Page 11 - Sample pages "Forty Six: The Birth of Porsche Motorsport"

FORTY SIX 87 CHAPTER 4
FINALLY, LE MANS
Their “headquarters” at Teloché was a garage that, as Faroux had promised, would accept the German team. Auguste Veuillet knew of the repair shop owned by Georges “Jojo” Després who considered Porsche’s needs and rented them a portion of his space. When his neighbors learned he had rented to Germans, their reaction was, contrary to Charles Faroux’s guarantee, less warm and welcoming to the team and hostile to the garage owner. “After all this drama, Porsche’s team was almost dreading the race,” Le Mans historian Quentin Spurring noted.
According to Quentin Spurring, it rained during all but one of the practice sessions, and this was enough to put Porsche to its penultimate test on Thursday night at White House Corner. “Having
The Birth of Porsche Motorsport
1951 24 HOURS OF LE MANS
made it to France with two cars, the team lost one (SL 054) during a wet practice session when Rudolph Sauerwein lost control and overturned, almost taking with him Stirling Moss’s Jaguar and an Aston Martin,” Spurring reported. Those two cars then collided.
George Huntoon, who co-drove the No 3 Cunningham C-2R wrote in the September 1951 issue of Road & Track magazine, “The writer happened to be about 25 yards behind the Porsche when it got into trouble and apparently the driver
[ABOVE] Numbers 46 (SL 063) and 47 (SL 054) at Teloché, June 1951 with unknown persons.
[LEFT] SL 063 at Teloché headquarters with two unknown mechanics, June 1951.
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