One of the hardest challenges in motor racing, the Le Mans 24 Hours, now on its 83rd edition, remains the most famous and most coveted to conquer. There may be more technically difficult 24s, the Nurburgring for one, but as a test at the very highest level of the sport with an atmosphere and consequent pressure that is simply intense, Le Mans is still unique. Victory here is like nothing else and failure, well, failure is simply heartbreaking.
Britain’s Oliver Jarvis, whose car is fourth on the grid here, the highest qualifying Audi behind the three Porsches, experienced the latter at La Sarthe last year and dearly wants to taste the former. The race may last 24 Hours but it has been an even longer time in the making. Everybody understands the importance of this race,” he says. “It comes once a year. The cars are designed maybe two or three years before and the guys and the girls that have been working towards it since last year’s race finished. Its not a couple of months preparation, our focus has been on this race for months and months and months.”
Jarvis now has a full factory drive with Audi, the dominant force in endurance racing, with 13 wins at Le Mans since 2000 and although he began his career in single seaters with a view to entering Formula One has taken to sportscar racing with real enthusiasm. He had begun in karting and done well in Formula 3, before, inevitably, the huge costs of entering GP2 stopped him his tracks. He took a works drive with Audi in DTM in 2008 and excited by the team’s top-end LMP1 endurance racing team immediately looked to step-up. “The moment I joined Audi the blinkers came off and I saw the world outside single-seaters,” he says. “Suddenly I was aware of a whole other world and Le Mans was very much a focus, the cars fascinate me.”
He moved on to pursue his interest quickly and having raced the 24 for the first time in 2010 with Kolles Racing, the 31-year-old was quickly aware of just quite how special the event is. “I’ve raced the Spa 24, the Nurburgring 24 and the 24 Hours of Daytona, all incredible races in their own right but nothing compares to Le Mans,” he says. “It’s a combination of the atmosphere and the track itself. Spa is one of the greatest circuits in the world but with the combination Le Mans has of a unique circuit and the prestige and level of importance it carries for everyone involved, it is unbeatable. For me it is the greatest race in the world.”
Jarvis promptly made his mark at the greatest race with made his mark with one-off drives for Audi in 2012 and 2013, both yielding impressive third places. Then last year he was to discover just how hard a mistress the 24 can be. “I had such a good feeling last year,” he says “We were the quickest in the pre-tests, I qualified as the quickest Audi, we were the lead Audi in the race and there was a real feeling we could go on and win the race and surprise a lot of people.”
It was not to be. During just the second hour of the race, a blink of an eye in the grand scheme of things, his co-driver Marco Bonanomi was knocked out of the race by a Ferrari GT coming up fast from behind during a wet spell. Jarvis and his other co-driver, Filipe Albuquerque, had not even stepped in the car.
“For myself and Filipe, we went through all the build-up and the tension, then not to get in the car was just heartbreaking,” he explains. “To be taken out of the race through no fault of our own was just devastating.”
Jarvis was also however, mature and professional enough to know that at its heart, as it must be, endurance racing is a team sport. We gave Marco a hug and told him it wasn’t his fault,” he says of their reaction after the event. “Its important at times like that that you show your team-mates it wasn’t their fault and even if it is, you still have to do the same. Because it’s a team sport and any one of you can make a mistake. That’s the difference between a strong team and a weak team, is that you really support each other: tell them it’s alright and that we will back stronger next year”
Back stronger indeed he is and is now fully part of a very, very strong team. He has a full-time works drive with Audi for this year, competing in the full World Endurance Championship season, of which Le Mans is the blue-riband event. A win is the intent and although Porsche have an advantage in straight-line speed that Jarvis acknowledges, he also knows Audi have experience, reliability and an advantage in grip through the corners and higher mid-corner speed. It is battle he cannot wait to join and one he cannot help but enjoy.
“I love driving at here,” he says. “Especially at night, two to three in the morning, it’s almost as if you are out there on your own, you really become one with the car, But ultimately whoever manages to stand at the top step will have done an incredible job. They will have to have driven 24 hours on the absolute limit, with no mistakes, because that is what it is going to take to win Le Mans this year.”
