Marv’s Garage: One French guy beats Jackie Ickx and Porsche at Le Mans.

Frenchman Jean Rondeau is the only guy to win Le Mans in a car bearing his own name. The 1980 race was a titanic struggle, not just between Rondeau’s Cosworth DFV-powered M379B and Jackie Ickx’s Joest-Porsche 908/80, but against torrential rain that made the race the wettest up to that point of its history.

Against Dick Barbour’s Porsche 935 and Hans Stuck’s BMW M1, Jean Rongeau had entered five 379Bs into Group Six. Ickx, who had already won four of his six Le Mans titles to earn his “Mr Le Mans” nickname, struggled early on with visibility in the open-top Porsche prototype.

A broken fuel injection pump belt threatened to wreck it for Ickx and his co-driver (and team owner) Reinhold Joest, but they kept battling to retain the lead by early Sunday morning. However, the Porsche’s transmission failed at 10am and – while they managed to fix it –Rondeau was back in the lead and gapping Ickx by three laps.

In one of the all-time great charges, the Ickx and the Porsche clawed time back so that when Jean-Pierre Jaussaud took over driving duties of the Rondeau with 90 minutes to go. As rain fell an hour later a crucial decision was made: Ickx pitted for rain tyres while Jaussaud kept battling on his slicks.

It was almost all lost on the last lap as the rain grew heavier and Jaussaud spun out, but he managed to keep it off the walls to take the win by two laps with Gordon Spice, Philippe Martin, and Jean-Michel Martin coming in third in another Rondeau. He was one of just two wholly independent constructors to win the 24hr classic since 1949.

While Jean Rondeau was killed in a car crash at a level-crossing in December 1985, 17 of the 19 Rondeau race cars built still exist.