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One of the most pleasing features of the Le Mans 24 Hours
is the long record of participation of American cars. Chrysler
set the ball rolling as early as 1925 and there have been
only a few periods when there were no runners from across
the Atlantic. Yet overall success did not come until 1966
when Ford used a sledgehammer to break the ice, bringing over
a whole armada of machines and equipment to stop Ferrari in
its tracks after Enzo had refused to sell out to Dearborn!
A case of “if you can’t join them, beat them”!
The Ford
innings lasted for four years, and Ferrari has never won since,
but from that time onward no challenger from the USA has scooped
the top honours although some have tried.
Nevertheless,
American challenges are both popular and welcome but it has
to be said that their automotive technology has never been
on a par with their European rivals. This has certainly been
the case with the appearance of Cadillacs on the Sarthe circuit.
Not a make that one would naturally associate with motor sport
activity, Cadillac is one of the early names in American,
indeed motoring, history. Named after the French founder of
the city of Detroit, the company was established in 1903 and
became part of the General Motors family in 1909. It soon
wrote itself into the history books by being the first to
standardise coil ignition, electric starting and electric
lighting in 1912, the first in America to market a V-8 (a
5.1 litre unit in 1915) and the first to produce a V-16 motor
into the market-place. These and other innovations helped
to make Cadillac an expensive luxury car and it has sought
to maintain this reputation ever since. And so Cadillacs at
Le Mans are hardly what you would expect to find.
Until recently,
Cadillacs appeared just once at Le Mans, in 1950 as part of
a campaign that the great American enthusiast Briggs Cunningham
launched to try to win for the USA. His noble effort was prompted
by Luigi Chinetti’s win in the first post-war race, when
the thrice winner suggested that the ACO would accept a couple
of American entries for the 1950 race. Cunningham’s first
thought was to enter two ‘Fordillacs’, Ford sedans
into which had been forced powerful Cadillac V-8s by Frick-Tappet
Motors of Long Island, New York. The ACO objected on the grounds
that these were not production cars but Cadillac’s president,
Ed Cole, offered Briggs two Cadillac Series 61 Coupes de Ville,
complete with the 3-speed manual transmission that had just
been discontinued. To prepare his Le Mans assault, Cunningham
bought the Frick-Tappet concern and it was intended that one
car should be an aerodynamic roadster, the ACO agreeing since
the chassis would be standard. Now it happened that just down
the road was a Grumman Aircraft Inc. plant at Bethpage and
an engineer from this, Howard Weinmann, agreed to devise and
build an aerodynamic body in his spare time. Thus was born
what came to be affectionately labelled “Le Monstre”.
Ed Cole devised for this a five carburettor manifold to feed
the 5.4 litre V-8 and the standard sedan and roadster duly
appeared at Le Mans, the Collier brothers taking the former
and Briggs teaming up with the admirable Phil Walters in the
big open car.
While the
Colliers steered their comfortable rolling machine to 10th
overall, Briggs was having a more eventful time with “Le
Monstre”; it ran out of brakes at Mulsanne on its second
lap, charging the legendary sandbank out of which Briggs had
to dig with his hands until a mysterious shovel appeared!
He got going again with a damaged left front wing and headlight
and eventually finished 11th behind its team-mate, but not
before an occasion when the barge like car spun at the Indianapolis
corner and, being too large to turn in the road, had to reverse
in the race direction all the way to Arnage before being able
to resume the right way round! And both cars had their fashionable
steering-column gear changes (as did the Jowett Jupiter in
the same race!).
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But Cunningham set his sights higher and started to make his
own machines which used Chrysler’s more potent unit.
We leap almost fifty years to late 1999 when the new Cadillac
Northstar LMP began testing at the Putman Park circuit on
20 September. The motor racing world had been surprised to
learn of a serious programme by Cadillac to win Le Mans in
celebration of its centenary, General Motors never having
admitted to such a serious involvement in motor racing before!
The ‘General’ had always been a reluctant participant
and would regularly deny involvement with Corvettes in their
formative years in the late fifties. And now it was proclaiming
its ardent desire to win the biggest sports car prize of all!
It chose
a bad time! The late nineties was a period of big manufacturer
involvement at Le Mans, Porsche being joined by Mercedes,
BMW, Toyota, Nissan and Audi, all out to add Le Mans to their
triumphs. This inevitably pushed the technical progress forward
more intensely. Cadillac arrived in 2000 with a car that was,
frankly, out of date, Riley and Scott the chosen designers
and constructors of the Northstar LMP admitting later that
they had not kept abreast of European developments. Cadillac
spent the next three races trying to catch up!
Despite extensive
testing and development work on the production-conceived Northstar
V-8, a debut appearance in the Daytona 24 Hours yielded 13th
and 14th place, while Sebring offered more promise with a
6th.
At Le Mans,
Jean-Paul Driot’s DAMS team was entrusted with two additional
cars (chassis 02 and 05, the cars painted in a smart black)
while the factory brought chassis 03 and 04 in their characteristic
silver finish. 19th (DAMS no.3), 21st and 22nd were all that
could be mustered, the other DAMS car (no.4) catching fire
on the Mulsanne straight very early on. With such a disappointing
debut at Le Mans only the DAMS team ran cars in 2001, chassis
04 finishing 15th, while chassis 07 retired with accident
damage sustained in the wet conditions.
While this
was happening, the designer Nigel Stroud was commissioned
to create a completely new car and, when LMP02 was first seen
at testing at Sebring in January 2002, the future for Cadillac
looked more hopeful: only the brakes, turbos, and electronics
for the power-steering were carried over from the previous
Riley and Scott design. But when the cars appeared at the
Le Mans test day they were an alarming nine seconds off the
Audi pace! This was narrowed down considerably before June’s
race but the two works cars, chassis 02, car no.6 driven by
Taylor, Angelelli and Tinseau, and chassis 03, car no.7, driven
by Bernard, Lehto and Collard, could only manage 9th and 12th
respectively in the race.
The team
did not give up hope and improved the cars to the point where,
in the ALMS series later races, Cadillacs scored four podium
finishes, the best of which was a 2nd at Miami and, perhaps
more telling, a third in the Petit Le Mans. Then General Motors
pulled the plug on the project and we are unlikely to see
the famous name Cadillac at Le Mans again in the foreseeable
future.
But there is one small compensation. In that 1950 race Sydney
Allard and American Tom Cole drove their Allard J2 to an excellent
third place. And the engine that powered it? A 5.4 litre Cadillac!
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