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How Street Car Tires Went to the 24 Hours of Le Mans and Won March 18, 2005 The cover of the Jan/Feb issue of Vintage Motorsport Magazine shows the cars and even gives a peek at the tires. The story is titled, "How Street Car Tires Went to Le Mans and Won; the inside story of the BFGoodrich Mazda-Lola Racing Team." It was 1983 and BFGoodrich® tire engineer Chuck Patrick remembers, "We had a really great tire and had won races with our V-rated radial on a Mazda RX-7 in GTU. The problem was, nobody really cared about an RX-7 doing really well in GTU." GTU was a class in the now-defunct International Motor Sports Association (IMSA) GT road racing series. The solution, figure out a bigger, more glamorous racing venue to show off the technology, like Class C2 in the World Endurance Championship, which included the 24 Hours of Le Mans. That led to the creation of a BFGoodrich racing team to race the 24 Hours on BFGoodrich tires. What soon followed was one of the most important chapters in the history of The World's Hottest Street Tires. The man picked to make up the team was hot-shoe Jim Busby, a southern Californian with plenty of experience winning big races. It was already a given that the engine for the BFG Le Mans racer would be the well-proven Mazda rotary, and Busby decided the sleek new Lola T616 was the perfect chassis. He was right, but it wasn't an easy drive from southern California to victory at Le Mans. Asking a street tire to deliver 24 hours of performance at 180 mph was asking a lot, but there was more. It turned out the ideal tire size for the new Le Mans racer was ultra low profile tires on tiny 13-inch wheels, which meant engineering a new kind of tire. The team wanted very short tires so that the car could ride lower and minimize the car's frontal area and aerodynamic drag. The rears were almost as wide as they were tall! The new tire took plenty of testing, which Busby remembers as being a challenging process, helped by Computer-Aided Design (CAD) technology to work the bugs out. 
But the bugs got worked out; the cars went to Le Mans and made history. The drivers loved the cars. Lead driver Jim Busby said the Lola's light weight and sophisticated design, combined with the BFGoodrich tires, contributed to superb handling. "It was amazing the way
the car stuck to the ground. It was absolutely magical in the corners. One of the nicest cars I've ever driven."
"We had a very balanced team in terms of drivers. Our lap times were identical, and we basically ran like a freight train," said team driver Rick Knoop, who finished second in C2. "The Lola is a very sturdy beast that's extremely agile. Absolutely bulletproof." "It was an easy car to drive and it handled well," says John Morton, driver of the car that won Class C2. "The crucial part of our strategy was fuel consumption. We had to watch the fuel-flow meter on the dash, and we knew that to finish and win, we had to really milk our mileage. That meant feathering it on the straight and then running part throttle, keeping it down to about 180 mph to conserve fuel." It all worked. The BFGoodrich Mazda-Lola finished 1-2 in Class C2 in the 24 Hours of Le Mans, making history on street radials, and nobody who was part of it will ever forget it. "We were really a family," says longtime BFGoodrich tire engineer Chuck Patrick, who's contributed to a number of the company's history-making moments. "We figured out how to make a street-legal race tire, and what we accomplished was pretty amazing when you think about it now. It's something I look back on and I'm proud." You can find out more about the effort at www.vintagemotorsport.com. Photos courtesy Edd Mangino. |
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