No wonder, then, that team-mate Henri Pescarolo didn’t want him anywhere near the car. In fact he didn’t much want to be in it himself. To call Pesca cheesed off with Matra at the time is putting it mildly. In his first ever full F1 season in 1970 he’d finished all but three races for Matra, always in the top ten, at Monaco on the podium, yet at the end of the season they fired him. He resolved never to race for his national team again. But two years later the MS670 looked like being a far better car than its predecessors, Porsche had walked away from sportscar racing in a huff after new 3-litre rules made its all-conquering 917 ineligible, and Ferrari, whose 312PB won literally every other race of the year, decided not to enter Le Mans. By contrast Matra, having been committed to sportscar racing since 1966, decided to focus on Le Mans alone. Pescarolo knew this was the best chance he’d had, possibly the best chance he’d ever have, and he wasn’t about to let wounded pride stand in the way.
But he was still worried about Hill. He thought the Briton was there rent-collecting in the autumn of his career and, with fairly filthy weather in prospect, would take it easy and not push the car the way he knew it needed to be pushed to beat his countrymen Francois Cevert and Jean-Pierre Beltoise in other MS670s and their hugely experience team-mates Howden Ganley and Chris Amon, the latter being the bloke who’d replaced him in the Matra F1 team…
He need not have worried. Beltoise and Amon were out on the second lap and while the Cevert/Ganley car kept on the same lap as Pesca and Hill for most of the race, when the water finally got into its electrics and put it back a couple of laps, their challenge was over.