5 Group C Greats

Porsche 956/962

1982-1986 World Sportscar Champion

1982-1987 Le Mans winner

39 Group C World Sportscar victories

Is Porsche’s Group C dominator the greatest sports-racer of all time? You could make a strong case. The 956 and its direct descendant, the 962, probably won more international motor races than any other car – unless you count all the derivatives of Porsche’s own 911.

Work on Porsche’s first (aluminium) monocoque started before the final Group C regulations had even been finalised. While the ground-effect chassis opened up new avenues – and challenges – for Porsche, the German firm did at least have a suitable engine.

A 2.65-litre unit had been developed for Porsche’s stillborn Indycar project, but fitted into the back of an old 936 it proved its worth at Le Mans in 1981. Not only had it won but the figures suggested it could reach the fuel efficiency required by the new regulations, while also producing 600-650bhp.

The 956 made its debut in the Silverstone 6 Hours, round two of the 1982 Championship. The added distance, 1,100km rather than the normal 1,000km, with no extra fuel allocation made the event an economy run. But Jacky Ickx and Derek Bell brought the car home second overall – behind the new Group 6 Lancia LC1 unfettered by fuel restrictions – and well clear in Group C.

More indicative of the future was that year’s Le Mans result. Works Porsches finished 1-2-3, with the next Group C car (an Aston Martin Nimrod) 42 laps behind the winner in seventh overall.

Ickx narrowly beat Lancia’s Riccardo Patrese to the drivers’ crown and, with the championship moving to full Group C, it was clear you needed to have a 956 to win. Fortunately, Porsche built scores of chassis for privateers, resulting in some fine contests, even if the factory Rothmans-liveried machines usually had the edge.

At the 1983 Le Mans, there were nine 956s in the top 10, and between October 1982 and October 1984, no other car won a World Sportscar Championship round.

For 1984 the 962 arrived, initially to make the car eligible for IMSA events in the United States, but a ‘C’ version was soon produced for Europe. A longer wheelbase was probably the most obvious change, but Porsche was constantly working on other developments, such as electronic engine management and increasing the flat-six’s capacity. Leading privateer teams, like Richard Lloyd Racing, also made their own tweaks, leading to myriad versions.

All this helped Porsche fight the oncoming onslaught of Jaguar and Sauber-Mercedes. Derek Bell narrowly pipped Jaguar’s Derek Warwick to the drivers’ title in 1986, but by the following season the 962 was no match for the XJR-8 in sprint races.

Le Mans, however, was a different matter. And, in one of its greatest moments, the turbo Porsche secured its sixth consecutive victory in the 24 Hours, in the hands of Bell/Hans Stück/Al Holbert.

Porsche focused all its efforts on Le Mans the following year, but finally lost to Jaguar and the 956/962’s heyday was over. That still didn’t stop a Joest example taking its final World Championship victory at Dijon in 1989, or the Dauer GT LM version winning Le Mans in 1994. The design had outlived the category for which it had been created.

“Every era has its masterpieces and the 956/962 was it,” says former works Porsche driver Jochen Mass. “They were fantastic cars.”

Jaguar XJR-9

1988 World Sportscar Champion and Le Mans winner

6 Group C World Sportscar victories

A Silk Cut-liveried Jaguar XJR-9 is probably the first image many British fans conjure up when Group C is mentioned. The V12-engined sports-prototype that finally took Jaguar back to the top of the Le Mans podium is one of motorsport’s most iconic machines.

To single out the XJR-9 is a little unfair to the series of Tom Walkinshaw Racing Jaguars designed by Tony Southgate. In truth, there was a direct lineage from 1985’s XJR-6 to the 1991 XJR-12, despite many changes and developments, such as an increase in engine capacity from around six litres to 7.4.

The XJR-6 showed Jaguar was serious right from its 1985 debut, and took its first win at Silverstone in 1986, but it was the XJR-8 that knocked Porsche off its Group C perch. The Big Cat stormed to 1987 World Championship success with eight wins from 10 rounds, but one of the two losses came at Le Mans.

The XJR-9 – or, more specifically, the low-downforce XJR-9LM – put that right in 1988. As well as holding off the increasingly threatening Sauber-Mercedes challenge to take both the drivers’ and teams’ titles, Jaguar won Le Mans after an epic battle with Porsche.

Andy Wallace, who took that famous victory with Jan Lammers and Johnny Dumfries, remembers the XJR-9 fondly.

“The first time a I drove one was at Paul Ricard and I was doing 200mph. It was quite an eye-opener,” says Wallace, not long out of British Formula 3 at the time. “They were fantastic cars, with ground effect and lots of downforce. They didn’t have power assisted anything so through fast corners they really loaded up. It was almost unmanageable on the Daytona banking – you had to jam your elbow in the door. And they were really hot inside.”

The Southgate cars were strong too, as Win Percy proved at Le Mans in 1987 when a tyre blowout caused his XJR-8 to crash at around 220mph. He walked away unscathed. “The tub stood up unbelievably,” said Percy at the time.

After 1988 – during which the XJR-9 also won the Daytona 24 Hours IMSA season opener – the normally aspirated V12 was increasingly outclassed by the turbocharged five-litre Mercedes V8-powered C9 and C11. Jaguar eventually went down the turbocharged route too, but the XJR-12 was still a force in longer events.

That was underlined by another Daytona 24 Hours success in 1990, as well as Jaguar’s seventh Le Mans victory. In the absence of Mercedes, the Jaguars steadily moved through the field and secured a one-two when the well-driven Brun Porsche of Jesus Pareja/Walter Brun/Oscar Larrauri expired in the closing minutes.

Even after the arrival of Jaguar’s sensational XJR-14, the V12 was wheeled out for Le Mans in 1991. The venerable package finished 2-3-4, but the extra weight handed to the older cars that year gave Mazda’s 787B a crucial advantage. It was nevertheless a fine way for Group C’s most successful normally aspirated engine to bow out.

Mercedes C11

1990 World Sportscar Champion

7 Group C World Sportscar victories

The ultimate Group C turbo car, the Mercedes C11 would surely have won many more races had the regulations not changed as World Sportscar racing headed down the 3.5-litre path in the early 1990s.

The Sauber C9 might have had a longer career and won more races, but the C11 was a significant step forward. The mean-looking Leo Ress-penned car was the final evolution of the five-litre turbocharged Mercedes-engined Group C machines that had been increasingly successful in the 1980s.

Goodwood favourite Jochen Mass, who won the 1989 Le Mans 24 Hours in the C9 and was successful in the C11, says: “The C9 was still an aluminium chassis and the C11 was carbon, and the aerodynamics were better. It was a fantastic car to race.”

The C11 also provided the nail in the coffin as far as Jaguar’s normally aspirated V12 was concerned, as Jaguar ace Andy Wallace remembers. “The V12 couldn’t match the fuel consumption of the Mercedes five-litre turbo,” he says.

“It was inevitable we had to go down that route – with turbos you could adjust the boost during the race to stay with the fuel consumption and in qualifying you could turn it up. In the normally aspirated Jaguars we always qualified behind the turbos.”

But even when Jaguar launched the turbocharged XJR-11, it couldn’t keep up with the Silver Arrows.

The Sauber-Mercedes team started 1990 with the C9 – still good enough for a one-two at Suzuka – before wheeling out the C11. Over the remaining eight championship rounds there were four one-two finishes and Mercedes only lost once. That one defeat came at Silverstone, thanks to one car being thrown out after practice due to receiving outside assistance and the other suffering an engine failure while well clear of the field.

The C11 also helped Michael Schumacher – then a Mercedes Junior Team member – to one of his first international victories, when the young German and Mass beat Nissan and Jaguar in Mexico City.

The car’s successor, the 3.5-litre C291, proved troublesome, so Jean-Louis Schlesser and Mass started their 1991 season in a C11. Despite now being saddled with a 1,000kg minimum-weight requirement (up from 900kg), the combination still proved adept at scoring points.

The C11 was also the class of the field on its Le Mans debut in 1991, Mercedes having missed the previous year’s non-championship 24 Hours. One or other of the three cars topped the hourly bulletins 20 times, but weren’t there when it really mattered.

In particular, the Schlesser/Mass/Alain Ferté car starred and was three laps ahead with just over three hours to go when an alternator bracket broke. The same pulley drove the alternator and the water pump so the C11 was retired with an overheating engine, leaving Mazda to win.

It was an unfitting end for such a great car. “I regret that the car didn’t win,” says Mass. “It deserved to be a Le Mans winner.”

Jaguar XJR-14

1991 World Sportscar Champion

3 Group C World Sportscar victories

Rarely has a car made such an impact with so few wins. The Jaguar XJR-14 only scored three World Sportscar Championship victories – plus a couple of IMSA successes in America and a single All-Japan Sports-Prototype win – but statistics do not do justice to a machine that changed the way sports-prototypes look.

Group C made a bold and ultimately doomed step towards 3.5-litre normally aspirated engines in 1991, but before the category died its final chapter would serve up a last helping of extraordinary machines.

The Ross Brawn-designed XJR-14 completely moved the goalposts in sportscar racing, thanks to several clever interpretations of the rulebook. It qualified more than two seconds faster than its nearest rival at Suzuka’s 1991 season opener and was even further ahead next time out at Monza. Indeed, such was the pace of the high-downforce car that it would have worried midfield F1 teams of the day.

Team manager Ian Harrison has described the Big Cat as “the best car I’ve ever been involved with”, a sentiment that is echoed by most of its drivers.

Reliability glitches scuppered the Jaguar at Suzuka, but it won three of the next four championship rounds (it didn’t start at Le Mans as the venerable XJR-12s were favoured for the 24 Hours), usually by an embarrassing margin. Its minor flaws of not enough front grip in slow-speed corners and a left-hand gearchange seemed mere details.

More important was Tom Walkinshaw Racing’s budget. Peugeot’s was much bigger and a revamped 905 (plus excellent Michelin rubber) suddenly made Jaguar’s job much harder in the second half of the year.

Over the final three rounds there were no more victories, but Teo Fabi was still able to take the drivers’ crown, to add to Jaguar’s teams’ title, before the marque bowed out of the series.

That was it as far as the XJR-14 in the World Championship was concerned. Davy Jones used one to set the pace early on in the 1992 IMSA GT Championship, but a string of incidents and the ever-increasing pace of the Eagle-Toyota operation limited him to just two wins.

The car did form the basis of the Judd-engined Mazda MXR-01 that finished fourth at Le Mans in 1992, but the XJR-14 begat even more important offspring later in the decade.

The chassis left at TWR’s IMSA workshop became the basis for Porsche’s WSC95 open prototype. The factory ended up not racing the car, but leading private squad Joest did – and won Le Mans twice, in 1996-1997. Not bad for a design conceived for different regulations at the start of the 1990s with no intention of running in a 24-hour event.

Final word to Goodwood House Captain and LMP ace Nicolas Minassian, who raced an XJR-14 at the 2013 Silverstone Classic and still holds the Historic GP circuit lap record: “It’s so good. It almost drives itself. This was the perfect training for the World Endurance Championship, even though the car is faster than LMP2…”

Peugeot 905

1992 World Sportscar Champion

1992 and 1993 Le Mans winner

8 Group C World Sportscar Victories

Unlike most of the other great Group C cars, Peugeot’s 905 was not an instant success. It did, however, end up as one of the very fastest sports-prototypes of all time.

Launched at the end of 1990, the French machine was built for the new 3.5-litre sportscar regulations. It lucked in to victory at the 1991 season opener at Suzuka, but in truth lagged well behind Jaguar’s new XJR-14 and didn’t always beat the ageing and ballasted Mercedes C11.

Its Le Mans debut also resulted in two retirements, though the 905s did at least get to run at the front in the early stages, helped by the rules allowing the 3.5-litre machines to start ahead of the older turbo cars and the quicker XJR-14 non-starting.

What Jean Todt’s team did have, however, was a serious budget and Michelin tyres. A sizeable break in the 1991 schedule allowed Peugeot to prepare the substantially different 905B, complete with rudimentary looking but effective front wing and Jaguar-style rear wing.

Peugeot went from being seconds off the pace to pushing the Jaguars at the Nürburgring, and Keke Rosberg/Yannick Dalmas then won two of the last three championship races. That wasn’t enough to stop Jaguar taking both the drivers’ and teams’ titles, but it demonstrated Peugeot would be a force in 1992.

With the withdrawal of Mercedes and Jaguar, grids dwindled, but Peugeot still had a works Toyota team to contend with. The further developed 905 usually had the edge over the TS010, the white cars sweeping to five wins from six rounds, and Dalmas/Derek Warwick winning the final World Sportscar drivers’ crown as the category finally died.

Contemporary lap times suggest the 1992 905 was on a similar pace to the previous year’s XJR-14. Which can be considered the fastest Group C machine probably comes down to the nature of a given circuit, but it is easy to argue the French racer was the better bet for true long-distance enduros.

“The Peugeot was between the V12 Jaguar and the XJR-14,” reckons Warwick, who won races in all three. “The engine was a bit bigger than the XJR-14, the gearbox a bit lazier. It was better in slow corners, but not as good in fast ones.”

Philippe Alliot showed just how fast the last generation of high-downforce normally aspirated sportscars were with his pole time at Le Mans. His 3m21.209s run was six seconds faster than Mark Blundell’s famous 1,000bhp+ turbocharged Nissan effort in 1990, and was almost identical to Bob Wollek’s 1987 pole for Porsche, set before the Mulsanne chicanes were introduced.

Peugeot continued development and, despite the demise of the World Championship, one final hurrah came at the 1993 Le Mans. The Evo 1C version underlined both its strength and its pace, scoring a 1-2-3, the winning Eric Hélary/Christophe Bouchut/Geoff Brabham 905 coming home 11 laps clear of the closest Toyota.

Public outings of the 905 are now few and far between, so it is no surprise that the sophisticated French racer is a hit whenever it appears at the Goodwood Festival of Speed.

Images courtesy of LAT