How 'Brilliant' Bob Wollek lived up to his nickname
The Frenchman was a couple of months short of his 58th birthday, and yet he was still competing at the sharp end of international sportscar racing.
The quirky demeanour of the guy and the longevity of a career that only ended with his senseless death, when he was knocked off his bicycle ahead of the Sebring 12 Hours 20 years ago today, are essential building blocks of the legend of Bob Wollek. So too, of course, are the four victories at the Daytona 24 Hours, but probably not quite as important as the failure to win the Le Mans 24 Hours outright over the course of 30 attempts spanning five decades.
Wollek never quite managed to crack it at sportscar racing’s big one, but he came close on multiple occasions. He was on the overall podium no fewer than six times, had a pole position, and also notched up four class wins, though two of them were more or less meaningless, coming as they did in the days in the second half of the 1990s when GT1 and LMP machinery battled for outright honours. Another class win, on his final participation in the 24 Hours in 2000, was lost in the scrutineering bay.
In addition to the four Daytona victories, he won once at Sebring, and claimed 11 wins in world championship endurance racing and a total of nine in IMSA’s Camel GT Championship. Then there were two titles and 24 race victories in the German DRM sportscar series. The only things missing from his CV were a world title and that elusive Le Mans triumph.
To describe Wollek as being one of the best sportscar drivers of his generation isn’t quite right, because his career spanned multiple generations. That much is clear when you scroll down the list of team-mates with whom he drove at Le Mans: Patrick Depailler, Jean-Pierre Jaussaud, Jacky Ickx, Stefan Johansson, Jorg Muller and Lucas Luhr were among his co-drivers at the 24 Hours. But what is correct is the bit about him being one of the best.
1978 Le Mans 24hrs.
And probably one of the strangest. Wollek could come across as cold, arrogant and aloof. That explains why, although loved by many, he wasn’t universally popular in the paddock. He was a Marmite person: you either liked him or you didn’t.
He wasn’t one to glad-hand sponsors, nor even give them the time of day if the mood didn’t take him. Achim Stroth, longtime team manager at the Kremer squad with which Wollek built his reputation in sportscars in the 1970s, remembers the team winning the Suzuka 1000Km with its star driver and Henri Pescarolo in 1981.
“Bob shook hands with everybody on the podium and left, leaving Henri to read out a speech that went on for 10 minutes, thanking the track, the sponsors, the crowd and, it seemed, everyone who was there,” recalls Stroth. “That was the difference between their characters. Bob didn’t care about all that stuff.”
Wollek was outspoken, for the most part in a dry, laconic way, his words usually delivered with that crinkle of a smile for which he was known. He said it how it was, or at least how he thought it was
It was probably to the detriment of Wollek’s career. He first raced for the Porsche factory at Le Mans in 1978, sharing a 936 with Ickx and Jurgen Barth (pictured above). He was back again with the Group 6 machine the following year but, when the German manufacturer brought the 936 out of mothballs for 1981 as it prepared for its Group C entry with what became the 956 the following year, he wasn’t part of the set-up. Wollek would race again for the factory as early as 1986, but he missed out on the glory years for its Rothmans-sponsored Group C machines with the likes of Ickx, Derek Bell and Jochen Mass driving.
Manfred Jantke, Porsche motorsport boss at the time, can’t specifically recall why he overlooked Wollek when he was putting together his squad for 1981 and beyond. But he does remember the kind of driver he wanted on the programme.
“I was looking for drivers with personality, who were good with the public, the press and sponsors,” Jantke recalls. “That wasn’t Bob, although he was a driver I absolutely trusted.”
1988 Le Mans 24hrs.
Wollek didn’t endear himself to everyone. Kevin Jeannette, crew chief on Preston Henn’s Swap Shop Porsche when Wollek notched up the first of his Daytona wins in 1983, doesn’t pull his punches when talking about the Frenchman.
"He could be an arsehole, but the way I looked at it, he was my arsehole, because he was driving my car," says Jeannette. "He would rub people up the wrong way, but then you have to have a certain amount of attitude to be a great race car driver.”
Wollek was outspoken, for the most part in a dry, laconic way, his words usually delivered with that crinkle of a smile for which he was known. He said it how it was, or at least how he thought it was. That explains his use of the f-word on network TV in the US at Daytona 1983. Some believe that he made history as the first person do so.
He’d just handed over his Porsche 935L, the Andial-built ‘Moby Dick’ copy developed for the previous season, that he’d been slowly hauling up the order in difficult conditions after early delays. He came into the pits on Sunday morning, strapped the next man in, and turned around to see Preston Henn and Claude Ballot-Lena, his two team-mates at the start of the race, standing on the pit counter.
It fell to Jeannette to tell him that Henn had added AJ Foyt to the line-up after the Indycar superstar’s Nimrod-Aston Martin had dropped out of the race: “I said it was AJ Foyt, and you could tell Bob was livid.”
A split second later Wollek had a TV camera in his face and a microphone under his nose, and was being asked what he felt about having a real life living legend in Foyt alongside him in the car. “Who the f*** is AJ Foyt?” was his famous reply.
Jeannette can’t praise Wollek the driver highly enough. “He was definitely one of the best I ever worked with,” he says. “I won’t say who I think the very best was, but Bob was definitely on the same page.”
Wollek was an all-round package as a sportscar driver. He had a deep understanding of the discipline: he didn’t make mistakes; he knew how to get through the traffic; he was technically strong; and he could eke out a tankful of fuel beyond most of his rivals and team-mates. Nor should there be any doubting his outright pace – witness his Le Mans pole position at the wheel of a Lancia LC2 in 1984.
Lancia LC2 Le Mans 1984
“Bob understood that if he wanted to win races, the other drivers in the car had to be quick as well as him,” says Stroth. “He would set up the car so they could drive it quickly, too. That was a big part of his success.”
Stefan Johansson backs up Stroth’s comments. The Swede had one international sportscar race to his name when he started driving with the Joest Porsche team in 1983 for a campaign with one of the first customer 956s that yielded victory for Wollek in the European Endurance Championship. He found his team-mate to be an able and willing teacher.
“He taught me all the little tricks that would have taken years’ worth of mistakes to learn for myself,” says Johansson. “One of the things I remember most is how he explained how to pace myself over a 24-hour race when we got to Le Mans. He showed me the importance of distributing your energy over the whole race.
“He could see the big picture. He’d been around long enough to not let his ego get in the way of trying to achieve a good result. He was the team leader, but he wasn’t always demanding the fresh tyres and wanting to do the qualifying.”
The serenity with which Wollek carried himself transferred onto the race track.
“He made very limited errors,” explains Stroth. “I think the reason for that was that you couldn’t upset him out on the track. He was very calm. That helped a lot in traffic.”
Famed Porsche engineer Norbert Singer, the architect of the 935 and 956/962, still marvels at Wollek’s technical nous.
“Sometimes we’d be doing set-up work at the test track at Weissach, and we’d make a change and he’d come straight back in and tell us we needed to do this or do that,” recalls Singer, who became firm friends with Wollek. “I’d reply that the tyres hadn’t even got up to temperature, so how could he tell what the car was doing? He’d say ‘trust me’; I don’t actually remember one time when he was wrong. Bob once told me he could feel what the car was doing before he got to the end of the pitlane.”
Wolleck with Norbert Singer
Wollek wasn’t a trained engineer, but he had an intuitive feel for what the car was doing underneath him. Maybe it was because he started out as a skier, and a successful one at that: he bagged a trio of gold medals at the 1966 Winter Universiade in Italy. He’d already done the Mont Blanc Rally a couple of times when he failed to make the French national squad ahead of the 1968 Winter Olympics in Grenoble and swapped sports, entered the Volant Shell Scholarship organised at Le Mans, and then progressed into Formule France single-seaters.
Singer isn’t sure that Wollek’s previous sporting experience played a part in his technical understanding. “I think it’s something you’re born with,” he says. “You either have it or you don’t.”
Nor did he truly ever understand Wollek’s ability to stretch a tankful of fuel. “I can only say that it was all in little details,” says Singer. “He never explained how he did it, but he would sometimes look at what another driver was doing and tell me that it was completely wrong for the consumption.”
Wollek’s undoubted talents resulted in the ‘Brilliant Bob’ nickname that gained traction through the 1980s. The origins of the moniker are generally reckoned to lie with Autosport, and its former editor and sportscar correspondent Quentin Spurring.
Spurring recalls somehow describing Wollek’s brilliance at the wheel of a Kremer Porsche 935 in his report of the 1978 Silverstone 6 Hours, and then a sub-editor seizing on his words and coming up with ‘Brilliant Bob’ for a photo caption. A flick through the relevant magazine reveals the phrase “the brilliant Bob Wollek” – note the lower case first ‘b’ – in his copy but not the caption he remembers. That suggests there might have been an earlier usage in Autosport or elsewhere.
Wollek maintained his brilliance into his dotage. You’ll find a line of drivers to tell you that they could never match the pace in the slow corners of a team-mate perhaps as much as 30 years their senior.
“We were doing a test at Jerez with the GT1 car at the beginning of 1997 when Porsche was trying to figure out what to do with me,” recalls Allan McNish. “I was quick, but I couldn’t match the fastest guy on the day at the hairpin at the end of the back straight. That guy was Bob, who was older than I am now.
“He had this ability to let the car float around a hairpin and reproduce it lap after lap. He could take a tenth out of me every time. In the end I gave up trying to figure it out and had to brave it out in the fast stuff to gain back the time.”
Johnny Mowlem was Wollek’s final team-mate: they were meant to contest the full American Le Mans Series in 2001 at the wheel of a Petersen/White Lightning Porsche 911 GT3-R. Their only race together before Wollek was knocked off his bike the day before round two at Sebring came at the Texas Motor Speedway series opener. Mowlem, who was starting his second full season in the ALMS, was surprised to find that his veteran team-mate could match his times around the ‘roval’.
“I was 32 and he was 57, and he was exactly the same speed as me,” recalls Mowlem. “He was one or two tenths faster in the slow-speed corners, and there were a lot of them at Texas. I mentioned this to Sascha Maassen [who’d driven with Wollek at the Dick Barbour Racing Porsche team the previous season], and he said, ‘Yeah, get used to it’.”
The length of Wollek’s career appears preposterous today, and was even by the standards of the day. Most remarkable was his record at Le Mans beyond the age of 50. He was second three times, first in 1995 with Courage Competition and then with the Porsche factory in 1996 and 1998 with the first 911 GT1 and the carbon-chassis 911 GT1-98. He could have won any of those races, and perhaps in 1997 as well, though that year his own mistake put the GT1 Evo he was driving out of the race.
A lot of hard graft was put in by Wollek to ensure he stayed at the top of his game. McNish found out about his famed fitness during a test at the Hungaroring in the summer of 1997.
Each June he would cycle from his home in Strasbourg to Le Mans, claiming that he carried nothing more than his cycling gear, a credit card and mobile phone. It was his way of clearing his head before sportscar racing’s big one
“It was stinking hot and Bob would peel himself out the seat and be able to get back in,” he recalls. “We youngsters had to be dragged out and then resuscitated. Bob had an amazing resilience.”
Wollek took up cycling seriously in the late 1980s when the legacy of a skiing injury stopped him from playing football, previously his preferred means of staying fit. His training regime is known to have taken in Tour de France stages, and each June he would cycle from his home in Strasbourg to Le Mans, claiming that he carried nothing more than his cycling gear, a credit card and mobile phone. It was his way of clearing his head before sportscar racing’s big one.
Singer recounts a story from near the end of Wollek’s life. Porsche decided to send its contingent of factory drivers to the fitness camp run by Willi Dungl, the guru behind Niki Lauda’s double-quick return to the race track after his fiery accident in the 1976 German Grand Prix. Wollek didn’t want to go, insisting he was fit enough. Porsche Motorsport boss Herbert Ampferer asked Singer to persuade his friend to attend. Wollek duly made the trip to the Austrian Alps.
Bob Wolleck 1988
“I asked him afterwards how it went, and Bob said, ‘You know, OK’,” recalls Singer. “Then one of the young drivers, I can’t remember who, came into my office and told me that Bob was so fit that he broke one of Dungl’s cycling machines!”
In the latter stages of his career, Wollek bought a kart and practised regularly at a track close to his home.
“Bob realised that his reactions were slowing down,” says Singer. “He wanted to work on them. He explained that everything happened very quickly in a go-kart, so driving one was a good way of staying sharp.”
Wollek claimed to have not a single trophy from his racing career at home and told your writer that he wasn’t fussed about not winning Le Mans. It wouldn’t define him, he insisted in an interview at the end of 1999. The photographs of him crying as he stood on the second step of the podium with Muller and Uwe Alzen the previous year suggested he did care, and deeply so.
And as for not defining him, that’s probably not correct either. His failure to win at the biggest race of his chosen discipline only adds to the mystique that surrounds Brilliant Bob Wollek.
Bob Wolleck 1992 Le Mans 24hr.