Glickenhaus driver Olivier Pla took me to task for describing his employer as a garagiste a while back. It seems it’s a pejorative term for the French. Not so for we Brits. Quite the contrary: there’s something celebratory about it. And that’s why we should rejoice in the successes of the Glickenhaus Racing squad now that it has told us that it is bowing out of the World Endurance Championship and its Hypercar class.
I hope that in times future we’ll talk about the American entrant — with a team run out of Italy — in the same breath as other plucky privateers that built and ran their own machinery to take on the ultimate challenge in endurance racing at the Le Mans 24 Hours. I’m referring to the likes of Alain De Cadenet’s tiny operation based in a mews garage near the heart of London and Pescarolo Sport, like Glickenhaus teams good enough to get on the podium with chassis of their own construction. Or at least substantially reworked versions of someone else’s machinery.
