Jean-Marc Gounon has no shortage of candidates when it comes to choosing his favourite car. The 1989 French Formula 3 champion never sat in a competitive Formula 1 car, making nine grand prix outings for Minardi and Simtek, before ploughing a furrow in sportscars where his hard-charging reputation honed by winning races with unfancied Formula 3000 machinery found its calling.
Aboard the Ennea Ferrari F40 at Nogaro in the 1996 BPR Endurance Series, Gounon had the race of his life in recovering from a lap down to challenge for victory until the driveshaft went with 10 minutes to go. But a car that while rapid was rough around the edges – with power delivery never controlled, ineffective power steering and inconsistent brakes – doesn’t qualify as his favourite.
And nor does the DAMS-run Lola B98/10 with a Judd V10 in which he won four times in the 1999 SportsRacing World Cup. Instead, the former Mercedes and BMW factory driver opts for a car he only ever raced once, after a last-minute call-up, at the Le Mans 24 Hours in 2003.
While the factory Courage-Judd C60 was arguably not the pinnacle of highly developed machinery, with no power steering and an “old-fashioned” manual sequential gearbox, the efforts made to get him into the cockpit for his first Le Mans appearance in three years and subsequent heroics during the race aboard “a very, very good chassis made by Paolo Catone” means it holds an elevated position in his memories. And when Gounon says “it was a fantastic story”, he is certainly not wrong – entirely befitting of a driver who began his karting career wearing gardening gloves, a borrowed motorcycle helmet and oversized painters overalls.
Gounon had made only sporadic appearances in the FIA GT championship over the 12 months prior to a Le Mans made famous by Bentley’s first victory since 1930 with the beautiful Speed 8. The owner of a car dealership in his hometown of Aubenas had begun to treat racing as his second job “because I needed to work on the dealership and I was already old” – he was a mere 40 – when a vacancy opened up in the all-French Courage LMP1 entry.
Boris Derichebourg, who had been due to share with one-time F1 prospect Jonathan Cochet and former Indycar racer Stephane Gregoire, had been injured in a French GT crash at Pau the previous weekend. Gounon recalls reading the news on the Tuesday before the 24 Hours in the L’Equipe newspaper and speculating with a friend over whether to inquire about the drive.
After giving in to curiosity and informing the team of his availability, he was told that a contribution would be expected - Gounon recalls that figures north of €150,000 were cited. He therefore believed “that was the end of the story”. Not so.
Source: Autosport