Cycle News - Archive Issues - 1980's

The 24 ~ours of Le Mans gets underway at the Bugatti Circuit in France. The French Honda team won. FIM CoUpe d'Endurance Road Race Series: Round 1 H~nda -France entry wins Le Mans 24 Hours By Julian Ryder Photos by Kel Edge LE MANS, FRANCE, APR. 22-23 Endurance road racing may have lost World Championship status, but the historic Le Mans Bugatti Circuit saw three of the Japanese faEtories field full works teams in the first round of the 1989 FIM Coupe 'd'Endurance. At the " d th I k" en d ~f th e roun e c oc race, It was the Honda France entry the winner by a margin of 10 laps over the runner-up works Kawasaki team with another works Kawasaki team taking third, three more laps in arrears. Honda had two RVFs, one for two of last year's winning trio, JeanMichel Mattioli and Alex Vierira of France and, in his first Le Mans race, Roger Burnett of the United Kingdom. The other bike was ridden by Canada's DuHamel brothers, Miguel and Mario, and Mal Campbell of Australia. The Hondas started as favorites, but Kawasaki had a formidable French trio of triple endurance World Champion Patri~k Igoa, Pierre Bolle and Jean-Louis Battistini on the new Kawasaki ZXR750 and an unknown Japanese trio, Sohwa, Tada and Tsuk"amoto. They were an official factory entry, given the ride as a reward for Sohwa and Tada's fifth place finish at the Suzuka 8 Hour last year: Suzuki had just one works bike for Moineau, Crine and Graziano. Qualifying went according to the form book. Vieira took pole position with a' scorching 1 minute, 49.16 second lap on the remode!ed circuit, comfortably ahead of Cnne on the Suzuki at 1:49.82. Miguel DuHamel was next at 1:50.00, followed by the two Kawasakis. Igoa led the Green Meanies with 1:5L 14, followed by Tadahino Sohwa with a fast but ragged 1:5L28. The best privateers, Skold and Linden of Sweden with Robert Dunlop, brother of Joey of Ireland, were nearly a second behind the works bikes in sixth. Unfortunately, the very pretty little Honda 644cc single of That's Team Ikuzawa (That's is a cassette tape manufacturer) missed out when their qualifying engine overpowered the clutch and when it was fixed Robert Holden of New Zealand faced a partially wet track. The bike was an unofficial' project of II Honda R&D employees that had been 'realized WIth the full blessing of both Honda R&D and HRC who assisted with advice and permitted after hours use of their facilities in Japan. Holden and That's sponsorship. replaced Paul Lewis on a private Harris Yamaha after the little Aussie broke his hand in qualifying. A crowd estimated at 65,000 watched the Saturday afternoon start in' clear weather. They saw Vieira and Crine slug it out at the front, changing the lead three times in the first eight laps. Bolle led Sohwa in a Kawasaki tandem at a respectful distance. Miguel DuHamel's Honda had refused to start on the button and had to be pushed. He charged through the pack, setting a new lap record of 1:49.77 in the process and finishing the first hour in fifth. Vieira established the Honda as the leader as Crine eased his challenge. Sohwa, having held a strong fourth, faded badly at the end of his session and his lines became erratic. Observers marked the Japanese team down for an early exit. . But as Mattioli kept the pace at the front the Suzuki slipped a lap behind after two hours and then blew up in spectacular fashion during Graziano's first session. Various explanations were offered by Suzuki personnel, but the most reliable report I heard.said the crank broke, . prrecipitating mechanical mayhem. All that remained was for the factory mechanics to throw cemen t dust over the massive oil slick in front of their pits and pack up. The race pattern was now established. The Anglo French Honda held a slim but significant one-lap advantage over the French Kawasaki, which in turn was a lap up on the second Honda. The newly christened That's Racing Yamaha of Robert Holden, Mat Oxley. and Michael Lundwall led a pack of five teams on the same lap including the Japanese Kawasaki getting its act together after a very erratic first couple of hours. At the start of the second hour there was a terrible looking collision at the end of the main straight when Honda-mounted Barrie Middleton was rammed by the French Suzuki of Bergeret. It looked appalling: debris flew everywhere and Middleton's rear tire was tom off its rim, but both riders got up and jumped over the Armco as soon as they stopped rolling. Amazingly, the British rider got away with a broken wrist, the Frenchman with contusions. Just as everyone breathed a collective sigh of relief, four bikes went down in a heap at the 180degree Museum bend left-hander and the pace car was sent out for the first of three occasions while the marshalls cleaned up oil. As usual, much of Le Mans' drama happened during the night. At midnight Patrick Igoa took the French Kawasaki to within two laps of the leading Honda. In a storming session he put in several 1:50 laps. Mal Campbell, two laps further back in third, was following. Every time his pit board showed he'd put in a fast lap, Igoa seemed to pull away. At the end of his session, the Aussie ripped his helmet of( and with an ear-to-ear grin asked his pit, "What was Patrick doing?" When he was told, the grin got even bigger and the Australian offered the opinion that "Patrick's a .@#&%@ (expletive deleted)." He repeated this statement several times. But it was the Kawasaki's pit stop just before 1 a.m. that signalled the end of the green challenge. The crew took a lot of time to get the front brake pads changed and only 10 minutes after Pierre Holle had rocketed out of pit lane to chase the Honda he was back in again complaining of a misfire high up the rev range. The mechanics fiddled with various electrical connectors and sent him out again. Five minutes later he was back; this time the tank came of( and ignition system components were changed. The DuHamels and Campbell duly took over second place, and when the leading privateers' French RC30 went down in another nasty double pile-up, the four works bikes were left well clear at the head of the field. Halfway through the race, Burnett, Mattioli and Vieira were making it look easy three laps ahead of their teammates. Three laps further back the French Kawasaki team was still worrying about their untraceable problem, especially as they only had two laps on the Japanese team. The leading Honda's only worry was Roger Burnett, or rather his feet. Two weeks before the race he'd crashed in private practice breaking three toes in his right foot and cracking a bone in his left ankle. The toes had knitted, but he still needed a modified right boot because of the swelling. The real problem was the broken bone on the top of his left foot. That, of course, is the gearchange foot and at Le Mans there are 22 gear changes per lap and 30 laps a session. At 2 a.m. Burnett was turning regular 1:52 laps, al though next time he appeared in the pits he was using a cane. "It hurts," he said, somewhat unneccessarily. Actually, there was another word in that sentence, but this is a family newspaper. Unusually, there' was no rain at Le Mans during the race, but after 15 hours the field of 55 starters was down to just 27 machines. As Burnett was coming to the end of a stint at 5:30 am., he started feeling the chain jumping the sprockets. It got worse, and after he'd decided to come in one lap early, the chain jumped off the cogs and locked the wheel. Fortunately for Roger it freed, and even more fortunately he didn't have far· to push. At first the mechanics were confused by Burnett's Anglo-Saxon expletives about the gearbox, but they lost just three laps getting the bike straight again. But that was enough to let their teammates through to the lead. Behind the two Kawasakis, suffering from a misfire and a Sohwa crash, respectively, the battle for top privateer featured the French Hondas: Bertin, De Puniet and Monneret, Brand, Coq and Goulin, and Amer-

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