MOTORSPORT: 'Mack The Knife' at The Mountain

More than half a century ago a song titled ‘Mack The Knife’ was a huge hit, sung most successfully by Bobby Darin but also recorded by – among many others – Louis Armstrong, Frank Sinatra and Eartha Kitt.

A new version of ‘Mack The Knife’ was recorded yesterday at Mt Panorama, NSW.
A McLaren 650S won the Bathurst 12 Hour, with its superstar driver Shane Van Gisbergen saying that every time the Nissan ‘Godzilla’ behind him in the closing laps posted a blindingly-fast lap he “stuck the knife in and did the same”.

McLaren is the fifth make to win the 12 Hour in the six years it has been a GT race.
And this victory came on the same day as news of the death of Patty McLaren, widow of Bruce McLaren – the New Zealander who created a team, also more than half a century ago – that has been the second most successful in Formula 1, and much more.

Bruce McLaren was killed on June 2, 1970, testing one of his CanAm sports cars at Goodwood, England.

He had been the youngest grand prix-winning driver, given Ford its first victory in the Le Mans 24-hour classic, built and won in his own F1 cars, dominated the CanAm series in North America and just built his first car for the Indianapolis 500.

All that at just age 32. Before computers, before mobile telephones and other electronic devices. Almost before technology.

The company he founded in Britain now employs 3000 people, including the daughter who never got to know him, Amanda.

While the McLaren F1 team is in the doldrums, not having won a GP the past three years and finished ninth of 10 teams last season, a new chapter in the legacy of its genial giant (not literally) founder began with yesterday’s success at The Mountain.

McLaren cars will feature more prominently in Australian racing now, with Tekno Autosports – the winning entrant yesterday, having forged a strong link to the McLaren factory through its team manager Steve Hallam, once an engineer to the great Ayrton Senna – set to field three entries in the GT races at Adelaide’s Clipsal 500 next month.

The 12 Hour triumph may have been McLaren’s most important since it won Le Mans 21 years ago with what it had built as the world’s most expensive road car.

That model, called the F1, sold for $A2.5 million, but more recent editions are a fraction of that price, although still exotic and expensive.

Most recently McLaren GT cars have had success in Europe’s Blancpain series, with Van Gisbergen – appropriately a New Zealander, like the man behind the marquee – among its drivers there.

Van Gisbergen was The Man at the Mountain at the weekend, coming closest to the magic two-minute barrier for the iconic 6.213km circuit with a pole-position qualifying time of 2:01.286 and then a race lap record of 2:01.567.

He started and finished the race, while Alvaro Parente – a McLaren factory driver from Portugal and Tekno team owner Jonathon Webb – did the stints in between.

It was far from plain sailing though. Parente had to stop the 650S on the pit straight and reboot its system, losing 45 seconds in the process and giving Van Gisbergen a heart-in-the-mouth moment as he tried to take a break in his trackside hotel room.

Later the Kiwi copped a drive-through penalty for leaving the pitlane too fast, having forgotten to turn the limiter on after another reboot and found himself 2 minutes off the lead.

But the last safety car came at just the right time for him and soon, needing only a top-up with fuel on his final stop, he was back in front as he had been in the first couple of hours.

Japan’s Katsumasa Chiyo, last year’s 12 Hour hero for Nissan, was in the hunt again at the finish this time but – while he boxed on in a newer NISMO GT-R in the manner of his countryman Fighting Harada, so admired by Australians who remember him fighting our Lionel Rose and Johnny Famechon – Van Gisbergen always had him covered.

The margin was less than 1.3 seconds at the chequered flag as ‘The Giz’ eased up, with a Bentley Continental with an all-international driver line-up in third place after being knocked out of a podium position at the very end a year earlier.

German team Phoenix Racing’s Audi R8 was the fourth and last car on the lead lap, with its drivers – especially Belgian gun Laurens Vanthoor – lamenting its crucial lack of straight-line speed, blaming it on the international balance- of- performance regulations.

One of Erebus Motorsport’s ageing Mercedes-Benz AMG SLSs made it five makes in the top five finishers, not quite the seven-in-seven of last year but yet another excellent advertisement for the 12 Hour’s great diversity.

There were 29 lead changes among eight cars, with the eventual top four completing a record 297 laps despite 13 interruptions that brought out the safety car.

‘Godzilla’ led the most laps, 107, to the McLaren’s 102 and the third-placed Bentley’s 28.
While Chiyo was again hugely impressive in the Nissan he shared with Rick Kelly and German Florian Strauss, one of his partners in last year’s victory, Parente was another of the day’s stars, with his best lap only a fraction slower than Van Gisbergen.

But the result was most particularly a massive triumph for Van Gisbergen and Webb after having been unlucky not to win the Bathurst 1000 V8 Supercar classic in 2014.

The McLaren spent 45 minutes in the pits in the course of 13 stops yesterday, while for the Nissan it was 57 minutes and 11 stops.  The Phoenix Audi made only eight stops.
Victory in the GT3 class for cars with one amateur driver went to another Audi shared by three Aussies – Barton Mawer and Nathan Antunes with “gentleman driver” Greg  Taylor – that also was sixth outright.

Kiwis cleaned up in Class B, with Scott McLaughlin and last year’s Le Mans winner Earl Bamber sharing car owner Stephen Grove’s Porsche 997 that finished 15 laps clear of the next and second-placed 997 in that class.

The invitational class was won by a MARC Mazda in which one of the drivers was Aaron Seton, teenage son of dual national touring car champion Glenn Seton who so unluckily never won an enduro at The Mountain.

Another good-news angle of the event was the 7-litre Daytona coupe in the invitational reaching almost 307kmh on Conrod Straight – much faster than the GT3 cars, although it failed to finish.

And it was another horror year for Maranello Motorsport. Having missed the 2015 race after a crash only minutes into practice, its Ferrari 458 in the hands of Finnish ex-F1 driver Mika Salo and a Lamborghini Gallardo with Nick Percat at the wheel collided at turn two on the opening lap!

That was it for the Lambo, while the Ferrari notched up only 63 laps for the day and was never going to be in contention after that, and Salo and Percat traded barbs.

They were a couple of lows among what was another year of highs for the 12-Hour at the mountain circuit that international GT racing boss Stephane Ratel declared has “all the character of what we need” in his new Intercontinental GT Challenge, that also includes the Spa 24-Hour in Belgium and Malaysia’s Sepang 12-Hour.

Full list of Bathurst 12-Hour results here.