I don't want to bury Clarkson completely, but this got published in February>>
But the dullest, most excruciating sport of them all — and I’ll brook no argument on this — is the day-long motor race at Le Mans.
At four o’clock on the Saturday afternoon, a grid full of cars from companies you’ve never heard of, and drivers whose names you can’t even pronounce, set off on what in essence is a 24-hour economy run. And then it goes dark.
Now I’m sorry but how, in the name of Zeus’s butthole, can anyone with even a tiny sliver of intelligence imagine that spectators will be interested in watching a sport they can’t see? A pair of headlights is coming towards you and then, after a short, deafening roar, they are replaced by a set of red tail-lights whizzing off into the night. Was that a Courage that just went by, driven by Alfonso Percolinno? And if so, was it winning or coming last? There is no way on God’s earth of knowing.
All you do know is that the race, when it finishes at 4pm on the Sunday, will be won by the team with the most money. And that, for the past few years, has been Audi. Although, for marketing purposes, the car is not always called an Audi. Sometimes they replace the four rings with a flying B and call it a Bentley.
Frankly it would be easier, and quieter, if each team were asked to roll up with a copy of its most recent bank statement. Then the champagne could be given to the one with the most amount of noughts. That way we’d all be spared the public relations-inspired test of a car’s fuel consumption, held under the cover of darkness, half a country away from where 80% of the spectators live.
There’s talk among the sport’s fans that things will improve when the field is made up of proper road cars that everyone recognises. This, they say, is already happening with Aston Martin entering a DB9, Chevrolet a Corvette, Lamborghini a Murciélago, and Ferrari a 575.
Apparently if this new class becomes numerous and competitive enough the one-off Audi-style prototypes will be banned and it will be the basis on which all endurance racing is founded. That sounds great, but there are still two problems. First, it will still go dark, so for a third of the race we won’t see what’s going on. And second, the Italians will bend the rules so hard they are as near as dammit broken.
In fact, it’s already happening. You see, the new class is supposed to be for GT cars. That would be “grand tourers” like the Corvette, the DB9 and the 575. But what Maserati has done is go cap in hand to its sister company, Ferrari, and take away all the components from an Enzo, which is no more a GT car than my dog. From these it has made a racing car.
Of course the rules say that 25 road versions must be sold, but finding 25 people from a customer pool of 6 billion isn’t that hard. Even when the car in question costs £520,000 and doesn’t even have a back window.
If I’d been running the governing body, I’d have smiled while they explained how this car obeyed the letter of the law and then told them to get lost. But I’m not running the governing body, so even though it’s racing on wooden tyres it’s already out there winning races without breaking out of a canter.
