Four years on from becoming the most decorated Olympic cyclist of all time after taking his sixth gold at the London Games, Sir Chris Hoy is recalling how a childhood fantasy turned from pipe dream into the unlikeliest reality and will see him compete at the world’s greatest sports car race – the Le Mans 24 Hours.
Hoy will drive in the classic endurance race at the Circuit de la Sarthe on Saturday, the culmination of a life-long love of the sport that was, until now, secondary to a magnificent cycling career. He was seven years old when he first became aware of the race, via a Scalextric set. “I had a silver and gold Porsche 911, on which the lights came on,” he says. “I used to get a pack of straights or corners to add to it on birthdays and Christmas. I remember asking my dad: ‘Why do these cars have lights and other cars don’t?’ He explained that it was to race through the night for 24 hours non-stop at Le Mans.
“I remember being amazed by it but never thinking I would get the chance to do it myself. It must have sparked something, though.”
Hoy has previously explained how his cycling career was inspired by the film ET and while it would go on to consume his time with such success, that spark for motor racing never left him. He began driving on the track in 2008 and continued to do so in cycling’s close season to relax. When making a documentary about his hero, the rally driver Colin McRae, he had the opportunity to take it further, racing a Radical after his retirement in 2013. He scored a podium in September that same year.
That he was serious was clear and Nissan were paying attention. The manufacturer already had a long and extensive involvement with Le Mans through engine supply and in various innovative marketing projects such as its GT Academy programme that gives video gamers the chance to become real drivers and has garnered huge success in the form of Jann Mardenborough and Lucas Ordóñez, both now full-time pro drivers. The driver development programme the company put the gamers through took on Hoy.
“By the end of the first season when Nissan came on board it stepped up a gear,” he says. “All the support and opportunity started and then Le Mans became the pipe dream, the thing to aim for, the end of the rainbow.”
But savvy as Nissan is in spotting the chance for publicity, for it and Hoy this was far from a stunt and he delivered on its investment. There was a podium in the British GT championship in 2014 and graduating to the European Le Mans series in a prototype the following year, Hoy returned three wins and the LMP3 drivers’ title with his team-mate Charlie Robertson.
The next step, within the remarkably short period of a single Olympic cycle and less than four years since that last gold, saw him entered in the 84th running of the ultimate endurance test that had first taken place in 1923. And it will be a real test. Hoy will race, with team-mates, Britain’s Michael Munemann and France’s Andrea Pizzitola, in a Nissan-powered Ligier LMP2. The privateer class sits below the top-end manufacturer run prototypes of LMP1 and is fiercely competitive.
Of the 60 entries at this year’s race, 23 are P2. The class is cost-limited and features six different types of chassis and four different engine manufacturers, the cars are very close in performance and the racing will be intense.
“The P2 is the best car I have driven so far,” Hoy says. “Once you get your head round it, it’s fun to drive, it’s responsive, it does what you ask but you have to treat it with respect or it will bite you. It’s a hell of an experience. You never quite get over the feeling of pulling out in a P2, you feel like this is a serious race car.”
Hoy acknowledges that one of the biggest changes he has faced in adapting to motor racing is the abrogation of some level of control – that things on track will occur about which you can do nothing – not least at Le Mans where the closing speeds between the four classes of cars is huge. But the transition between disciplines has not been entirely the sea change that might have been expected.
“Its about focusing and refocusing,” he explains. “In cycling terms it happened throughout the day, you’d be racing 12 times through a 10-hour period and you would be alert all day but it was about switching it on when you had to.
“Everybody deals with it differently. The concentration has never been an issue. I don’t drift off. I don’t think too far ahead. You just think about the next braking zone, the next corner, it’s like a hurdles race – one at a time and once you’re past it you don’t dwell on it, you think about what’s next ahead of you.”
Concentrating on the detail is equally part of how the 40-year-old, as all drivers must, has rationalised the dangers involved. “If you considered the risks of everything in life you wouldn’t leave your house,” he says. “But I am a father and a husband. I don’t do these things for the hell of it. At the same time you accept the risks and acknowledge that there is a risk, that there could be a big crash or worse. But I know I am not going to put myself in jeopardy by being reckless or being underprepared. I only ever would do this if I was prepared and ready for it which I am.
“With all those things taken on board, once you sit in the car on the circuit you just don’t think about it. You are so focused on what you are doing the danger doesn’t come into it.”
Only two other Olympic gold medallists have competed at Le Mans. Charles Rigoulot won the weightlifting gold for France in 1924 and raced in 1937, and Henri Oreiller won the men’s downhill and combined at the 1948 winter Games and ran at La Sarthe in 1962.
Neither man finished the race and so for Hoy, already a fixture in the pantheon of sporting greats, just reaching the flag this weekend would be another unique and remarkable achievement and that, for the moment, is the target.
“The first aim is to race and complete my first double stint at Le Mans,” he says. “Then to get through the first six hours and 12 hours, to watch the sun come up, then it’s to finish the race and that’s all you can ask for.”
The Le Mans 24 Hours begins on Saturday at 2pm BST on British Eurosport.
