Chequered Past

12th June 1999: The Race That Rewrote The Rules Part 2

On the twelfth of June, across seventy-three years of motorsport history, Le Mans produced four races that refused to deliver the winner anyone expected.  In 1926, Bentley ended up in a sandbank in the final half-hour while their competitor locked out the podium.  In 1954, Ferrari held on by less than five kilometres after an engine that wouldn't fire at a pit stop nearly handed the race to Jaguar.  In 1971, a car nobody expected to win set a distance record that stood for thirty-nine years — then its driver lost his career to a stone the following season.  And in 1999, the most competitive grid Le Mans had ever seen produced one of its most dramatic finishes.  Cover image: By Martin Lee - BMW V12 LMR - Pierluigi Martini, Yannick Dalmas & Joachim Winkelhock head towards Dunlop Bridge at the 1999 Le Mans, CC BY-SA 2.0, Link [https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=115358827] Send us Fan Mail [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2506134/fan_mail/new] Music by #Mubert Music Rendering [https://mubert.com/render]

11th June 1955: The Race That Rewrote The Rules Part 1

The eleventh of June appears more than once in the history of the twenty-four hours of Le Mans — and the first of those appearances casts a shadow over everything that follows. In 1955, a crash in the third hour of the race killed more than eighty people and changed motorsport forever. This episode examines what happened, why the race continued, and what the disaster set in motion — in the regulations, in the circuit design, and in the sport’s long, slow reckoning with the question of safety. The three races that follow show how Le Mans evolved in the decades after. In 1977, a Porsche that should have been out of contention — damaged, running deep in the field — became the first car shared by three drivers to win Le Mans outright. In 1988, Jaguar ended seven consecutive Porsche victories on a gearbox held together by the torque of its engine and the nerve of its driver — while elsewhere on the same circuit, a Frenchman quietly broke the four hundred kilometre an hour barrier on the Mulsanne Straight, setting a record that can never be beaten. And in 2011, two of the most violent accidents in the modern race’s history produced something the crowd in 1955 could not have imagined: both drivers walked away. Four races. One date. And a thread running through all of them that begins in the worst moment in the sport’s history and ends, fifty-six years later, with two drivers climbing out of cars that had been destroyed at three hundred kilometres an hour. Send us Fan Mail [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2506134/fan_mail/new] Music by #Mubert Music Rendering [https://mubert.com/render]

Le Mans: The Race That Rewrote The Rules

Before the races, the circuit. Before the results, the race itself. This opening episode of Chequered Past’s Le Mans series sets the scene for everything that follows — examining what the twenty-four hours of Le Mans actually is, what it has always been, and why it continues to matter in a way that no other race quite does. From its founding in 1923 as a test of reliability rather than outright speed, through the manufacturer battles that brought Ford, Ferrari, Jaguar and Porsche to the Circuit de la Sarthe with reputations and fortunes at stake, to the privateer teams who arrived with neither and occasionally beat everyone anyway — Le Mans has always asked a different question to the rest of motorsport. Not which car is fastest, but which car keeps going. This episode also considers what the race has meant to the drivers who defined it — among them Jacky Ickx, Tom Kristensen and Graham Hill, the only man in history to have won what is informally known as motorsport’s Triple Crown — and what it withheld from those it never quite rewarded, however much their speed deserved it. And it acknowledges, plainly, that this series will not look away from the darker chapters of Le Mans history. That history is part of what the race is. The episodes that follow will show why. Send us Fan Mail [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2506134/fan_mail/new] Music by #Mubert Music Rendering [https://mubert.com/render]

31st May 1959: The Date That Proved Everyone Wrong

On 31st May 1959, Jo Bonnier won BRM's first Grand Prix at Zandvoort in a car the team had already started replacing. In 1981, Gilles Villeneuve won at Monaco in a turbo that everyone agreed couldn't win there. In 1987, Ayrton Senna won Monaco's first active-suspension Grand Prix in a Lotus that was supposed to be outgunned. And in 1992, Nigel Mansell lost the race he had controlled for seventy laps to a loose wheel nut that Williams had spent five years ensuring could never happen again. Four races. Four dates. Four times the sport was certain — and four times it was wrong. This is also episode 365 of Chequered Past — the last date, and the end of Series 1.  Send us Fan Mail [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2506134/fan_mail/new] Music by #Mubert Music Rendering [https://mubert.com/render]

30th May 1965: The Day The Championship Looked West

The thirtieth of May has appeared on the Formula One World Championship calendar more times than almost any other date — and it has never produced a quiet afternoon. In this episode of Chequered Past, we follow four stories across seven decades. In Monaco in 1965, Graham Hill took to the escape road on lap twenty-five and came back to win his third consecutive Grand Prix at the principality, while Jim Clark was making history at Indianapolis the following day.  For eleven years between 1950 and 1960, the Indianapolis 500 sat inside the World Championship as an official round — a strange arrangement that produced Vukovich and Ruttman and Hanks and Pat O’Connor, and ended quietly in 1960 with no Formula One driver present.  In Monaco in 1976, Niki Lauda won from pole for his fifth victory of the season and extended a championship lead that looked unassailable — though none of us watching could have known what was coming at the Nürburgring ten weeks later.  And in Istanbul in 2010, Mark Webber and Sebastian Vettel collided while running first and second for Red Bull, handed McLaren a 1-2, and planted the seed of a bitterness that would take years to fully bloom. Send us Fan Mail [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2506134/fan_mail/new] Music by #Mubert Music Rendering [https://mubert.com/render]