international race for the K8 took place at Donington, the fifth round of the Sports Racing World Cup. A double Dutch pairing of Bert Ploeg and Remco Papenberg in the former’s car finished 15th, some 14 laps down on the winning DAMS Lola. The final curtain……………..17 years after Jürgen Barth rolled out 956/001 at Weissach, amazing.

John Brooks, November 2013

Rocket Ron

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1998 Rolex 24

The first time I got to shoot the Rolex 24 was back in 1998, one of the better Floridian 24’s around the turn of the century. Ron Fellows is pushing into the First Horseshoe in Andy Evans’ 333 SP, the pair sharing driving duties with Max Papis, Yannick Dalmas and Bob Wollek. This heavyweight line up led the race for several spells but the transmission blew up in a spectacular manner after 610 laps with just a few hours left to run. Dalmas had recorded a 1:39.195 to grab pole position, Papis followed that up with the race’s fastest lap of 1:40.545, a small consolation for the end of the line for Andy Evans’ dream of victory on the banking at Daytona. His departure that season was not mourned by the enthusiasts, though it must be said that he was one of the saviours of endurance racing in the mid-90’s after the implosion of both IMSA and Group C in 1992. Credit where credit is due.

John Brooks, November 2013

View From The Top

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2000 SRWC Magny Cours

October 1st 2000 at Magny Cours, pit stop for the JMB Giesse Ferrari 333 SP, David Terrien out and Christian Pescatori in, on their way to the fifth victory of the season. They took podiums whenever they competed and were Champions by some clear margin.

John Brooks, November 2013

Eye of the Storm

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2001 Rolex 24

Another image of the 333 SP, this time shot during the 2001 Rolex 24. I wrote a while back about this race and had this to say about this fabulous car.

Perhaps the Ferrari 333 SP of Risi Competizione was the most popular choice for the top step of the podium at the race’s end. A hotshot team running the car, a driver line up that consisted of Ralf Kelleners, David Brabham, Eric van de Poele and Allan McNish plus the beautiful, sonorous Ferrari seemed to be the obvious selection. McNish has had his eye on a Rolex since winning his class in 1998 at Daytona, the year before the watches were awarded to all class winners not just the overall victors. Of course we are all too gentlemanly to ever mention this small omission in his career, maybe this would be his best chance to get hold of one the fabled timepieces. Fastest lap in practice of 1:41.118, if not in Qualifying, seemed to support the argument. 

2001 Rolex 24

The race was run in conditions more often found at the Nürburgring than Daytona Beach, cold and grey to start then a deluge, most unlike Florida as we Brits imagine it to be sunny all the time.

More thoughts from the past…………

Most of the photographers showed good sense and stayed either in the warm, dry Benny Khan Media Centre or hid under awnings in the pits. Me? Well, Regis Lefebure and I headed out to the back straight, where we spent several hours trying make some sort of acceptable images in the murk. I reckon he got better results than I.

In this sort of dull stuff it is almost impossible to turn Chicken Shit into Chicken Salad. The 2001 Rolex 24 was a personal landmark for me, it was the last race that I shot entirely on film. By the time I crossed the Atlantic again to shoot the ALMS season opener at Texas I had acquired a Canon D30. Digital had arrived, that genie had escaped and things would be very different. Photographers would go on to be software operators, mind you the crap ones would still be crap.

2001 Rolex 24

On track things took their usual course, hard racing and hard luck.

Out at the head of the race #12 and #16 continued to swap the lead. Then Risi Competizione took their turn on the wheel of hard fortune. Out on the back straight McNish lost a front wheel due to lug nut seizing. Fixing this problem cost five laps and probably the race. This diagnosis was confirmed a few hours later, just before dawn. During a routine pit stop it was noticed the oil temperature was rising rapidly, it was suspected that head gasket had failed in the V12. The Ferrari was reluctantly retired, another leader down and no Rolex for McNish.

The race was a cold miserable affair, only the performance of the Corvette team gave any kind of pleasure, they were, and still are, a class act.

One pleasing aspect is that the top picture ran as a double page spread in European Car, I have to say it was a satisfying way to say farewell to exclusively shooting film.

John Brooks, November 2013