24h Le Mans
As the days count down to the iconic endurance race, we look back to years when the 24 Hours of Le Mans were also held on 17-18 June. This first part features two races that took place in the inter-war period.
17-18 June 1933 – Italian domination
After becoming the first Italian manufacturer to conquer Le Mans two years earlier, Alfa Romeo claimed its third straight win in 1933 with its 8C driven by Tazio Nuvolari and Raymond Sommer. It was Sommer’s second consecutive triumph.
Nuvolari, meanwhile, became the first driver to win both the 24 Hours of Le Mans and the Monaco Grand Prix following his success in the Principality a year earlier, also in an Alfa Romeo. The 1933 24 Hours of Le Mans saw two other 8Cs complete the podium with Philippe Varent/Luigi Chinetti in second and Tim Rose-Richards/Brian Lewis in third, while the eighth-placed 6C driven by André Rousseau/François Paco made it four Alfa Romeos in the top ten.
Two Aston Martins finished fifth and seventh. The wheel of the seventh-placed Ulster was shared by Augustus Bertelli, joint owner of the marque at the time, and Sidney Charles Davis, who had won in 1927 in a Bentley.
17-18 June 1939 – Drivers, manufacturers and super sportscars
The 1939 24 Hours of Le Mans, the last one before the outbreak of World War II, saw Bugatti clinch its second win, two years after its maiden victory. Jean-Pierre Wimille, one of the best French drivers of the inter-war years, was at the wheel for both successes – the only two appearances he ever made in the race!
Wimille became a manufacturer after the war, building a touring car named after him. The car had three staggered front seats with the central driver’s position forward of the two side seats. Incidentally, a similar design was adopted many years later by McLaren for its 1985 Le Mans-winning F1-GTR.
In 2005, Bugatti honoured the memory of Wimille’s 1939 co-driver Pierre Veyron by naming its extreme sports coupé after him. Powered by an 8.0-litre, quad-turbocharged W16 cylinder engine, the Veyron 16.4 entered the record books as the world’s fastest production car in July 2010 by reaching a peak speed of 431 kph.
The first post-war 24 Hours of Le Mans to fall on 17-18 June did not occur until 1995, with further episodes after the turn of the century. Read all about them in part two of this mini-series.
Photo (ACO archives): In 1933, Italian Tazio Nuvolari (in the foreground, second from the left) became the first driver to achieve the Monaco Grand Prix/24 Hours of Le Mans double.
