Page 9 - Against All The Others

024 David Bull
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CHAPTER 3
1968 Racing Season Preview
The FIA had ulterior motives woven into its Académie Française–perfect decla- ration emasculating Group 6 and Group 4. But Isaac Newton’s third law—he being English, not French—codifies a fundamental truth the FIA failed to imagine initially: For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.
Translated to practicalities, it reads this way: Eliminate competitors from your regulations, and you eliminate them from other starting grids. This then might give some teams
reason for not going racing at all.
“There was obvious concern that other than the existing two-liter Group 6 Prototypes from 1967
and earlier, the entry lists would be thin initially,” racing historian János Wimpffen observed. “To alleviate this, the Sports, or Group 4, category was allowed to continue and remain eligible for overall manufacturer points.” The FIA eliminated the duplicate championship awards and, in a gesture of encouragement, reduced the homologation requirement from 100 vehicles to 50 for Group 4. This promised to keep grids populated with the growing numbers of “pre-owned/pre-raced” 2.0-liter 910s, 5.0-liter GT40s, and 3.0-liter 250 LMs. Might it even encourage Eric Broadley to turn out a few more 5.0-liter Chevrolet-powered Lola GT coupes? Or convince Ford Advanced Vehicles to reactivate the “assembly line” for GT40s? The FIA could hope.
OPPOSITE: A fleet of 906s bite into a turn at Innsbruck. The 906 was the first collaboration between body engineers Eugen Kolb and Gerhard Schröder; they faced constraints from existing stocks of wheels and tires. [COURTESY PORSCHE CORPORATE ARCHIV]
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