Olivier Gendebien – Le Mans

Oliver Gendebien from Autosport 6 july 1962
I used photo from Alan Wheelans and I made this with soft for you.OLIVIER GENDEBIEN

Although the top Grand Prix drivers receive plenty of public acclaim, the really successful sports car driver seldom

has his praises sung.

Without doubt, Olivier Gendebien is the uncrowned king of sports car racing and so consistent are his victories that no excuses are made for offering this short biography

By PAUL Frere

WHEN the late Joe Craig was Nor­ton’s celebrated racing develop­ment engineer and talent spotter, he used to profess that, to be really fast, a racing man has to be slightly hungry-both, I suppose, literally and figuratively.

This is certainly not the case with Olivier Gendebien, who hails from one of the wealthiest Belgian families, lives in a magnificent country house near Fontainebleau, has recently acquired a huge property in the south of France and is generally spoilt with most of this world’s goods. All this has not prevented him from becoming probably the most success­ful driver of all time in sports car racing. ‘ With the single exception of the 1000 Kilometers of Buenos Aires, a race which has not been organized for some years now, he has won every regular Champion­ship sports car race at least once in the last six years, has won the Targa Florio and the Sebring 12 Hours Race three times and has now become the only driver who has won four times at Le Mans.

Before he started racing, Olivier, who is now 38 years of age, was not even in­terested in cars. He had spent several years in the Congo and had learnt how to handle a car competently on typical colonial dirt roads. This is why a friend of his, Charlie Fraikin, who had come back to Europe to try his luck at the Liege-Rome-Liege, asked him to be his co-driver in a Mark VII Jaguar-not ex­actly the ideal car for that sort of event. They finished after several wheels had surrendered to Olivier’s efforts to make the big, heavy car go round the hairpins quicker. This was in 1952.

The following year, Olivier drove in his first road race, the Spa Production Car Race, and promptly showed the shape of things to come when he beat up all the XKs with a none too young and consider­ably slower 2-litre Ferrari. Very quickly, he became one of Europe’s top rally drivers, finishing in 3rd place in the Liege-Rome-Liege of 1953, in second place in 1954, and winning it in 1955, when he shared the wheel of his 300 SL with Pierre Stasse. The same team had already won the Tulip Rally with an Alfa Romeo earlier in the year.

By then, rally driving had thoroughly trained Gendebien’s flair for going fast on open roads, and though illness prevented him from any serious practicing, he won the G.T. class in the 1955 Mille Miglia. A few weeks later, he also won the Stella Alpine, but what really got him started in his racing career was the ” Coppa della Dolomiti,” a sort of miniature Mille Miglia up and down Dolomite passes for about 200 miles.

The event was open to sports cars up to 2 liters and to all G.T. cars. In the sports car class, the race turned into a battle royal between Castellotti’s Ferrari Mondial and Cabianca’s 1,300 c.c. Osca. At about two thirds of the distance how­ever, the Osca ran into trouble, and Ugo-lini, who was in charge of the Ferrari team, instructed Castellotti to play safe, which he did. As it turned out, however, he was not safe at all, for Olivier had been pressing on so hard that he won the event outright.

Enzo Ferrari was so upset that he im­mediately invited Gendebien to Maranello and gave him a place in his sports car team. However, Olivier overturned the Ferrari Monza that had been entrusted to him for the 1955 Tourist Trophy. race on the Dundrod circuit, and broke an arm; rather a bad start as a works’ driver. In the fol­lowing years, Olivier proved to be an ex­tremely reliable driver. He had a bad accident, driving a F.I car at Casablanca in 1958, when he suddenly found another car broadside-on in his way, bent a Porsche when practicing for the Targa Florio in 1960 and escaped miraculously when he overturned a Lotus, in practice for the U.S. Grand Prix, last year.

Gendebien immediately excelled in the big Italian road races, such as the Tour of Sicily, the Targa Florio and the Mille Miglia. In every one of those events, he always had with him, as passenger, his cousin, Jacques Washer (the brother of Philip, the former Davis Cup player). In 1956, they won the Tour of Sicily out­right, and won the G.T. class in the Mille Miglia, both in 1956 and 1957.

For nearly three years, from 1956 to 1958, Olivier reigned supreme in the G.T. class but Ferrari never really gave him a chance in F.I racing. No other driver has contributed so much to the six manu­facturers’ championships gained by Fer­rari, but Olivier’s ambitions of reaching the top line in F.I racing will probably never be fulfilled. Judging by his performances in the Belgian Grands Prix of 1960 and 1961, when he drove a 1959 Cooper and a 65 degree Ferrari respec­tively, he certainly has the ability for it, though perhaps for this line of racing he is not quite ” hungry ” enough to accept the sort of risk that can be rewarded with just that wee bit greater velocity, but tan also spell disaster.

Now, after his fourth Le Mans victory, Olivier has declared publicly that he would not drive at Le Mans again. He has raced little this year, though he drove his car to victory in every race in which he started in Europe, the Targa Florio (with Mairesse and Rodriguez), the 1000 Kilometers of the Nürburgring and Le Mans (both with Phil Hill).

For business and family reasons (he has now three young children) he appar­ently intends to fade out of the scene of circuit racing. He will not leave the sport for good however. With the back­ground of his enormous racing experience, he wants to return to his old love, the big rallies and transcontinental road races such as the Liege-Sofia-Liege, the Argentine Road Grand Prix, the Safari and others. These are more likely to quench his in­satiable penchant for adventure than the sport car races which he now knows so well for having won them all at least once.