Between Jo Siffert's first top 5 finish at the 24 Hours of Le Mans in 1966 and his untimely death at the Brands Hatch circuit in 1971, high points in the Swiss racing driver's career coincided with many events still discussed today.

1968 was an outstanding year for Jo Siffert. He won the Rolex 24 at Daytona, the 12 Hours of Sebring and his first victory in the Formula 1 World Championship, at Brands Hatch. 1968 was also the year of the the Prague Spring period of political liberalization in Czechoslovakia, the assassinations of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy, not to mention the political and social unrest that erupted in May in France. As a result, the 36th running of the 24 Hours of Le Mans was pushed to the month of September. Jo Siffert scored Porsche's first pole position at the race and became the first Swiss pole-sitter at the 24 Hours!

1968 was also a turning point in motorsport financing. "We saw the emergence of 'visible' sponsoring," confirms Michel Janvier. According to Olivier Marin, it was extraordinary that "Jo Siffert had anticipated the change. He was one of the first to understand the benefits of sponsoring. I think because he came from a modest background and wanted to be successful in a profession that requires money, it pushed him to be more than just a driver. In the 1960s when things were evolving quickly, he understood the power of publicity, he looked for sponsors himself and worked hard to get the money he needed to be able to continue racing. We named one of the chapters 'Jo Siffert homme d’affaires' (Jo Siffert, businessman, Ed.) to represent that aspect of his professional life."

"Olivier and I did not set out expressly to include news and events that coincided with Jo Siffert's sporting career," continues Michel Janvier. "But doing the research for the book brought to light the opportunity to link certain dates and events. The first story I illustrated was his win at the British F1 Grand Prix in 1968. A BBC video I studied showed a young Prince Charles with some drivers. The latest fashion trends were exploding at the time. That helped me with the illustrations that showed the public. Fashion played a part in races and influenced my drawings in that first story. But I was first inspired to link events deliberately when I accidentally came across a Paris-Inter audio diary in the INA archives. I had simply been looking online for videos on the 1969 1,000 km of Zeltweg for the story when Jo Siffert won a race with the Porsche 917 for the first time, along with Kurt Ahrens. And I found this audio diary dated 10 August 1969 revealing that the date of the victory coincided with the killing of Roman Polanski's wife Sharon Tate in Hollywood by the Charles Manson clan. The savagery of it (Sharon Tate was heavily pregnant and several people were massacred, Ed.) shocked the world. I didn't use it in the story of Zeltweg 1969, but I did in 'Siffert globe-trotter' for his world travels between 1969 and 1971. The pace of the chapter, going from race to race, went well with the topical references of the time, and the summer of 1969 was particularly remarkable to me. The races perfectly mirrored certain events: on 21 July 1969, Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon; on 10 August, the Manson Family Murders took place; and during the weekend of the Woodstock Festival, Jo Siffert did his first Can-Am race with the 917 PA! That's why Jimi Hendrix figures in the work. In three weeks, things happened that we're still talking about today."

Olivier Marin clarifies that "it wasn't always easy to sort through all the events that marked Jo Siffert's life and career. The number of pages in a comic book is limited, but we tried not to leave out any essential aspect of his legend, all while increasing the profile of lesser known events, and that's when making the choice became tricky. To be as exhaustive as possible relative to his eclectic character, we often slipped an anecdote into a single panel in the middle of a short story dealing with another topic, but we always paid attention to the flow. That allowed us to cover as many things as possible."

After 1968 and 1969 - and despite two retirements at the 24 Hours of Le Mans - 1970 and 1971 firmly entered Jo Siffert into the motorsport hall of fame. Again there were overlaps between the news of the day and his career achievements, to be discussed in the next installment in this series.

ILLUSTRATION (Michel Janvier and Olivier Marin/Editions Paquet): In 1969, Jo Siffert took part in the 24 Hours of Le Mans at the wheel of a Porsche 908/2, and the following year Steve McQueen scouted locations for his film "Le Mans."