Sabotage at the London-to-Sydney marathon? 17th December 1968
Fifty years after a stunning conclusion to the gruelling London-to-Sydney road race, shocking allegations have emerged about what really happened to the leading Citroen, writes John Smailes.
"Driving with Belgian ace Lucien Bianchi, winner of the Le Mans 24 Hour race only two months before, the Frenchman was in sight of victory. The pair had kept their lightweight Citroen DS21, a real rocket, in touch with the lead all the time. They’d been third at Bombay, and across Australia had kept their head, as a firestorm of desperate competition burst out around them. That tactic had delivered them outright first, but it was tenuous.
At midnight on the last day of competition, just 12 points separated the top six competitors. Bianchi and Ogier’s gap was only two minutes, and each minute was worth a point. It was too close to call, and there were 694 competitive kilometres remaining. Bianchi, the lead driver, took the wheel. Formula One driver, sports car ace, rally expert – he was masterful that night.
When the team reached Hindmarsh Station, the last competitive stage on the near 17,000-kilometre journey, they were 11 minutes ahead. Bianchi had massively consolidated his lead. It had been a night of legend, a fitting climax to a glorious adventure. It was the expectation of all crews that the real marathon had finished and that they would now cruise to the finish. Ogier took over and a tired Bianchi settled down in the right-hand seat of their left-hand-drive car.
It was early morning, just coming up to 8:00am, and they had two hours and one minute to cover the distance to the time control outside Nowra, an average speed of less than 80 kilometres per hour. Seventeen kilometres back from the control was Tianjara Creek, the last obstacle on the course. Ogier cleared it, not gently but with spray flying. It was an act of celebration.
Just moments before, a white Mini Cooper S drove unchallenged through the control point at Nowra with two young men on board. Incredibly, it set off the wrong way, in the opposite direction to the oncoming competition cars. The marathon did not close roads and nobody at control stopped them.
Two kilometres down the road from control was John Gowland, manager of the Australian Ford team. “I heard, then saw, the Mini coming,” he said. “I stepped out on the road, waving my hands at him, but he swerved around me and kept going.” Gowland saw and heard nothing more. “Later, Andrew Cowan [in a Hillman Hunter] came through followed by Paddy Hopkirk [Austin 1800].”
There was no Citroen....
Two kilometres after the water splash, Jean-Claude Ogier had been approaching a right-hand bend. It was a big sweeper with room for two cars to squeak past each other. “I was in the centre of the road,” Jean-Claude told me in Marseille, his memory of that moment and his attention to detail still intense. “Then the Austin [Mini] jumped to our side.”
The crash was catastrophic. With a massive tearing of metal and not much energy absorption, both cars folded back to their firewalls, trapping their right-hand occupants. The Mini caught fire. No one saw the crash and no one was in earshot."
More here:-
https://www.whichcar.com.au/features/sa ... y-marathon
Paddy Hopkirk saved lives, but lost the race…
In 1968, at the epic 10,000 mile London-Sydney Marathon, Hopkirk gallantly gave up any chance of victory on the penultimate stage to rescue the Bianchi-Ogier team then in the lead, whose Citroën DS had just collided head-on with a Mini Cooper S on a road supposedly closed to traffic. The crash was catastrophic. With a massive tearing of metal and not much energy absorption, both cars folded back to their firewalls, trapping their right-hand occupants. Hopkirk and his crew (Alec Poole and Tony Nash) were first upon the scene and stopped to extinguish the flames on both cars in the accident and to help the trapped Lucien Bianchi out of his car.
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid ... 3961467414
"Three months and fourteen days after his marathon crash, Lucien Bianchi, still recovering from his injuries, crashed his 3.0-litre Autodelta V8 Alfa Romeo 33/3 prototype while testing for his Le Mans defence. He died instantly."
