From Gladiators to Astronauts: Behind the Scenes with Porsche at the 2014 24 Hours of Le Mans [w/ Gallery]

Despite massive pre-race downplaying of its chances for victory, Porsche returned to Le Mans with its first factory-backed team since 1998 to run hard. It also came to party hard, having paid to erect multiple glass-lined, air-conditioned, and Champagne-stocked suites for VIPs around the circuit. A fleet of Porsche-stickered vans waited to whisk invited guests here and there, including out to a makeshift helicopter port were rides were given over the track.

And when a brilliant summer sun came up on Sunday morning after 13 hours of eventful racing, including a catastrophic pair of downpours early on that damaged cars from Toyota and Audi, both rivals for the lead, the Porsche 919 Hybrid was right there. The white, fin-backed prototype advertising Japanese industrial toolmaker DMG Mori was tracking the leaders steadily from third place and waiting for Le Mans luck to strike.

And strike it did. First, Toyota’s race-leading TS040 hybrid retired with fritzing electrics in the 14th hour, bringing driver Kazuki Nakajima to tears and moving Audi into first. Then the lead Audi R18 e-tron Quattro choked on a bad turbo in hour 21, rotating Porsche into a position to grab the rookie victory that the company had taken such great pains to assure fans that it wasn’t gunning for. Ex-Red Bull F1 driver Mark Webber put the spurs to the 919, as his lead over the next Audi was mere seconds.

All over the circuit, Porsche bacchanals erupted in cheers and applause, and a crowd pegged by organizers at 263,300 began pressing the fences and buzzing with anticipation. Could Porsche actually do it? Win Le Mans with a new team and new car after such a long absence? And against Toyota and Audi, both of which have amply paid their dues?

Then, not quite two hours later, Le Mans luck turned again. Coming out of one of the two Mulsanne chicanes, Webber “heard something” in the 919’s V-4 engine, which had been getting “tired” and “wasn’t running clean,” he said. He immediately shut it down and motored back to the pits on the car’s front-axle electric motor. Except for a last-lap return for photos and television, the 919’s race was done.

Also done are the days when leading Le Mans teams put all the responsibility for winning in the hands of the lone gladiator in his chariot. Sure, the pilots are the ones working the controls, hitting the apexes and the braking zones, and keeping the cars off the rails and away from each other. But nowadays, top-tier Le Mans teams each resemble mini Apollo moon programs, with rooms full of engineers in the pits constantly monitoring every conceivable aspect of the vehicle and radioing instructions to the cockpit to maintain its health or make it go quicker (or slower), as conditions dictate.

“You should see it; it looks like Mission Control,” said three-time Le Mans winner Hurley Haywood of Porsche’s operations center at Le Mans. We intruded on Haywood’s Sunday morning breakfast for a short chat during the 82nd running of the French classic. “All I can say is that I’m glad I raced when I did,” said Haywood, 66, whose first victory in a Porsche 936 came in 1977 and his last in 1994 in a Porsche 962.

In the old days, “we didn’t even have radios. You were alone in the car,” he said. “All those dials and buttons on the steering wheel nowadays, and the room full of engineers telling you to turn this or push that. I wouldn’t like it.”

Instructions from the team manager are nothing new, but more than ever, racing at the pinnacle is a group endeavor, a fact accentuated by the three leading teams at this year’s 24 Hours of Le Mans. For Audi, Porsche, and Toyota, the driver doesn’t just keep it between the lines. He serves as the in-car representative of the hordes of support staff in the pits, which, with better telemetry and capability for on-the-spot analysis, are exerting more and more control over the decision-making. As the cars become even more laden with black boxes to run and monitor their hybrid powertrains and energy-recovery systems, race-car drivers are looking less like gladiators in chariots and more like astronauts in capsules.

Webber, who at 37 is just old enough to straddle both eras, said, “I started when we had just a tach needle. I love more of the hands-on stuff, to be honest.” But, he added, while visiting with our little group of reporters as we leeched free food and drink at one of Porsche’s pleasure palaces, “things change, things move on, we have to accept that.”

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And Webber refused to buy the notion that today’s race drivers are just systems managers, just rocket jock drones taking dictation from disembodied voices in their helmet earpieces.

“We’re still earning our money out there. You go at night at 210 mph with all the backmarkers to watch out for, it’s pretty hairy.”

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