Super Seven: One-time World Sportscar race winners

As sportscar racing devotees will know, Toyota recently lifted the prestigious RAC Tourist Trophy at Silverstone, round one of the World Endurance Championship, but back in the second half of the 1980s and early 1990s, the death throes of the WSCC, it played second fiddle to Jaguar, Mercedes and Peugeot in the scrap for Group C glory.

Toyota is one of seven marques to have claimed just a single WSC victory between 1953 and 1992. Here are the other six that tasted global endurance glory on one occasion.

Alpine

The Alpine-Renault partnership had been successful in World Rallying a few years before, lifting the inaugural WRC Manufacturers’ title, but it only secured one WSCC win – and that came at Mugello in the second round of the 1975 series. Frenchmen Gérard Larrousse and Jean-Pierre Jabouille took the A441 to a one-lap win over the Willi Kauhsen-run Alfa Romeo T33/TT/12 of Jacky Ickx and Arturo Merzario. “But what about Alpine-Renault’s famous Le Mans win in 1978 with F1 ace Didier Pironi and Jean-Pierre Jaussaud?” you may well cry. Well, the 24 hours wasn’t a round of the WSC that year.

Brabham

Perhaps surprisingly, given its success in Grand Prix racing and its innovative approach to a variety of single-seater disciplines, Brabham didn’t do sportscar racing in quite the same way that other independent marques did. However, its nimble BT8 chassis, powered by a 2-litre, four-cylinder Coventry Climax engine, and driven by Denny Hulme, a man who would go on to win the F1 world title for Brabham in 1967, picked a fight with the big boys at Oulton Park on May 1, 1965 in the famous Tourist Trophy. When the V8 McLaren M1Bs and Lola T70s wilted, Hulme was there to snatch glory. The Kiwi won the first heat and finished second to the T70 of Briton David Hobbs in the second, but he took overall honours on aggregate.

Cunningham

American entrepreneur and America’s Cup-winning yachtsman Briggs Swift Cunningham II’s eponymous creation, the C4R, will forever hold the distinction of winning the very first World Sportscar Championship race, held at Sebring in 1953. Cunningham’s 5.4-litre V8 Chrysler machine was crewed by John Fitch and Phil Walters and they took a one-lap victory in the 12-hour Florida enduro over the works-entered Aston Martin DB3 of British duo George Abecassis and Reg Parnell. Cunningham himself shared a 1.3-litre OSCA MT4 with Bill Lloyd, taking fifth place overall and first in the up-to-1500cc class. And that would be the last time a Cunningham graced the top step of a WSC podium. More recently, as you can watch in the video above, British historic racer Sam Hancock took a Cadillac-engined C4R to victory in the Peter Collins Trophy at Goodwood’s 74^th Members’ Meeting in 2016.

March

A British-built March chassis took one of the most bizarre WSC wins in the series’ history – at Fuji in 1985. The 85G, powered by a 3-litre, twin-turbo V6 Nissan and driven solo by top Japanese racer Kazuyoshi Hoshino, capitalised on the appalling weather that befell the Japanese venue that October. The rain was so incessant and the track so flooded that all the factory Group C teams – Rothmans Porsche, TWR Jaguar and Mazdaspeed – as well as most of the top privateer squads (John Fitzpatrick, Joest and Richard Lloyd), withdrew, refusing to start what was scheduled to be a 1000km event. In the end, the race did get going, but it was stopped just after quarter distance with Hoshino the winner. His team-mates, Akira Hagiwara and Keiji Matsumoto, never even got to drive the #28 machine. It remained Hoshino’s, March’s and Nissan’s only WSC victory – and a rare success for a soloist.

OSCA

Officine Specializzate Costruzione Automobili or, more simply, OSCA, was created by three of the Maserati brothers who’d split with the family firm in the late-1940s. Their only WSC win came with the MT4 at Sebring in 1954. The Italian machine, with just 1500cc motivation, was pedalled by Bill Lloyd, who’d won his class in an even smaller-engined car a year earlier (see Cunningham), and a Brit by the name of Stirling Moss. The duo took a five-lap victory over the much more powerful works Lancia D24 of Porfirio Rubirosa and Gino Valenzano, with Grand Prix ace Moss very much making the expected difference in the diminutive Briggs Cunningham-run car and thereby guaranteeing OSCA’s place in WSC folklore.

Shadow

There were two World Championships for endurance racing in 1976 – the World Championship of Makes for Group 5 production-based machines and the World Sportscar Championship for Group 6 prototypes – and neither was particularly well supported. Porsche’s 935 and BMW’s 3.5 CSL did all the winning in the WCM and Porsche’s 936 cleaned up in the WSC. On one occasion, however, during the fifth round of the WSC at Mosport in Canada, Porsche was walloped by a numbers-boosting interloper in the shape of an 8.1-litre Chevrolet-powered Shadow DN4A – a defunct Can-Am title-winning beast from 1974. Driving that day, albeit not eligible to score WSC points, was Briton Jackie Oliver. He took the Shadow to an easy win from pole position over another fellow Can-Am champion, George Follmer, in a thunderous McLaren M20. So that’s how Shadow ended up winning a WSC race, even though it had the ‘wrong car’.

Images courtesy of LAT