Racing History
In April 1999 Mercedes launched the new Mercedes CLR as successor to the FIA GT championship-winning Mercedes-Benz CLK GTR and later CLK LM which would take part in the upcoming Le Mans 24 Hours. With tens of thousands of miles of testing on smooth race tracks, like Homestead and Hockenheimring, Mercedes felt that the car was quick enough to win the race, despite the short time spent on wind tunnel testing.
Three cars were entered, numbered 4, 5, and 6, each driven by a German, a French, and an English speaking driver, to allow efficient international marketing. Mercedes' major competitors, Audi R8R, BMW V12 LMR, Cadillac, Nissan R391 and Toyota GT-One, each entered two, three, or even four cars, making the 1999 Le Mans one of the toughest ever, particularly when additional competing smaller private teams like Panoz were considered. Only the Porsche factory team, the winner of the previous year's race, was missing from the prototype classes.
However, Mark Webber's #4 car became airborne at the Indianapolis corner during the Thursday night qualifying session. The car was rebuilt from scratch on Friday, modified for more downforce at the front, and entered in the Saturday morning warm-up. This time, Mark Webber only made it to the hump before the Mulsanne corner when the car backflipped in spectacular fashion, this time caught in mid-air by photographers. Luckily, neither Webber nor anyone else was injured on either occasion.
Despite the second incident and its echoes of the 1955 Le Mans disaster, Norbert Haug decided to go ahead and enter the other two cars in the afternoon, with additional modifications and instructions to the drivers not to follow other cars closely over humps.
Still after over 4 hours, driven at the time by Peter Dumbreck, the #5 CLR chased a Toyota GT-One and became airborne two turns before Indianapolis, somersaulting and landing over the barriers into the trees, all on worldwide live TV. The crowd in the Le Mans grandstands was terrified, seeing the pictures on large screens without hearing any comment for a long time. No injuries were sustained in this incident. The race continued under yellow flag conditions. The #6 CLR, driven by Bernd Schneider, was immediately retired.
Read more about this topic: Mercedes-Benz CLR
Famous quotes containing the words racing and/or history:
“Upscale people are fixated with food simply because they are now able to eat so much of it without getting fat, and the reason they don’t get fat is that they maintain a profligate level of calorie expenditure. The very same people whose evenings begin with melted goat’s cheese ... get up at dawn to run, break for a mid-morning aerobics class, and watch the evening news while racing on a stationary bicycle.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)
“The history of the past is but one long struggle upward to equality.”
—Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902)