Graham Hill’s last laugh - Thank Frankel it’s Friday
Andrew Frankel
This Sunday marks the grim 45th anniversary of the untimely death of Graham Hill, an event on which we will dwell no longer. Instead join me a little more than three years earlier in the summer of 1972. By now Graham is 43 years old and while still driving in Formula 1, is clearly well past his prime. He has not been on a podium since before his cartwheeling crash in the 1969 US Grand Prix.
He has driven at Le Mans before of course, because most F1 drivers did back then, but not for seven years. And yet he has joined the Matra team which has decided to forsake the entire World Sports Car Championship to focus on its efforts to win this one race. By contrast, its major opposition in the form of Ferrari, despite turning up and going fastest at the March test weekend, has taken the other approach. Incredibly the Scuderia’s 312PBs would win every single other round of the Championship, but stayed away from Le Mans.
There are four Matras entered, all with one French and one English-speaking driver. Hill has been teamed with the 29 year old hotshot Henri Pescarolo for whom this is his sixth consecutive attempt to win Le Mans, four of which have been with Matra and precisely none of which has seen him to the flag. He knows this is his big chance in a brand new MS670 but is displeased by his team’s choice of team-mate for him. To put it mildly.
Indeed at first he had told the team he wouldn’t drive with Hill. He feared the Englishman would not take it seriously and when the going got tough in way it never did in Formula 1 – at night in the rain and the fog – he feared also that a man quite clearly in the home straight of his career would not be prepared to take the very necessary risks needed to secure victory at this lethal old circuit. He had to be talked around to the idea and even then only grudgingly accepted.
Even without the Ferraris, the race was never going to be a cake-walk for Matra, aiming to be the first French manufacturer to win its country’s most important race since 1950. There were Jo Bonnier’s exceptionally rapid Lola T280s, and a trio of Autodelta Alfa 33s. In the event the Alfas were plagued by troubles both major and minor, but the Lolas were a real headache, streaking into the lead from the start, with moods in the Matra pit not improved by Jean-Pierre Beltoise blowing his engine just five laps into the race.
The Cosworth DFV-powered Lolas stayed a threat until the early hours when Bonnier took one of those risks Pescarolo was talking about. Diving up the inside of a Ferrari GT car, the gap closed, the cars touched and the Lola pitched into an unsurvivable crash.
But by then Pescarolo had completely revised his opinion of his team-mate entirely, telling MotorSport magazine: ‘he was bloody quick of course. When I looked at his lap times during the night and in the rain, I thought “ok, I can sleep now.”’
So it came down to a straight fight between Pesca and Hill’s car, and that of François Cevert and Howden Ganley. And here a little Le Mans luck determined the outcome: first the rival Matra was delayed by rain getting into the electrics, and then it was put entirely out of contention when rammed by a Chevrolet Corvette. It would finish, and in second place, but fully ten laps behind the victorious car of Pescarolo and Hill.
It was a fine achievement for both drivers. For Pescarolo it would be the first of a rarer-than-rare Le Mans hat-trick, all accomplished in Matras to which he’d add another win in a Porsche 956 in 1984 by which time he was ironically almost as old as had been Hill in 1972. In the end he would do a run of 33 Le Mans from 1966 to 1999, broken only by a terrible testing crash in 1969 which ruled him out of that year’s race.
For Graham, it would be his final race win of any kind, but it was enough to secure his unique legacy as the only man ever to win motor racing’s Triple Crown of the F1 World title, the Indy 500 and Le Mans. Forty-eight years on, that record remains.
Le Mans
Graham Hill
Henri Pescarolo
Triple Crown
F1
Indy 500
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