Phew, what a weekend of motorsport. Mercedes continued their domination of F1 at the new street circuit in Baku, Azerbaijan with Nico Rosberg's clean sweep of pole position, fastest lap and a start to finish leading position, ably controlling every lap.
Eddie Jordan criticised Sergio Perez for throwing away a podium by hitting a barrier in practice. I hope he's eaten humble pie. As we know from the so called 'wall of champions' hitting a barrier can have minimal or devastating consequences and Baku was nearly all barriers close to the corners. The margin between hero and zero is narrow indeed. Sergio seems to have something of Mansell about him, slow to learn his craft in F1, but very, very good indeed now he's a few seasons in.
The main event for me this weekend was Le Mans, for so many reasons. When people are racing in an event I've dreamed of competing in for years, it's hard to feel sorry for anyone, but Toyota's heartbreak was palpable. I even felt a bit sorry for Inés Taittinger crashing her LMP2 Pegasus with an hour and a half to go, despite all the opportunities which come your way as a twenty six year old scion of the Taittinger Champagne dynasty.
However, about Toyota, what can be said? As a former employee of a Toyota advertising agency I was willing them home. Toyota debuted at Le Mans in 1985 and this was their eighteenth attempt to win it. They have had five second places and been on the podium six times. In 1994, with one and a half hours remaining they lost an almost certain win to a simple broken gear linkage, in 1999 they had the fastest car by some margin, but both suffered catastrophic high speed punctures.
Last year Toyota were outclassed, but they went away, designed a new car and came back. I was mentally preparing a blog about persistence paying off when, after twenty three hours and fifty something minutes, I heard that terrible radio transmission and watched the leader slow then stop.Although the car was restarted to crawl round at the end it wasn't even classified as a finisher so that the Toyota in third was elevated to second, Porsche claimed their eighteenth win with terrible symmetry and Audi after a poor showing by their standards found themselves on the podium.
One might think that the old adage about second place being first loser shouldn't apply at Le Mans, so great is the challenge, so gruelling the race, but in the world of huge corporations, huge budgets and commercial competition, that's just what it does mean. Not that I wouldn't buy Toyota's excellent and fun GT86 because of it.
In LMP2 the Alpine Nissan took the win, I'm surprised by the name as it always reminds me of the iconic Renault and I can't quite put it together with Nissan, anyhow that leads us on to the GTE class, divided into professional and amateur and based on road legal cars as Le Mans used to be before about 1970. Ford set out to win the Pro class and GTE generally to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of their outright win in 1966, the first of four, for the fabulous Lola inspired GT40. So determined were Ford that they weren't above a little sandbagging in the earlier races and test days - allegedly and not by me!
Very happy to see Sebastien Bourdais in the class winning car. I felt he was bumped unfairly by Red Bull in F1, a tradition they're keeping up with their recent action in demoting Daniil Kvyat. A ruthless and political organisation, looking in from the outside at least. Bourdais is a multiple champion in Champ Car, the American Indy Car series. It would be nice to see him in a competitive LMP1 sometime.
The good news is that Toyota have promised to be back at Le Mans again next year, good luck guys, if anyone deserves it you do.
Malcolm Snook is published at Nook, Kobo and Amazon
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