The amazing story of the first motorsport triple crown winner

In the meantime, wind back 46 years to the leaden skies of Le Mans, 1972, where another man was attempting to do exactly the same thing. Graham Hill had already won the F1 title twice and, of course, the 1966 Indianapolis 500. Le Mans would be a doddle, then? Well maybe not.

By 1972 Graham Hill was 43 years old and while still a full time F1 driver, had not so much as seen a podium since 1969. Indeed having smashed both his legs at Watkins Glen at that end of that season there are those who’d say he was never quite the same driver again. Factor in also that while he was a Le Mans veteran with nine previous starts in the race and one second place, he’d not actually raced in the 24 Hours since 1966…

It gets worse. He was surprised and honoured to be asked to drive for the French Matra team and by the time he dutifully turned up at Paul Ricard for a pre-race 24 hour test of the MS670 he was to race, it had been wailing around the track without problem for 20 hours. “I’ll soon fix that,’ said Hill with his customary banter and put a rod through the block within two laps of climbing aboard.

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.

And to Pescarolo’s more or less complete surprise, Hill drove beautifully on that treacherous circuit in often terrible weather. ‘When I looked at his lap-times in the night and in the rain I thought ‘OK I can sleep now”. His speed in the night was one of the reasons we won.’ They were completely simpatico as team-mates, Hill displaying not one of the prima donna tendencies you might expect from a two-time F1 world champion towards a team-mate still in his twenties with a single podium to his name.

As it turned out, Graham Hill never raced at Le Mans again, while 1972 would be first of a hat-trick of wins for both Pescarolo and Matra. He would win his fourth in a Porsche in 1984 en route to clocking up 33 starts in the French classic, more than anyone before or since.

For Hill that win was an enormous achievement, confirmation if ever it were needed of his place in the pantheon of all-time great racing drivers. As for that other double F1 world champion Fernando Alonso, if he realises his dream and does indeed win the Indy 500, that achievement will be no less impressive and no less deserved.

Photography courtesy of Motorsport Images.