Dick Barbour left his mark on sportscar racing as both a driver and, over two spells, as a team owner, but the American, who has died aged 85, is arguably best remembered for giving movie legend Paul Newman a chance to race at the Le Mans 24 Hours in 1979. That’s because in a story that was probably too outlandish for Hollywood, they very nearly won the race sharing a Porsche 935 with Rolf Stommelen.
Keen amateur racer Newman had driven for the same Ferrari team as Barbour at the Daytona 24 Hours in 1977 and then joined Dick Barbour Racing for the traditional US sportscar season-opener two years later. Their assault on the American enduro with a 935 was conceived as a lead-in to Le Mans. The French enduro, the team owner recounted to this author more than 20 years ago, “was something Paul really wanted to do, something he was very excited about”. Newman, who would go on to win both an Oscar and a couple of Trans-Am races, reckoned he didn’t drive very well at Le Mans, but at one brief moment of the race it looked as though the 54-year-old was going to win the thing.
The Kremer Racing Porsche 935K3 shared by the Whittington brothers, Don and Bill, and Klaus Ludwig that ultimately prevailed had lost a massive 15-lap lead when Don had been stranded out on circuit around midday on Sunday after the fuel injection pump drive belt broke. His efforts to fit a spare carried in the car ended in failure — it snapped the moment he tried to re-fire the car — but he somehow fashioned a makeshift repair using an alternator belt and a copious amount of gaffer tape.
He trickled back to the pits and the car was undergoing proper repairs when the Barbour Porsche came in for a pitstop. Had it left the pits on schedule, it would have moved into the lead. It didn’t because the front wheel jammed and the only way the team could remove it was to dismantle the whole corner. Newman and his team-mates would end up second, seven laps down on the Kremer entry, the car’s engine rooted by Stommelen’s efforts to get back on terms.
Newman didn’t return to Le Mans; he was spooked by the media attention he received. Barbour insisted that the hordes gathered around their pitstall in the cramped Le Mans pitlane cost them precious time. But the first incarnation of Dick Barbour Racing went on to enjoy the most successful season the following year as a result of an encounter in the pitlane over the course of the week of the 24 Hours. Barbour met British sportscar driver John Fitzpatrick, who’d taken a pair of European GT Championship titles and was already a Daytona winner, and invited him to join his team for the following year’s IMSA GT Championship.
“I remember being sat on the pitwall - I was driving for Georg Loos that year — and Dick wandering up the pitlane,” recalls Fitzpatrick. “I’d never met him before, but I knew who he was. He asked me what I was doing the following year and when I said I didn’t know, he asked, ‘Do you fancy coming over to the States and doing IMSA with me?’”
The new partnership enjoyed an ultra-successful season with a new 935K3 purchased from Kremer, Fitzpatrick sweeping to the title. He won eight of the 14 races, a mixture of enduros and one-driver sprints. That tally included the Sebring 12 Hours where, sharing the cockpit with Barbour, he triumphed in a classic confrontation with Bruce Leven’s 935 in which US racing legends Peter Gregg and Hurley Haywood did the majority of the driving. The team boss was also his team-mate when the car triumphed at the Riverside 6 Hours.
“Dick was a decent driver, pretty fast: I remember around Riverside him being only a second off my pace,” recalled Fitzpatrick. “But his real strength was in putting a team together. Dick always ran a good team: he had the best equipment and mechanics. We never wanted for anything. I’m sure Dick put his own money into the team to keep it going at the level he wanted. I think that hurt him in the end and explained why he had to close it all at the end of ’80. He spent too much at a time when his dealerships weren’t doing very well.”
Barbour disappeared from motor racing after his operation, based in San Diego, closed its doors at a time of recession, though his star driver took over his workshops and many of his key staff to launch John Fitzpatrick Racing for the following season. It would be 20 years before Barbour returned to racing after one false start when plans for a team involving Sylvester Stallone and a long-tail McLaren F1 GTR failed to reach fruition in 1998.
“In those 20 years I was away from racing, there wasn’t a day when I didn’t dream about returning,” he said when he did finally make it back. Dick Barbour Racing was re-established for 2000 and an attack on the GT class of the fledgling American Le Mans Series.
Barbour had always promised himself that if he did come back he wouldn’t be what he called a “grid-filler”. He stuck to his word. He had factory backing for the pair of Porsche 911 GT3-Rs run by his team and a quartet of works drivers. At the helm of the team was Tony Dowe, the architect of Tom Walkinshaw Racing’s IMSA successes and a team manager at the Newman-Haas CART Indycar team in the mid-1980s.
Two crews of works drivers dominated the ALMS aboard the Barbour Porsches, young guns Dirk Muller and Lucas Luhr taking the title and veteran Bob Wollek and Sascha Maassen coming home second. Between them, they took class honours in nine of the 12 races.
Barbour also won the GT class at Le Mans with Wollek, Muller and Luhr, only to lose the victory in post-race scrutineering. The fuel tank in the car was found to be oversized. The disqualification was implicated in Dick Barbour Racing’s loss of its factory deal with Porsche for the following year.
Dick Barbour Racing continued in the ALMS, moving up to the prototype ranks with a pair of LM675 Reynard 01Qs powered by Judd V8s. Didier de Radigues ended up winning the class title, admittedly against limited opposition. Barbour subsequently went on to field Panoz prototypes and Lamborghini GT cars in North America. Running under the Robertston Racing banner, it entered a Panoz GT-LM and the Ford GT-R in the GT2 class of the ALMS in 2007-11.
Barbour's racing career started in the late 1960s with a Porsche 356 on the back of his business selling Porsche parts and accessories. His early successes included a Sports Car Club of America regional title in the production ranks with the 356 in 1968. He subsequently moved on to a Porsche 904 and also raced a 908/2 in a handful of Can-Am events before taking a break from racing after 1971.
He returned to the cockpit late in ’76, establishing a team that initially ran as Dick Barbour Performance. It ran a Porsche 934 in IMSA in ’77 before a switch to a new factory 935 took team and driver to Le Mans for the first time. Barbour finished fifth and first in IMSA GTX together with Brian Redman and John Paul Sr. Having finished second at Daytona earlier in the year, he won the Daytona-Le Mans Trophy for the driver achieving the best aggregate race across the two races having finished second with Johnny Rutherford and Manfred Schurti in the US enduro.
A hat-trick of Le Mans top-six finishes and class wins was completed by Barbour in 1980. He shared his new 935K3 with full-season driver Fitzpatrick and Redman, finishing fifth overall again. He always believed they could have won but for an engine problem.
Barbour left one more mark on sportscar racing. The 935 he shares with Newman and Stommelen proudly bore the livery of the Haiwaan Tropic sun lotion brand. Its bikini-clad models would become a fixture on the Le Mans grid in the build-up to the race for the better part of 30 years.
