The 1994 24 Hours of Le Mans was the 62nd Grand Prix of Endurance, taking place at the Circuit de la Sarthe, and took place on 18 and 19 June 1994. The race was won by a car that had its roots in a 10-year-old design. Porsche exploited a loophole in the new GT regulations that allowed a single new car to represent a promised production run. Thus, in conjunction with customer team-owner Jochen Dauer, they created a road-legal version of the Porsche 962 Group C car. In the equivalency formula, GT cars were allowed more engine horsepower and a 50% bigger fuel tank than prototypes which, in turn, had better aerodynamics. The Dauer 962 Le Mans had both. Their main rivals would be Toyota, who put their support behind their two customer teams running a pair of Group C chassis after its 3.5-litre engined TS010 was no longer eligible.
The ACO had developed a new equivalency formula to be able to match Prototypes against GTs on a roughly equal level and the starting grid seemed to bear that out. It was Alain Ferté who put the homegrown Courage on pole position, with Derek Bell alongside him in an open-top Kremer spyder. It was Bell who swept around the outside to take the lead into the first corner before Ferté and Baldi in the Dauer passed him on the back straight. After the prototypes had pitted it left the Dauers of Baldi and Stuck running 1-2 at the end of the first hour. The challenge was taken up by the Toyotas who double-stinted their tyres to shorten their enforced extra fuel-stops. When Dalmas ran his Dauer out of fuel coming into the pit-lane and Sullivan had a puncture on his just after the pit-entry road, the Toyotas seized the opportunity and took their own 1-2 lead into the night. As temperatures fell, the performance of the Courages picked up, and they pulled back the gap to the top four. However, their charge ended early on Sunday with terminal engine problems. The Nisso Trust Toyota led through the night until pitting at dawn with a faulty differential. The hour spent on repairs dropped them to fifth, handing the lead over to the SARD Toyota. After their initial problems, the Dauer-Porsches had run well, never more than 1-2 laps behind, waiting for any slip-up. But all through the morning, the Toyota kept up its pace, pursued by the Dauers. It looked like Toyota might finally achieve their first Le Mans victory then with just 100 minutes to go, Jeff Krosnoff came to a stop at the pit exit. A broken gear-linkage leaving him with no gears. Jumping out, he manually slammed it into 3rd gear and did a lap to get back to the pits. The quarter-hour needed for repairs was all the Dauers needed to pass them. Nevertheless, Eddie Irvine took off to stage an all-out pursuit in the last hour. He caught up with second-placed Thierry Boutsen with ten minutes to go, and when they came up behind slower cars approaching the final chicane, Irvine pounced, trapping Boutsen behind the others. For the last couple of laps Boutsen tried to re-pass, scattering flag marshals expecting a tame procession to the flag. Irvine secured a courageous second, but the victory went to the Dauer-Porsche of Hurley Haywood, Yannick Dalmas and Mauro Baldi.
In the GT class, outside of the Dauer-Porsches, there were ten other makes in the two classes. The GT1 victory was expected as a foregone conclusion for the Dauers, but in GT2 it was initially between the Callaway Corvette and the Larbre team Porsche. However, after the Corvette was disqualified for refuelling on-track, the Porsche reliability left Larbre to lead home a class 1-2-3.
Regulations After the demise of the Sportscar World Championship, FISA (Fédération Internationale du Sport Automobile) indicated that GT racing would be the future of endurance motorsport. The new BPR Global GT Series was one of the first fruits of this future. Named for the surnames of the originators, the international series was the merger of Jürgen Barth's German Porsche series and Patrick Peter and Stéphane Ratel's Venturi supercar series opened to all makes in 8 races in Europe and Asia.Spurring 2014, p.150 The Automobile Club de l'Ouest (ACO) had itself suffered and was virtually penniless, handing over the finance and promotion activity to the Syndicat Mixte.Clarke 2000, p.67 Motor Sport Jul 1994 Yet, people recognised that teams would always want to race sports car prototypes. In the USA, IMSA were developing their "World Sports Car" category. The ACO chose to embrace mixed-class racing and came up with a pioneering equivalency formula to allow the production-based GT cars to compete for the outright win against its own LMP class and the IMSA WSC cars. These involved engine air-inlet restrictors, smaller fuel tanks and minimum weights to limit the prototypes' performance.Clarke 2000, pp.50-1 Autocar 15 Jun 1994Williams 2023, p.337
FISA's new GT rules had developed through 1993, in consultation with the ACO, IMSA and Japanese JAF, defining a GT as a 2-door, road-going car on sale to the public and registered for road-use in two of the following countries: France, Great Britain, Italy, Germany, the Benelux, USA or Japan. The chassis would remain unchanged, with only electronic- and driver-aids on the road-version allowed on the racing model.Henry 1993, p.34 Autocar 16 Jun 1993 Minimum annual production levels were 25 for GT1, and 200 for GT2. However, a crucial loophole in the rules allowed a manufacturer to apply for GT1 homologation even when still planning the car design and before any cars had been made. This meant a single prototype for a proposed model could be classed as a GT model. But FISA were taking too long to finalise, so to allow time for prospective entrants to prepare, the ACO was forced to issue its own GT regulations in September 1993, before FISA had completed their work. When those rules did finally come out, there were several detailed differences. The ACO's GT1 encompassed the GT1 and GT2 classes run in the BPR series, while their GT2 covered the FISA/BPR GT3 and GT4.
The air-inlet restrictors would be graded according to the engine volume, induction system and the number of valves per cylinder – all important components defining a car's power output. A comparison of the restrictions:Clarke 2000, p.56 Motorsport Jun 1994Laban 2001, p.227 LM-P1/C90: fuel tank 80L, target output 550 bhp, min weight 900 kg (950 kg for turbos), max tyre width 16" LM P2: fuel tank 80L, target output 400 bhp, min weight 620 kg, with production engines, max tyre width 12" LM GT1: fuel tank 120L, target output 650 bhp, min weight 1000 kg, max tyre width 14" LM GT2: fuel tank 120L, target output 450 bhp, min weight 1050 kg, max tyre width 12" IMSA GTS: fuel tank 100L, target output 650 bhp, min weight 1000 kg, max tyre width 16"
Finally, the FIA had threatened the ACO with losing its international license if a track invasion by spectators happened again at the end of the race. Very dangerous if cars were still travelling at speed towards the finish line, this regulation would be rigorously enforced.
Entries With no more manufacturer support for the old Group C, the numbers were slipping away and only made up a third of the entries. However, the new GT regulations created a lot of interest, and the ACO received a pleasing 83 applications. They pruned this down to 50 for an ultimate 48 starters, along with a number of cars left on Reserve. There were three nominal factory teams (from Porsche, Lotus and Honda) although Toyota, Venturi and Alpine strongly supported their customer teams.Spurring 2014, p.149 Reaching out to IMSA, the ACO also offered places for any of their new WSC and GTS classes, but there was very little take-up this year. This year, there were 36 cars at the Test Day, held in early May.
Class Quantity Turbo /Superchargedengines LM-P1/C90 10 / 9 8 / 7 IMSA-WSC 4 / 0 0 / 0 LM-P2 4 / 4 3 / 3 LM-GT1 17 / 11 12 / 8 LM-GT2 28 / 21 8 / 8 IMSA-GTS 3 / 3 2 / 2 Total Entries 66 / 48 33 / 28 Note: The first number is the number accepted, the second the number who started.
LM-P1/C90
Prototype racing was in a state of flux - the fleet of former Group C cars were aging and increasingly obsolete or kept in museums by the works teams. The new IMSA-WSC class was still in its infancy, so the ACO therefore adapted their prototype rules to aim for the 1990 Group C cars, with the proviso that they now had to be open-topped and with flat underfloors to limit the impact of ground-effects technology.
With the closure of their works team, Toyota put their support behind their regular customer teams, who had convincingly beaten the Porsches in previous year. This year's 94C-V were essentially 2-year-old cars based on a 6-year design. After the debacles of the previous years, the team at Toyota’s engineering department installed stronger gearboxes, as well as a new aero-kit to comply with the ACO regulations with a long tail and low rear-wing.Spurring 2012, pp.155-6Clarke 2000, p.68 Motor Sport Jul 1994 Although down about 15 kph on top speed compared to the Porsche-engine cars (with their larger air restrictors), the greater engine torque gave the Toyotas better acceleration. The #1 car was run by Shin Kato's SARD team, with Mauro Martini, Jeff Krosnoff and Eddie Irvine brought in as a replacement for Roland Ratzenberger. In a poignant tribute, the team had the name of Ratzenberger listed on the car, as he was originally scheduled to drive in the SARD Toyota but had been tragically killed in qualifying for the San Marino Grand Prix just before the test-day. The #4 Nisso Trust Racing Team had enticed veteran Bob Wollek to join team regulars George Fouché and Steven Andskär.
Longtime Porsche customers, the Kremer brothers had modified their Porsche 962 to an open-top spyder version, called the Kremer K7. It had notable success, winning the Interserie series in 1992 and 1993 by Manuel Reuter and Giovanni Lavaggi respectively. They took the car to the May test day in the LM-P1 class, but it was ruled ineligible by the scrutineers. Work quickly started on a new version, which became the K8. This involved a complete change of chassis to a flat bottom, and returning it to be a 2-seater, with a kevlar/carbonfibre bodyshell.Spurring 2012, pp.158-9 Matters became complicated when Kremer Racing then secured the rights to run the Honda works GT effort on their behalf. However, the Project 100 marketing agency approached Kremer regarding a deal to run a P1 for a return to Le Mans by Gulf Oil UK. The idea was to have it centred around Derek Bell, who had won his first Le Mans victory (of 5) with the Gulf-Mirage GR8 prototype. An agreement was reached, and race preparation of the K8 was taken over by UK-based Kiwi Graham Lorimer's F3000 team. Bell was enticed out of his year of retirement for the event. Decked out in its distinctive Gulf livery, he ran midfield at the test-day – so work was required to reduce the downforce effects. For the race, Bell was teamed up with Robin Donovan and Jürgen Lässig.
Yves Courage was still trying to emulate Jean Rondeau with an owner/racer Le Mans win. His team was working on a new chassis, the Courage C41, for the IMSA series. However, with a month to go the project was set aside as there would not be enough time to get it properly race-ready. Already planning a 3-car assault including two C32LMs based on last year's chassis, a third one was hastily prepared in its stead. Engineer Marcel Hubert updated the cars for a flat-bottom and longer tail. The suspension was also modified to use Michelin tyres for the first time. The lead car would be raced by veteran Henri Pescarolo with Alain Ferté and Franck Lagorce.Spurring 2012, pp.159-60