Ask Jan Lammers to name his favourite racing car, and he doesn’t plump for any of the Formula 1 machines he raced or tested - and the latter category includes the world championship-winning Lotus 79.
Nor does he go for the Toyota TS010 3.5-litre Group C contender he describes as the “fastest thing I ever drove”. Top of the list for the 1988 Le Mans 24 Hours winner is the BMW M1 Procar in which he was a race winner in the F1-support series that many regard as the greatest one-make championship of them all.
“It’s everything about that car, the series and the time,” says Lammers, a veteran of 23 grand prix starts and 24 at Le Mans. “It was the engine and the gearing of the car, the way it handled - it was such a joy to drive and really suited my style.”
His Procar season started with an out-of-the-box victory in the M1 from pole at Donington Park in April 1980 and then near misses at Avus and Monaco. He would almost certainly have won the former had his fire extinguisher not gone off and he remains disappointed and is more than a bit miffed that he missed out on the latter. He lost a clear chance to win on the streets of Monte Carlo courtesy of a bump from Didier Pironi while running at the head of the field.
“I was leading in the wet and braked early at the Tip Top bar for Mirabeau and Pironi torpedoed me - he just launched into the back of me,” recalls Lammers of an assault from the Ligier F1 driver, who was driving one of the entries that went to the five highest-placed Goodyear-shod drivers in opening F1 qualifying for the grand prix-supporting Procar rounds.
“He pushed me over one of those high kerbs and I realised straight away that my suspension was broken.
“I can say it today all these years on, but I decided I was going to get my revenge at the hairpin and take him off, but I was a little bit too late: rather than T-boning him, I ended up putting myself in the wall. My team asked me why I’d ended up just driving into the wall. I couldn’t tell the real reason, of course!
“I was so furious because I really wanted to win that race. I was driving for ATS in F1 at the time, but the Procar race was a chance to show yourself with equal machinery in front of everyone.”
The chance of victory at round two at Avus had disappeared when the in-cockpit extinguisher went off while Lammers was leading. It was the result, he believes, of blocking all the ducting into the driver compartment in the name of top speed on the long straights of the Berlin city-centre venue.
Disorientated, he dropped back into the lower reaches of the top six before he fought his way back to second. He got onto the back of race winner Manfred Schurti approaching the final corner, but was caught out by how slowly he was going - the Liechtenstein driver was nursing a puncture.
"My team asked me why I’d ended up just driving into the wall. I couldn’t tell the real reason, of course!"
Jan Lammers
“I was in attack mode, do or die, but he was going slower than normal, so it was either hit him or spin the car,” recalls Lammers.
He chose the latter and employed the experience from the Rob Slotemaker skid school at Zandvoort where he’d honed his driving skills as a teenager to rejoin in a cloud of tyre smoke and finish just six seconds down on the race winner: “I used some of the old tricks I’d learnt as a kid, knocking it into reverse. A nice trick and a lot of fun!”
A second position followed at the post-Monaco round at the Norisring, but after that, it was downhill with an increasingly wayward Bimmer. There was a fifth at Hockenheim and then a sixth with a broken valve spring in his backyard at Zandvoort. That was as good as it got for Lammers over the remainder of the season.
“The car was never quite the same after Monaco,” he says of the BMW Nederland entry fielded by the Alimpo Sport team run out of the back of a BMW dealership in The Hague.
Lammers, who switched from ATS to Ensign in F1 after Monaco following Marc Surer’s return from injury, led the Procar points into the closing stages of the season courtesy of his flying start. But he ended up fourth in the championship behind Nelson Piquet, Alan Jones and Hans Stuck.
It hasn’t clouded his recollections of racing in what was the final year of the two-season Procar series.
“It was still a good season, and I guess Monaco was just a bit of bad luck,” says Lammers, now 68. “Thinking about that car triggers so many emotions. That series was a special time and place for me. Sweet memories.”
