Global Endurance Legends to Demo at Le Mans Classic
New for the Le Mans Classic in 2018 are the Global Endurance Legends, who will be doing demonstration runs and their addtion sees the event as a whole now cover cars from the history of the Le Mans 24 Hours right up to 2014! (Entry list at bototm of story.)
In 2018, Global Endurance Legends is joining up with historic series for the first time for a number of spectacular demonstrations of their popular cars: GTs and prototypes from the 1990s and 2000s. This initiative is a particularly important one for Peter Auto as in the past the organiser was at the origin of the growing impact made by these cars. "At the beginning of the 1990s beautiful GTs no longer appeared on circuits," recalls Patrick Peter. "So in the summer of 1993 Stéphane Ratel and I organised a race at Le Castellet. And suddenly everybody got very excited about the idea. One of the entrants spoke about it to Jürgen Barth who, at the time, was in charge of public relations at Porsche.
“This is how we created the BPR (Barth, Peter, Ratel). It was an immediate success and attracted Ferrari F40s, McLaren F1 GTRs and then the Porsche GT1 with Formula 1 drivers at the wheel." A few years later Peter Auto again took the initiative and created a series that was at the origin of the FIA World Endurance Championship. "It became obvious that a championship had to be created for the entrants in the Le Mans Endurance 24 Hours and that’s how the ACO and Peter Auto founded the Le Mans Endurance Series in 2004."
This year, these two generations of cars will add spice to Le Mans Classic. More than 50 will take to the famous track, featuring models such as: the Ferrari F40 LM (1990), McLaren F1 GTR (1996), Ferrari 333 SP (1997), Panoz Esperante GTR1 (1998), Toyota GT-One (1999), Audi R8 LMP (2000), Bentley Speed 8 (2003), Ferrari 550 GT1 (2003), Maserati MC12 GT1 (2004), Aston Martin DBR9 (2005) Pescarolo LMP1 (2007), Peugeot 908 HDI (2011), etc.
At the wheel of these endurance racers are well-known drivers such as Christian Pescatori, Norman Nato, Sam Hancock and Emmanuel Collard. The latter, who has racked up 23 starts and two top-three finishes in the Le Mans 24 Hours, will be back at the wheel of the Toyota GT-One, which he drove in the event in 1999.
The two Global Endurance Legends demonstrations will take place on Friday 6th July between 10:45 and 11:15 (local time) and on Saturday 7th July between 13:22 and 13:57. These demonstrations are not races as the aim is to allow these fantastic cars to show what they can do in an appropriate and safe environment.
Current Entry List:
