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.
That last point is why I think team founder Jim Glickenhaus isn’t quite correct to describe his operation as a privateer. He’s only half right.
The words privateer and garagiste, and independent too, are interchangeable for some. But to me the distinction between a privateer and a garagiste lies in who builds the car. Kremer was the first privateer home at Le Mans in 1983 with an off-the-shelf Porsche 956. Glickenhaus matched that feat in 2022 as a garagiste because he built his own Le Mans Hypercar, the 007, and commissioned a bespoke engine for it to boot.
Glickenhaus is part of a proud sportscar racing tradition that includes the DeCads that went into battle in the 1970s and early ‘80s and then the cars built and run by Le Mans legend Henri Pescarolo’s team in the 2000s and into the 2010s. The race has never just been about big manufacturers, sometimes even up in the rarefied atmosphere of the first few rows of the grid. I hope it never will be.
PLUS: The great Le Mans garagistes that challenged factory might
For every garagiste success story at Le Mans there are probably three, four or even more tales of indifference: cars that flattered to deceive, didn’t live up to their potential or just simply weren’t fit for purpose. But the three-season story of Glickenhaus in the WEC truly was a success.
Source: Autosport