Le Mans 1923 – the very first Le Mans – Thank Frankel it’s Friday

The actual answer is that Le Mans did not have a winner in 1923 nor, for that matter in 1924 or 1925 either, because these were not individual races but mere rounds of the Rudge-Whitworth Triennial Cup. The idea was a ploy pure and simple, cooked up by the Automobile Club de France and the French importer of Rudge-Whitworth bicycles, motorcycles and wheels to ensure teams kept coming back, which given the expense and risk of hosting the world’s first 24 hour race is probably fair enough.

Incidentally, Le Mans didn’t just introduce the world to 24 hour racing, in 1906 it hosted the world’s first Grand Prix too. International motor racing had been dominated by the Gordon Bennett Cup races since the turn of the century, which suited the French not at all because each participating nation could only enter a limited number of cars, and France had by far the largest car industry in Europe. So it suggested a new race with no such limit, put its money where its mouth was and called it a Grand Prix because the ‘prix’ for winning was absolutely enormous: 45,000 francs if you please. So if you ever wondered why everyone uses a French term every time the location of the next F1 race is discussed, now you know.

I digress. Unlike the Grand Prix which was held on a vast 64-mile road course to the east of the city, the first 24 hour race was held in its now traditional location, even if the track itself was very different. For a start a lap was 10.7 miles long, whereas today it is 8.5 miles. The difference is largely accounted for the fact that where the track turns right after the pits today and goes up through the Dunlop chicane and down through the Esses to Tertre Rouge, in 1923 it carried on into town, before turning sharp right by the Pontlieue bridge and heading back towards Tertre Rouge. This made the straight leading from the old White House corner (bypassed by the Porsche Curves in 1972) to Pontlieue almost as long as was the Mulsanne Straight from Tertre Rouge to Mulsanne before they broke it up with chicanes in 1990.

To give you an idea of how Franco-centric this race was, consider that in the last Gordon Bennett Cup race in 1905 France, like every other nation, had been allowed a maximum of three cars. At Le Mans 18 years later, of the 35 cars that took the start, 32 were French, the exceptions being two Belgian Excelsiors and a lone Bentley. Moreover of the 70 drivers entered, 64 were French.

Another rather substantial difference to Le Mans as it is today is that the track was not sealed, the surface being made up of a mix of gravel and tar. As for the way teams went racing, perhaps the Bentley example will provide an insight.

The car was not Bentley’s but owned by John Duff, a formidable and formidably tall Canadian who, like so many of those who’d become known as Bentley Boys had fought in the Great War, been fearfully wounded and took up racing thereafter. WO was entirely dismissive of the race because, as he put it, ‘nobody’ll finish’ and only grudgingly lent Duff his test driver Frank Clement and a couple of mechanics. The four of them drove the car to Le Mans carrying only such spares as they could carry which, believe me, would not have been many. It was only an attack of guilt that persuaded WO at the last moment to go and help manage the pit.

The gravel caused havoc throughout the field. The Bentley’s odds of winning were lengthened by first one and then the other headlight being smashed and then wiped out by a holed fuel tank. Duff was driving at the time and parked the car out at Arnage before sprinting back to the pits, whereupon Clement ‘borrowed’ a policeman’s bicycle and cycling against the traffic while carrying two petrol cans slung around his neck, pedalled back to the car where he made a temporary repair with a wooden bung. ‘It was absolutely terrifying,’ he would later remember, ‘I thought they were going to mow me down every minute.’

It is popular among Bentley fans, of whom I am one, to think that but for such misfortune a British car would have won the first Le Mans with ease. But the Chenard & Walcker team were well drilled, their cars better protected and unlike the Bentley, had brakes on all four corners of their cars. Clement did break the lap record fighting back to an eventual fourth place finish, but it is not as if the car had been leading by miles at the time of its misfortune. I think it would have been a very close run thing. The following year however, with the same drivers but in a factory prepared and very well protected car with brakes on all four wheels, it would be a very different story, bringing as it did, the first of five wins in seven attempts at the world’s oldest, greatest 24 hour race.

Images courtesy of Motorsport Images.