1959 was Aston Martin’s year, as they took the World Sportscar Championship from Ferrari. Roy Salvadori and Texan Carroll Shelby in his chicken farmer’s striped dungarees didn’t go out to be the fastest, leaving Moss in one of the sister DBR1s to set an early pace to break most of the Ferraris, before engine problems began. The surviving works Ferrari of Gendebien and Hill traded the lead with the Shelby/Salvadori DBR1 during the night, and when the red car retired with overheating problems Aston’s strategy was vindicated with a race won by discipline over outright speed.

John Wyer managed that Aston victory; in 1975 he ran the Gulf-Mirage GR8, built in Slough and powered by the endurance version of the Cosworth DFV V8 – detuned to 370bhp and kept below 7500rpm to meet the consumption rules of this post fuelcrisis year and avoid car-breaking vibrations at higher revs. With the V12-powered Ferrari, Matra and Alfa opposition all absent, it wasn’t a great 24 Hours, but Jacky Ickx and Derek Bell worked hard to beat the bolder DFV-powered Ligier coupés. Surviving a broken rear suspension, it was Ickx’s second win and Bell’s first. There were maybe only 80,000 people there to see it, but inevitably a large proportion of them was British.

By the late 1980s the race was revitalised and ready for Jaguar and Mercedes-Benz to do battle again, bringing British fans in bigger, noisier profusion than ever. So for a few glorious years, Le Mans became as marketable to the tee-shirt and flag sellers of the merchandising world as football. And the races generally lived up to the frenzy.

Jaguar returned in 1984 with Group 44 and the XJR-5, and won in 1988, ending a run of seven consecutive Porsche wins with the XJR-9LM of Jan Lammers, Andy Wallace and Johnny Dumfries, sponsored by Silk Cut, run by Tom Walkinshaw and TWR. The Sauber-Mercedes were withdrawn before the race after one flipped in practice at 220mph (Mercedes clearly didn’t want echoes of 1955) but Jaguar had to work hard to beat Porsche, in a race where the lead changed 22 times, the gap was never more than a lap, and speeds on the pre-chicane Mulsanne topped 240mph. Motor noted, ‘it wasn’t until the French played God Save the Queen for the third time – and Derek Bell kissed Tom Walkinshaw on both cheeks – that it sank in that Jaguar had finally won Le Mans’.

It lost a stunning fight with Sauber-Mercedes in 1989 but won again in 1990 with John Nielsen, Price Cobb and Martin Brundle in the Silk Cut XJR-12 – and chicanes on the Mulsanne straight. That changed the character of the circuit, and Mercedes stayed away, but it was a great win against mighty opposition from Porsche, Nissan, Toyota and Mazda.

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