Legend of his time

Jacky Ickx won the 24 Hours of Le Mans six times between 1969 and 1982. As the gruelling endurance race turns 100, Simon de Burton talks to ‘Monsieur Le Mans’ and finds that motorsport wasn’t the first career choice for the famous driver

- Simon de Burton

THE term ‘gentleman driver’ is usually used for an amateur, but wealthy car fan who has the time and money to indulge a passion for motor racing. At the highest level of motorsport, however, there is one driver who is widely acknowledged as being among the greatest true gentlemen who ever turned a steering wheel —the Belgian star Jacky Ickx.

Although 78 years young and officially retired from professional racing (since 1985), his motoring life remains hectic. Earlier this month, he took to the 8½-mile Le Mans circuit in a variety of fire-breathing cars as a special guest at the centenary of the celebrated 24 Hours of Le Mans, the world’s oldest endurance race. First run in 1923 to prove the resilience of both car and driver, it became famous for the exploits of the celebrated ‘Bentley Boys’ —a group of affluent British motorists who drove the marque’s cars to victory, keeping Bentley’s reputation alive—notably in 1929, when the marque took the first four places. Soon, the race became synonymous with the heroic exploits of its protagonists (Raymond Sommer drove solo for 20 hours in the 1932 event after team-mate Luigi Chinetti became ill) and the 1950s saw Le Mans become a place of pilgrimage for British motorsport fans, thanks to the successes of Jaguar’s famed C and D Types and Aston Martin’s DBR1.

The 1960s, meanwhile, resulted in a hard-fought rivalry between Ford and Ferrari—inspiring the cult 1971 film Le Mans starring Steve McQueen that majored on the passions, dangers and uniquely changing atmosphere of a race that can run to as much as 3,000 miles as it passes from afternoon to evening, dusk to night and from dawn back to day.