top of page

Brands Hatch 1000Kms 1982

Brands Hatch 1000Kms 1982

ICKX & PATRESE, DOWN TO THE WIRE, 40 YEARS ON


William Shakespeare wrote in his comedy Twelfth Night “Some are born great, some achieve greatness and some have greatness thrust upon them.”


On Sunday, 17th October 1982, events at Brands Hatch proved the validity of that assertion. The catalyst for the greatness was “Mister Le Mans”: the great Belgian driver, Jacky Ickx.


According to Janos Wimpffen’s epic endurance racing encyclopaedia, “Time and Two Seats” Ickx won 40 major sportscar races in his career, including two at the Sebring 12 Hours and no less than six at Les Vingt Quatre Heures du Mans. It was not just in getting to the finish that the Belgian excelled; he also scored 22 pole positions and 26 fastest laps: Jacky was seriously quick.


Thus the first two parts of Shakespeare’s proposition are fulfilled. Ickx was clearly born talented and had achieved near-immortality. The object of the third part was me. Not that personal greatness was thrust upon me in any way but that the action on track that day was unquestionably in the greatness category and I was there to witness and, in a very small way, to participate.


The eighth and final round of the 1982 World Endurance Championship for Drivers would be a title decider. There were four drivers with a mathematical chance; Henri Pescarolo and Michele Alboreto were the outsiders. Jacky Ickx and Riccardo Patrese would go head to head: if either of these won the race they would be Champion – simple, really.


The Italians were each driving a Martini Racing Lancia LC1, a rules-bending special, built with the aim of taking one of the pair to the Driver’s Championship. Pescarolo was in the Joest Racing Porsche 936C, a conversion of the 908/80 that the team had campaigned in previous years. Ickx was in a factory Rothmans Porsche 956. Realistically it was one Porsche versus two Lancias. In addition to the title contenders, there was a pretty good field of 39 cars, led by a trio of Zakspeed-run Ford C100 prototypes.


Holding any sporting event outdoors during October, in England, certainly risks the attention of the weather gods and 1982 brought rain throughout the meeting. Brands Hatch is my local track, being 50 miles away on the other side of London. I had seen my first sportscar race there in 1971 and just over a decade later I was trackside with a media pass. It was my first major endurance race with accreditation and I recall buying my first long lens, a 400mm, just prior to the event. Mind you, the whole process of photographing cars back then was a bit different. Manual exposure, manual focus, manual winding-on of film. Film? Yes, that stuff, which had to be reloaded every 36 shots, with no idea until after the event what the results would look like; the complete opposite to today.


Driving around to the track with my mates early on Sunday morning, it was clear that I was going to get wet, very wet. Rain? What rain? I did not care, there was a race to run. I was more than a bit gung-ho.


That attitude must have caught on inside the cockpits of the two leading cars on the grid, the Ford C100 Cosworths of Manfred Winkelhock and Marc Surer. As the Pace Car pulled off into the pits, the white Fords accelerated along the Main Straight and proceeded through a sodden Paddock Hill Bend in the same fashion. Through Druids and through Bottom Bend they circulated “Side By Side!” as one present-day notable circuit commentator is wont to shout. A minute or so later the pair hove into view, still in parallel formation, at racing speeds and with torrents of water running across the track. It was going to end in tears. Lord knows what Erich Zakowski, the Zakspeed boss, was saying on the radio but I would guess that it was not pretty. The excuse given later for this odd behaviour was that it maximised visibility so that neither of the drivers had to sit in the spray of the other, a cunning plan.


On the first lap, Alboreto’s Lancia made a vain attempt to pass the blocking Fords and had to pit to repair his bent suspension, so that removed one of the challengers from the title chase almost immediately. Alboreto lost two laps and then the electrics failed, forcing the Lancia into retirement. Ickx was hanging onto the leading group in the awful conditions. The Fords were by now coming under pressure from the third-placed Sauber C6S BMW driven with great brio by Hans Stuck Jnr. The other Lancia, with Teo Fabi at the wheel, took a more conservative approach in the opening laps; this would be significant a few hours later.


Four laps into the race the inevitable happened, the leaders touched and Winkelhock speared into the Armco approaching Hawthorns, flattening it and causing the C100 to retire on the spot. Eventually, the red flag was shown and the competitors filed back to the pits while the damage was repaired. It was going to be a two-part race as there had been 20 minutes since the start. The gap at the conclusion of the first part between Ickx and Fabi was 6.4 seconds…

Brands Hatch 1000Kms 1982

The restart was also wet, it was a typical Brands Hatch autumn day and all four seasons made an appearance at some stage. The changeable weather meant that the race see-sawed between the Porsche and Lancia camps as one had the more appropriate tyres for whatever conditions prevailed. Patrese jumped in for Fabi, then Ickx and he fought a battle that ebbed and flowed as one car had wets in the dry and the other slicks in the wet.


For me, this was heaven, great sportscar racing in the up-close-and-personal confines of the Brands Hatch Grand Prix track. However, the rudimentary electronics of my Canon A-1 were not really able to deal with the persistent rain early in the race and I had problems shooting. However, as the sun came out, the track and my equipment dried out and all was well again.


Of course, trying to follow the race was a bit more complicated, especially out at the back of the circuit. I kind of knew that the Porsche and the Lancia were the main contenders; they were visibly faster than the other cars on the track. The order of the rest of the field, I was not sure about: in fact, the two surviving Fords were running well but the Fitzpatrick 935K4 was running better, though some distance behind the leaders.


If the circumstances of the race were not convoluted enough, word came down from the Clerk of the Course that the race was not going to run the full allocation 238 laps, as it would get dark before then. The marshals were not prepared for night racing and some cars, notably the Lancias, did not have adequate lights. A ten-lap warning would be given to the field and that would be that. When that notice would be given was left unsaid.


This, of course, meant that the three-dimensional game of chess, the balancing of fuel and tyres and pit stops became even more complicated. Both Porsche and Lancia gambled on the number of laps and whether they could skip a stop. Fabi got back into his LC1 and headed off to the finish, he hoped. Ickx replaced Bell and after a delay to change brake pads, emerged into the gloom and onto what was likely to be the final stint, but the Italian was about 70 seconds up the road. Ickx got onto the gas and was charging; there was a title to win. The 956 was being hurled around Brands Hatch some three seconds a lap faster than the Lancia, no worrying about fuel economy meant that both boost controls got the Spinal Tap treatment – “This one goes to eleven”. Just to add a little more drama, the left-hand door of the Porsche popped open but Ickx could not reach it to close. He ignored the distraction to record laps that were faster than pole position, gaining ground all the time.


Trackside it was clear that something special was unfolding in front of me. The commentator was bellowing with enthusiasm like his trousers had caught fire. Trying to capture the excitement and drama was beyond my abilities of the time, the level of the available light had dropped out of the range of colour film, so the HP5 black & white came out of the bag with a bit of pushing to 800 ASA.


Then at 201 laps, the signal was given: ten laps to go and Ickx was still ten seconds behind. Traffic and poor visibility played their part in the chase and coming on to the final lap, Fabi was still 4.1 seconds ahead. The Lancia crossed the line first taking the chequered flag with the Porsche’s headlights blazing at it down the main straight, just 1.7 seconds behind. It had been so close. What a race!


The Porsche crew accepted their failure, Norbert Singer, Porsche’s legendary Designer and Engineer told me that they were convinced that Patrese had won the title. So they made their way down the pit lane to congratulate the Italians to be greeted by the Lancia crew who had come to do the same. Then the penny dropped; since the race was in two parts and the aggregate result was in fact 4.7 seconds to Porsche, Ickx was Champion. On the last lap of the last race, with two great drivers in two great cars, from two great teams, absolutely flat out, it was pure Hollywood.


I had blundered around in the gathering darkness and had missed the flag shot and the less said about the podium shots, the better. Still, a couple of hours later I was back in Shepperton and The King’s Head. A few beers and the race had assumed legendary status. For once the beer talk was making sense.


Reading the reports the following week it became apparent that Ickx and Porsche had ridden their good fortune as far as they could. After the race Derek Bell reported “Jacky, you see, has incredible luck. Two more laps and he would have run out of petrol. Two laps less and he would not have won the race.”


Sometimes, just sometimes, fortune favours the brave.

© 2022 Daily Sports Cars • By John Brooks • Published here for non-profit, entertainment-only purposes

© Patrese Archives • 2002 - 2025

  • Instagram
bottom of page