The Unpainted Wonder of Le Mans
The Le Mans 24-hour race has always been a theatre of high drama, a place of heroic victories and heartbreaking failures. But in the entire history of the great race, there might have never been a story more chaotic, more gloriously amateur, and more quintessentially British than the tale of the Ecurie Ecosse Tojeiro in 1962. It is a story that involves a brilliant but unproven car, a famous blue transporter, a can of paint, a spray gun, and a rather unfortunate crash on the way to the circuit. It is the story of a team that turned up to the world's greatest race with what was, essentially, a half-finished race car, and almost became heroes.
A Mad Dash to the Start Line
The car itself was a work of pioneering genius. It was a collaboration between the legendary Scottish racing team, Ecurie Ecosse, and the brilliant, back-shed chassis wizard, John Tojeiro. It was the world's first proper, rear-engined, closed-coupe GT prototype, a full year before the famous Lola Mk6 that would go on to become the Ford GT40. Tojeiro had built a magnificent, lightweight chassis, and for the body, in a moment of wonderful eccentricity, he had it styled from a painting by an artist named Cavendish Morton, for the princely sum of £47.
The problem was, the whole project was running catastrophically late. As the famous, flag-blue Ecurie Ecosse transporter was being loaded for the trip to France, the new Tojeiro prototype was still a bare, unpainted aluminium shell. Lesser teams would have admitted defeat. Ecurie Ecosse, however, simply threw the car in the back of the lorry, along with a few cans of paint and a spray gun, and set off for Le Mans with the intention of finishing the car when they got there.
And Then They Crashed It
And this is where the story descends into magnificent farce. On the way through Kent, the iconic transporter had a monumental crash. The precious, one-off prototype, which was unfinished, was now also damaged. The team arrived at Le Mans not with a championship-winning racing car, but with a battered, unpainted kit of parts. What followed was a heroic, non-stop bodge job in the paddock. The mechanics hammered the bent panels back into shape, and then, with just hours to go before scrutineering, they hastily hand-painted the entire car in the team's signature blue. It was probably still wet when it rolled up to the starting grid.
Miraculously, the car, driven by Tommy Dickson and Jack Fairman, was not just a participant; it was properly quick. For eight remarkable hours, this machine that had been a wreck on the side of a British road just days earlier ran flawlessly. It sat as the second-highest British entry, clear proof of Tojeiro's chassis brilliance and the sheer bloody-mindedness of the Scottish mechanics. And then its Cooper Monaco gearbox gave up. The race was over.
A Glorious Failure
After Le Mans, the car went on to have a long and varied career in British club racing, and was even clocked at an impressive 152 mph at Monza. Today, it has been beautifully restored and is a star at historic racing events, a magnificent survivor of a more adventurous age.
The story of the Ecurie Ecosse Tojeiro at Le Mans is not a story of victory. It is something much more important than that. It is a perfect reminder of the spirit of the great privateer teams, a time when a small group of determined, passionate, and slightly mad enthusiasts could build a world-beating car in a shed, crash it, fix it, paint it in a field, and then turn up at the world's greatest race and give the giants a proper scare. It was a magnificent failure.