Race
The Porsches were able to turn up to turbo boost in qualifying, thus were able to qualify in the top spots. Early in the race Jaguar proved to be faster and overtook all the Porsches (In the normal race configuration turbo boost) by the 2nd lap.
After four years of trying with previous evolutions, Jaguar took the XJR-9 to victory against Porsche's works 962C in 1988. Apart from a lone Jaguar in fourth, Porsches filled the rest of the top ten. The Sauber-Mercedes team withdrew prior to the event following concerns over blowouts from their Michelin tires. The race covered a distance of 5,332.97 km, the most distance covered in any of the Le Mans 24 hours races, except 1971 when the Martini Racing Team Porsche 917K covered 5,335.313 km in 397 laps. Those records would however be broken over 20 years later in the 2010 24 Hours of Le Mans, when the #9 Audi R15 TDI plus of Joest Racing (under the name Audi Sport North America) tied the record for the number of laps around the Le Mans circuit (at 397 laps) and, due to its changing course configurations (such as the Mulsanne straight chicanes), set an outright distance record of 5,410.7 km over the 13.629-km course configuration.
This was the second-to-last 24 hour race without chicanes on the Mulsanne straight, and Team WM Peugeot had prioritised breaking the speed record that year. With special tires and taped-over air intakes, the WM P88 managed to reach a top speed of 407 km/h (253 mph) at the end of the Mulsanne straight.
The Jaguar team suffered from gearbox problems, Lammers holding the car in 4th gear to keep the gearbox from damaging itself. The Bell, Stuck, Ludwig Porsche 962C came very close to winning, with Ludwig making a rare error by running out of fuel on the track and losing valuable time getting back to the pits. The win ended Porsche's 7-year reign at Le Mans.
Read more about this topic: 1988 24 Hours Of Le Mans
Famous quotes containing the word race:
“These battles sound incredible to us. I think that posterity will doubt if such things ever were,—if our bold ancestors who settled this land were not struggling rather with the forest shadows, and not with a copper-colored race of men. They were vapors, fever and ague of the unsettled woods. Now, only a few arrowheads are turned up by the plow. In the Pelasgic, the Etruscan, or the British story, there is nothing so shadowy and unreal.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“We set this nation up ... to vindicate the rights of man. We did not name any differences between one race and another. We opened our gates to all the world and said: “Let all men who want to be free come to us and they will be welcome.””
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)
“On fields all drenched with blood he made his record in war, abstained from lawless violence when left on the plantation, and received his freedom in peace with moderation. But he holds in this Republic the position of an alien race among a people impatient of a rival. And in the eyes of some it seems that no valor redeems him, no social advancement nor individual development wipes off the ban which clings to him.”
—Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825–1911)