At Le Mans, the long-tail 962 was about as good as it gets, in my experience

When I stopped racing F1,’ says John Watson, ‘I agreed to drive some sports cars for one reason alone: to get off the motor-racing drug in a progressive manner rather than going cold turkey.’

Mention John Watson and most of us will recall his fine victory in the 1981 British GP at Silverstone. Seeing him hillclimbing with a Porsche 962 in Sussex last year, however, was a reminder of his less well-known sports car racing days. At the 2008 Goodwood Festival of Speed, Watson was back in a Porsche, the 1987 Leyton House-sponsored 962 which now belongs to Paul Michaels of leading London BMW dealer, Hexagon of Highgate.

Back in 1984, after his solid decade in Formula One, John agreed to drive for Jaguar at Le Mans. Over the next five years he drove Jaguar, Toyota and Porsche Group C cars in the world’s top 24-hour sports car race, plus a few other endurance events, as well as doing some development driving. Such is the fickle nature of 24-hour racing that he finished at Le Mans only once, in 1990 with the late Richard Lloyd’s Porsche 962C – sharing with Bruno Giacomelli and Allen Berg, he was 11th that year – but few can match his variety of experience.

‘Wattie’ remains one of a tiny handful of people to have driven many of the top cars in a golden era of Group C racing. We tracked him down to get his thoughts on the 962 and discover how it measured up against its rivals.

First of all, what was it like being back aboard a Group C car at Goodwood last summer, nearly 20 years on? ‘It gave me a good sense of the past, bringing it all back,’ says John, ‘and Paul’s car ran perfectly, doing everything it should do up the hill. I have always thought of the Porsche 962 long-tail as a supremely good car to drive.’

Wattie did have one experience of racing at Le Mans before his F1 career really got going. Back in 1973, he shared a Cosworth-powered Gulf-Mirage M6 with Mike Hailwood and Vern Schuppan. This foray to France marked his return to racing after being injured in the F1 Race of Champions early in the season. But, as things turned out, that Le Mans drive was brief; just six hours in, Vern was unfortunately caught out by an accident which flipped the Mirage onto its roof and out of the 24 Hours.

That was all a very long way back when Wattie returned to sports cars in the mid-1980s, just as endurance racing was rapidly becoming much quicker. When I asked him how different were the Group C cars from the single-seaters he was used to, his unexpected answer caught my interest.

‘Well, I don’t suppose anyone would know this but I did actually drive a 956, just once, when I was still with McLaren in F1. It was at Weissach [the Porsche factory’s own test track] and in the very early days of the Formula One TAG engine, the turbo 1.5-litre V6 that Porsche had built for us at McLaren. During the final stages of development I flew out to Weissach – it must have been August 1983 – ahead of Ron Dennis and John Barnard, and when I got there I saw a 956 development car sitting there. It looked quite rough and purposeful, like any development hack, and they had installed a TAG turbo engine in it for their test driver Roland Kussmaul to go pounding round.

‘No McLaren chassis was available but they needed to get the mileage on the engine and that’s why they used the 956. They had built the engine and they wanted to find out what it was like. They did find out but they didn’t tell McLaren, who actually owned the TAG engine, how they’d done it. When Ron saw it in a 956, it caused one almighty row. It’s amusing to remember it now but, I tell you, it was one of those “light the blue touch paper and stand back” moments.’

A 956 with a TAG turbo F1 engine in the back? The secret has long been out in the public domain but I had no idea that John Watson had actually driven it. This got my attention. What was it like?

‘Well, the thing was, I had nothing to compare it with at the time. What did interest me was that the TAG-Porsche engine seemed very impressive in the 956 but, when I got to drive it in the McLaren F1 car, there was terrible throttle lag at first. The installations were apparently identical but there’s so much more room in a sports car – I have always assumed it had something to do with that.’

Although Wattie was entered to drive the Group 44 Jaguar at Le Mans in 1984, that was no more than a toe-in-the-water first effort for Jaguar; his testing and occasional races with Porsche continued throughout the year.

‘The first time I drove a 962 was in a test down at Paul Ricard in spring 1984. I hadn’t driven a performance sports car on a circuit with a long straight for years and the thing that struck me was the amount of grunt, particularly the torque from that flat-six turbo engine, which I found very impressive.’ Although the first racing 962s had the 2.8-litre engine, with its single KKK turbo meeting US IMSA GTP regulations, this test car had the far more powerful 2649cc twin-turbo from the 956 works racers.

‘Of course,’ Wattie adds, ‘it was much heavier than an F1 car, correspondingly slow in its responses and it took much more physical effort to drive it. You needed to get up closer to the wheel, just to get the leverage, because the steering weights were much higher than in an F1 car. Then, when I got onto the long straight at Ricard that first time I can remember thinking, “****ing hell, this is quick!” But it was a very wellbalanced car and once you got used to the effort of it and the feel of that Porsche speciality, the spool diff that locks up, it really was nice to drive.’

Late in 1984, on September 30, there was a high point when he joined Stefan Bellof in a works Rothmans Porsche 956-83 for the Mount Fuji 1000km, a round of the World Endurance Championship. Our man was standing in for Derek Bell in Japan, as it clashed with an IMSA round in the USA, and Derek was in with a chance of winning the American championship.

‘What I remember most clearly from that race in Fuji is that, being Porsche, they’d put the seat on a nicely engineered adjustable slider, just like a road car. When Stefan came in to hand the car over to me in the race, he slid the seat right back to get out fast and I jumped in, not realising what had happened. Being of nearly the same height, we shared the same seating position. The belts were done up and I rushed away to spend the whole of my stint with my arms just about straight. It was extremely difficult to drive like that as I could only just apply the leverage required to turn the wheel.’ Modestly, he did not mention that they took pole and won the race. Bellof became the World Sportscar Drivers Champion for 1984 but was killed at Spa 11 months later.

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