Steve Soper: From Tin-Top Trooper to Sportscar ‘Soperman’

Think saloon car racing, think Steve Soper: BTCC, ETCC, DTM, RAC TT, Bathurst 1000 and Spa 24 Hours; and Rover V8, Ford Sierra RS500 and BMW M3. He tested a single-seater but didn’t like it; too draughty, or some such. So closed cockpit/open-faced crash helmet was his default setting for more than 20 years – whereupon he blew the roof off, donned a full-face and jumped aboard the Williams-designed-and-built BMW V12 LM, an open-topped sports-prototype. Its LMR successor of 1999 was, he said, “the best car I ever drove”. 

There had, however, been a halfway house on his ‘(open) road to Damascus’: a McLaren F1 GTR. In April 1996, partnered with triple Formula 1 world champion Nelson Piquet for Silverstone’s round of the BPR Global GT Series, Soper qualified on pole – by a full second – for his category debut. He was leading comfortably, too, when a fuelling miscalculation caused him to coast into the pits. The delay dropped him to an eventual fourth place.

Inspired by the McLaren F1’s victory there in 1995, BMW had vowed to compete at Le Mans until it won it as a manufacturer rather than as an engine-supplier. This was awkward for Soper, who had vowed never again to contest the race after a frightening – and deafening – experience in 1983 in a wayward rotary-engined Mazda prototype that treated the Mulsanne Straight as one long 200mph-plus corner. Despite his pre-meditated worst efforts, and those of equally spooked co-drivers Jeff Allam and James Weaver, the damned thing wouldn’t blow up and they finished 18^th overall, second in class.

The McLaren was a much safer and more competitive proposition and Soper’s Bigazzi-run entry was the fastest of them – by more than two seconds – in qualifying. JJ Lehto, the star of that 1995 victory, was astounded.

“JJ couldn’t understand how someone could be faster than him in the same car,” says Soper. “That’s why he chose me as his co-driver for the following year’s FIA GT series.”

Gearbox problems hampered Soper’s Le Mans – co-driven by Jacques Laffite and Marc Duez, he finished 11th – and for the remainder of the season, he returned to familiar ground: finishing runner-up in Germany’s Supertourenwagen Cup at the wheel of a BMW 3-Series. It would, however, be GTs all the way in 1997.

Their Schnitzer-run GTR having grown a 25-inch ‘long tail’ – for less drag and more downforce – shed 135kg and gained a sequential gearbox and fully adjustable suspension, victories at Hockenheim, Helsinki and Spa meant Soper and Lehto took the lead of the FIA championship. 

JJ was widely regarded as being the best in this field: “More than all the F1 drivers I’ve had as team-mates – Piquet, Brundle, Nannini, Boutsen – he was incredible over a single lap: perfectly smooth, no excessive steering wheel movement,” says Soper. “At first I was driving it too much like a touring car, upsetting it with the throttle, but JJ taught me a lot.” 

Soper soon gave up trying to match the speed of his co-driver, 14 years his junior, and instead adopted a senior pro' role. His contribution to their success was considerable, setting the car up and registering impressive stints on worn rubber to save time at pit stops. But although they inherited a fourth win, at Mugello, thanks to a rival’s freak accident, they were unable to stave off a late title charge by Mercedes-Benz. It must be said, however, that the latter’s CLK-GTR was a bespoke racer that went against the spirit of the regulations if not the letter, which had been rewritten at the 11th hour to accommodate it.

Soper, 47, had been with BMW since 1989, but the arrival in October 1998 of Gerhard Berger as its new Motorsport Director signalled the beginning of the end for this relationship.

“I’d let my guard down,” Soper admits. “Tom Kristensen and I had been similar in speed in testing [the LM] and had a verbal agreement that we would both have a shot at qualifying at Le Mans. But the team changed all that and I never got my chance. In the past, I would have fought back, but this time I decided to let it go. 

“And that came back to bite me when Berger took over: he saw me as an old bloke who couldn’t qualify. He’d retired from racing so why couldn’t I?”

The writing was on the wall when Soper was placed in a year-old privateer GTP LM at Sebring in 1999. And it didn’t help that he put it in the wall. But when Jörg Müller was seconded by BMW’s nascent F1 programme to be its official test driver, Soper was reunited with Lehto for the American Le Mans Series. Once again they were impressive – winning at Sears Point, Laguna Seca and Las Vegas – but this was neither enough to keep Soper in favour nor keep him interested. A second privateer outing at Sebring made up his mind.

“I was with Bill Auberlen Jr and Jean-Marc Gounon in 2000, not JJ, and they fought over set-up. We went with Gounon’s and it was undriveable. I walked away from that race [they finished fourth] having driven harder than ever, and suddenly I decided that I didn’t want to do it anymore.” 

A BTCC return in 2001 with Peugeot concluded in a crash at Brands Hatch that caused a spinal injury that ended his career. Until, that is, medical advances – three vertebrae removed and two carbon cages inserted in 2012 – made his neck “as strong as a 21-year-old’s” and enabled ‘Soperman’ to fly again, in historic saloons and, of course, historic GTs.

Images courtesy of LAT