The Porsche factory was down to its last car after an hour of racing at Le Mans but that one, driven by Derek Bell, Hans Stuck and AI Holbert, was enough to write some new pages in the record books.
Bell won the race for the fifth time (now second only to Jacky Ickx's record of six victories), Holbert for the third time, and Stuck for the second time. It was Porsche's twelfth Le Mans success, and the seventh in a row. Could a manufacturer be more dominant than that?
After seeing the Silk Cut Jaguar challenge crumble, Sir John Egan declared "we'll keep coming back until we win", but the bleak fact is that Tom Walkinshaw will have to wring still more out of the XJR-8LM design to beat the works Porsches next year, and even that assumes that the Stuttgart firm doesn't make further progress.
