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Getting the facts straight: Spitfires at Le Mans

4 November, 2015

“Well of course, we’re past and present winners at Le Mans,” said the Porsche owner — he was deep in conversation with a Triumph owner who, alas, didn’t have an answer to that remark. It was time for me to step in, add my tuppence worth to the conversation and, in doing so, single out the Triumph Spitfire’s brief but rather successful Le Mans career.

Works racing and rally Spitfires appeared for only two seasons — 1964 and 1965 — a programme that resulted in the 1964 manufacture of four race cars (ADU 1B–4B) and four rally cars (ADU 5B–8B), with a fifth rally car (ADU 467B) being built specially for Valerie Pirie — Stirling Moss’s secretary. In 1965 two more works cars were built — ERW412C was a race car built for Bill Bradley, whilst AVC 654B was intended for rally use by Simo Lampinen.

As Triumph wound up their works effort at the end of the 1965 season, they also bolted together a one-off, open-topped race car, which went to the Hong Kong Triumph agent, Walter Sulke, principally intended for competing in the Macau GP. Apart from the Macau car, the other Spitfires all ended up wearing a fixed, fibreglass fastback — moulded from the prototype Triumph GT6. They ran 1147cc engines, at first with the standard cast-iron head until later when an alloy head was homologated. With modified suspension, a TR4 gearbox, and highly tuned engines the team entered four Spitfires into the 1964 24 Hours of Le Mans. During the event only three cars started — ADU 1B and 3B crashed, but ADU 2B, driven by David Hobbs and Rob Slotemaker, finished 21st overall.

ADU 7B

For 1965 the Spitfires went on a diet, which included replacing the TR4 gearbox with GT6 units. In this form they competed at Sebring and Le Mans, with ADU 4B emerging as a class winner — a fitting end to the Spitfire’s circuit career.

ADU 2B

The rallying Spitfires competed successfully in the Alpine, Tour de France, Paris 1000 Kilometres, and Geneva rallies in 1964; the following year Spitfire teams took on the Monte Carlo, Tulip, Alpine, and Geneva rallies, while Valerie Pirie entered her car for the RAC Rally. The high-water mark of the Spitfire’s rally career was the 1965 Alpine Rally, where the cars won their class and the prototype category against the far more powerful Porsche 904s. Very few of these special Spitfires have survived to the present day — the whereabouts of ADU 8B is known, and 8B and 2B (both pictured in this article) have now been fully restored.         

We’ve hunted down some vintage Le Mans footage from 1965 for you to check out here:

 

The writing on the wall

25 September, 2026

Deven, a digital content producer in his 20s, says it was the rear-drive Nissan and Toyota drift cars that fired his imagination in his not-so-distant youth and soon had him wanting one of his own. However, like most of us, he had to start in something less glamorous – in his case, a 1997 Mitsubishi Galant. After that, he bought a four-litre V8 1991 Toyota Soarer, a big change from the Mitsubishi.
“It was my daily driver, and it wasn’t that bad to run back when petrol was affordable,” he says.
When he got fed up with filling it up, Deven bought a 1989 Ford Laser sedan, a 1.3-litre five-speed manual, to be his daily driver. It’s in very good condition, bought from a careful older driver, and he still runs it – although he will occasionally also drive the latest in a series of Nissan Laurel sedans. His current one, from 1993, has done the lowest number of kilometres yet, at 183,000. It has the single-cam version of the engine in his Skyline.
“I’ve had four different versions of that car. It was just a car I always liked. It’s really comfortable, quite luxurious. I bought it from a 90-year-old in Hamilton. It’s in mint condition, and everything is standard.”

The actual Formula One

18 September, 2026

Seeing, in a shed in Hamilton, New Zealand, the Darracq 120 racer that Louis Wagner, also a pioneer aviator, drove to victory in the 1906 Vanderbilt Cup race felt a little like finding a Rembrandt at a garage sale.
For historical significance, I’d say this car ranks with Ray Harroun’s Marmon Wasp, the first Indianapolis 500 winner. Unlike Harroun’s Wasp, which has been lovingly cared for at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Hall of Fame Museum over the years, this historically pivotal machine wound up half a world away from its home in France and, to most of the motoring world, largely forgotten. Sadly, so is the story of how the car got to Aotearoa in the first place.
More often than not, a racing car that is a few years old is regarded as obsolete and relegated to a shed somewhere. As far as racing drivers and team owners at the cutting edge of the sport are concerned, the cars are virtually worthless at that point. They can’t be driven on the street; at best they can be reconfigured for lower levels of the sport, so few people care about them until their historical significance becomes more apparent.