The ragbag of GT cars that took to the Circuit Paul Ricard for a couple of hastily-organised races in August 1993 hardly captured the world’s imagination. Autosport made no mention of it in its pages, and for good reason. The grid lacked quantity and quality, and there were no star-name drivers. No one could have predicted that it would be the start of something big. So big that its legacy stretches all the way to the present day.
The event ended up acting as a pilot for what the motorsport world generally refers to as the BPR series. GT racing was reborn with the BPR Organisation’s run of non-championship GT races in ’94, which then morphed into the Global Endurance GT Series for ’95. International sportscar racing in Europe, the Le Mans 24 Hours included, was hauled out of the mire in double-quick time.
The driving force behind the race at Ricard 30 years ago was Stephane Ratel, the ‘R’ of the BPR whose eponymous SRO Organisation today runs 15 series around the world and puts on 50-plus race weekends annually.
“A very important little race,” is how Ratel describes the Ricard event today. “I don’t think the BPR would have started without it. Everything I do today can be traced back to that weekend at Le Castellet. It was the beginning of everything.”
Ratel had taken his first steps in motorsport with the organisation of the one-make Venturi Trophy from 1992 and inevitably had his drivers asking if they could take their cars to Le Mans, which the following year would open its doors to GT machinery as Group C went through its final death throes. His response was to commission Venturi, a manufacturer of which he was nominally competitions boss, to build the 500LM GT1 car so they could live out their dreams. Post-Le Mans, they then wanted somewhere else to race their latest acquisitions.
“These guys had their Trophy cars, but they enjoyed driving their 500LMs more,” recalls Ratel. “They were asking me, ‘what are we going to do with them now?’. Then I had a kind of eureka moment walking down the stairs from my office in Paris.”
Ratel remembered that a couple of his customers from the Trophy had other GT cars, Belgian Michel Neugarten a race-prepped Ferrari F40 road car and Frenchman Laurent Lecuyer a new Porsche 911 Carrera RSR: “I thought that’s it! I have my seven owners with their 500LMs and I can invite some of my other customers with their own cars. Perfect!”
An important coincidence happened within days of Ratel having his bright idea. He received a call from historic motorsport organiser Patrick Peter. He had revived the Tour de France Auto for historic cars and now wanted to do the same with modern GT machinery for the Paris 1000Km sportscar fixture at the majestic Montlhery facility on the outskirts of the French capital.
“I told him not only would I be interested, but I was already organising a race,” explains Ratel. “He said, ‘right, I’m coming and I should be able to bring some cars’. I think he came with two or three of his customers who had Ferrari and Porsche [one-make] cup cars. That gave us our little grid.”
"There was a vacuum after the death of Group C and the old world championship. When you have a vacuum it sucks people in. When we went to Spa after Le Mans we had more than 30 cars" Stephane Ratel
There appears to be no surviving results sheet from Ricard on the last weekend of August, but Peter’s contribution boosted the grid into double figures. Ratel remembers a field of 12 or 13 cars. Neugarten, who raced his F40 in domestic event in Belgium including Belcar, was “happy to come and play the game”.
A driver who would go onto to race at Le Mans a total of 10 times won the first race in his Ferrari. Victory in the second of the 15-lappers went to Lecuyer’s RSR in the hands of Olivier Haberthur, whose family team ran the car. A gearbox problem for the Ferrari in the second race restricted Neugarten to second — and allowed Haberthur to claim aggregate victory.
It was, however, the other Haberthur twin, Christian, who had the bigger effect on the future of sportscar racing that weekend. He suggested that Ratel ring Jurgen Barth, Porsche’s boss of customer racing, to talk about what he was doing.
The call was made, and Barth high-tailed it out to the south of France, according to Ratel. He thinks the meeting was in the days immediately after the race. Barth suggests the meeting was actually a bit later in the year, but he concedes that he was keen to meet with Ratel and Peter.
“I needed my department at Porsche to continue and to do that I needed people to buy cars,” explains Barth, who had two products that could be sold into a new GT series, the RSR and the 968 Turbo RS. “I liked their ideas, so we agreed to do something together.”
The BPR was born and at the start of March the following year it organised its first race back at Paul Ricard. The grid wasn’t stellar — and half of its was made up of cars from the Venturi Trophy — but it grew exponentially through the season into 1995.
“We filled the grid up at the first proper BPR race with Venturi Trophy cars, which created a visual impact,” Ratel explains. “But there was a vacuum after the death of Group C and the old world championship. When you have a vacuum it sucks people in. When we went to Spa after Le Mans we had more than 30 cars.”
The success of the BPR was important in setting sportscar racing back on an upward trajectory. McLaren opted to build the GTR race version of the F1 supercar not because it wanted to win Le Mans, but because it saw the BPR as a strong market for its machinery at a time when it was struggling to sell road cars.
The success of the McLaren F1 GTR — it would win 10 of the 12 BPR races in ’95 as well as Le Mans - left little room for teams running the Venturi, even after an upgrade for 1994 that turned the 500 into the 600LM. But the French marque did have an important role in the resurgence of sportscar racing in the mid-1990s. And not just because the core of the grid at Ratel’s pilot race at Ricard was packed out by its cars.
PLUS: How McLaren conquered Le Mans with a car that wasn't intended to race
The very first Venturi Trophy race in 1992 took place on the Le Mans-Bugatti circuit in the immediate aftermath of the 24 Hours. Aftermath is the correct word, because that year just 28 cars took the start of the French enduro. Days later, Ratel turned up with 55 one-make racers.
“I remember the guys from the Automobile Club de l’Ouest, including the president, Michel Cosson, looking at my grid with big eyes,” recalls Ratel. “They’d had a hard time that year, and I told them if you want Le Mans to bounce back with a big grid you have to take GTs.
“They asked me if I would come, and I said, ’Not me, but my clients, yes’. I knew I had customers who wanted to go to Le Mans. One of the first things Rocky Agusta [who was to become another stalwart of the 24 Hours] asked me when he bought his Trophy car was, ‘Can I take it to Le Mans?’”
The ACO opened the door to GT machinery for 1993: approaching half the cars on the grid would be production-based racers rather than prototypes. Seven of them were the Venturi 500LMs that would reconvene at Ricard in August for the most important race you’d probably never heard of.
