Jean-Marc Gounon has no shortage of candidates when it comes to choosing his favourite car. The 1989 French Formula 3 champion never sat in a competitive Formula 1 car, making nine grand prix outings for Minardi and Simtek, before ploughing a furrow in sportscars where his hard-charging reputation honed by winning races with unfancied Formula 3000 machinery found its calling.
Aboard the Ennea Ferrari F40 at Nogaro in the 1996 BPR Endurance Series, Gounon had the race of his life in recovering from a lap down to challenge for victory until the driveshaft went with 10 minutes to go. But a car that while rapid was rough around the edges – with power delivery never controlled, ineffective power steering and inconsistent brakes – doesn’t qualify as his favourite.
And nor does the DAMS-run Lola B98/10 with a Judd V10 in which he won four times in the 1999 SportsRacing World Cup. Instead, the former Mercedes and BMW factory driver opts for a car he only ever raced once, after a last-minute call-up, at the Le Mans 24 Hours in 2003.
While the factory Courage-Judd C60 was arguably not the pinnacle of highly developed machinery, with no power steering and an “old-fashioned” manual sequential gearbox, the efforts made to get him into the cockpit for his first Le Mans appearance in three years and subsequent heroics during the race aboard “a very, very good chassis made by Paolo Catone” means it holds an elevated position in his memories. And when Gounon says “it was a fantastic story”, he is certainly not wrong – entirely befitting of a driver who began his karting career wearing gardening gloves, a borrowed motorcycle helmet and oversized painters overalls.
Gounon had made only sporadic appearances in the FIA GT championship over the 12 months prior to a Le Mans made famous by Bentley’s first victory since 1930 with the beautiful Speed 8. The owner of a car dealership in his hometown of Aubenas had begun to treat racing as his second job “because I needed to work on the dealership and I was already old” – he was a mere 40 – when a vacancy opened up in the all-French Courage LMP1 entry.
Boris Derichebourg, who had been due to share with one-time F1 prospect Jonathan Cochet and former Indycar racer Stephane Gregoire, had been injured in a French GT crash at Pau the previous weekend. Gounon recalls reading the news on the Tuesday before the 24 Hours in the L’Equipe newspaper and speculating with a friend over whether to inquire about the drive.
After giving in to curiosity and informing the team of his availability, he was told that a contribution would be expected - Gounon recalls that figures north of €150,000 were cited. He therefore believed “that was the end of the story”. Not so.
A call from John Judd revealed that the Rugby operation was prepared to offer Courage discounted engines to secure his services, then a meeting was convened that included tyre supplier Michelin, who was also willing to chip in. And by 8pm, Yves Courage had changed his tune.
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“He said, ‘Jean-Marc, we did everything for you, you come for free, we pay the expenses and you drive the car, but you have to be there tomorrow morning 8am’ because it was over the limit to register drivers,” remembers Gounon.
After driving through the night, he arrived in Le Mans at 4:30am on Wednesday morning, managed two hours sleep before being woken to get registered. Amid the whirlwind of the drivers’ briefing and making a seat for a car he’d never driven before, he was out for the start of first practice and, after remedying a ride height problem that destroyed the splitter, ended up 11th in the times on the first day before improving to ninth on Thursday. Not bad for his first prototype outing since September 2001 when he’d teamed up with Sam Hancock to race a B98/10 for the Kremer team at the Nurburgring.
“The Panoz was very quick [on the straight], they had low drag and they had big power also. I had to be in the slipstream all the time" Jean-Marc Gounon
“In two laps, the car was okay, and they were stupefied,” says Gounon, who recalls that engineer Catone agreed to swap the front and rear springs and change the dampers at his behest. “I said, ‘I know Le Mans like my home so it’s easy for me to go there’. At the end I did the quali because I was the quickest in the car.”
The Courage wasn’t especially easy to manage, with Gounon relating that it “was really quick, but hard to drive”. He’s well-qualified to make the judgement as Gregoire proclaimed himself unable to continue during the night. Gounon estimates that, as a result, he drove “at least 11 hours myself” and afterwards felt “totally destroyed”. It didn’t help that Cochet’s only set of overalls were misplaced from the drying machine when Gregoire made his mayday call, forcing Gounon to get back in one hour after completing a triple stint “from 4:30 to 7:30”.
“But we were fast and I was loving the car,” he adds. Sure enough, Gounon’s efforts lifted Courage into fifth spot, which was significant as the ‘best of the rest’ behind the two Bentleys and a pair of Audis – the third R8 run under the Audi Sport UK banner was an early retirement after Frank Biela’s uncharacteristic pitlane entry gaffe meant it ran out of fuel. “The best position you could do with a private car was P5,” confirms Gounon.
Autosport’s report notes that Gounon “was working wonders in the factory Courage-Judd”, but its hold on fifth wasn’t to last once he stepped out of the car. As the race entered its closing stages, Gounon rejoined the fray in the thick of a fierce three-way fight with the Gunnar Jeanette’s ageing but bullet-like front-engine Panoz LMP-01 Evo and the delayed Dome-Judd S101 with Jan Lammers at the wheel, recovering from losing 11 minutes to a battery change.
The battle raged in the closing stages, with Gounon briefly getting ahead when the Panoz had a nose change only for Jeanette to roar back past as Lammers followed in their wheeltracks.
“The Panoz was very quick [on the straight], they had low drag and they had big power also,” remembers Gounon. “I had to be in the slipstream all the time. They had TV on us and during one hour and a half, fighting, fighting, fighting.
“I was attacking in every corner but he was going away in the straights. He was so powerful and so quick that my engine was over-revving. At the end of each straight I was on the limiter, I couldn’t pass him. And I said, ‘okay, I have to wait until the last lap, last minute’.”
Autosport’s report relates what happened next: “Gounon came within inches of overhauling the Panoz, harried it for a while and then dropped back, his clutch having given up the ghost. This left him powerless to resist the challenge from a flying Lammers.”
Gounon admits he was “pissed off” at finishing seventh, after seeing fifth slip away: “In my mind, I said ‘it will be last lap, four corners [to go], attack’. It was clear that it was that and nothing else. And I was disappointed about that.”
But his mood was changed when he received applause from Joest’s technical guru Ralf Juttner. And Juttner wasn’t the only one to be impressed, as his 2003 drive parlayed into more opportunities with Courage in the team’s LMP2 car the following year.
After ditching the “catastrophic” Mechachrome engine, the C65 Courage was reconfigured to accept an engine built in Essex at AER and Gounon again starred by embarrassing several LMP1 machines to end up 12th overall, less than a second behind Erik Comas’s Pescarolo, and over 10 seconds ahead of his nearest class rival.
Gounon recalls that team patron Henri Pescarolo didn’t initially believe he was in a P2 car when they met in the pitlane after qualifying, and duly offered him a drive at Spa later that year in the fledgling Le Mans Endurance Series. And for 2005, he got his hands on an ORECA-run R8 for the full LMES. The Courage C60 had led to an improbable revival of his prototype racing career.
“It was good memories,” summarises Gounon. “The story is just out of what you see all the time. Testing, preparing, everything controlled, everything prepared for Le Mans during the winter. When I did it for McLaren [in 1997] we did several tests of 24 hours. Here you come, parking, seat, jump in the car – it’s out of what you can ever imagine.
“It was out of control, this story, it was nice!”
