Truly great race car drivers aren’t unearthed every day of the week.
Indeed, the most talented and gifted seem to pop up only once or twice in a generation, and deserve every single plaudit that comes there way for their skill and tenacity. We’ve seen some great names grace racetracks the world over in the last twenty years: the likes of Michael Schumacher, Jimmie Johnson and Sebastien Vettel, to name just three of the most dominant in recent years.
Yet, there is another man whose accomplishments rank right up there with those three, and, sadly, most Australians don’t know the name Tom Kristensen, let alone his impressive and incredible racing resume amassed over 15 years at the top of sports car racing.
Kristensen – also known as TK, the Great Dane, or Mr. Le Mans – is to the world of high-level endurance sports car racing what Michael Schumacher or Sebastien Vettel is to Formula One. And his glittering career comes to an end this weekend, at the Sao Paolo, Brazil round of the FIA World Endurance Championship.
Throughout nearly two decades at the top of international sports car racing, TK’s record stands for itself, and it’s an impressive body of work: nine wins from eighteen attempts at Le Mans (including six straight outright with Audi from 2000-2005), six overall wins at the 12 Hours of Sebring, a win at Petit Le Mans, 2001 American Le Mans Series champion and, most recently, the 2013 FIA World Endurance Champion.
And that’s only his major race victories. He’s won countless other ALMS, ELMS and WEC events at tracks as Road America, Spa, Austin and Shanghai. You can make a solid case that Kristensen is the best driver never to grace a Formula One paddock.
To have a 50% success rate at Le Mans, a gruelling race where there are, quite literally, a thousand and one things that can go wrong during the endurance test – mechanical gremlins, your own accident, weather, getting caught up in someone else’s accident – is staggering. Absolutely staggering. There was a time in the early part of the 2000s when you might as well have just gone ahead and inscribed TK’s name on the winner’s trophy at Le Mans, such was his dominance. You must wonder at the sort of despondency the rest of the grid felt knowing that, for the most part, they were racing for second.
Audi’s success at Le Mans and elsewhere in endurance sports car racing – the American Le Mans Series, World Endurance Championship and even the European Le Mans Series – can be tied to Kristensen. Aside from only his long-time Scottish co-driver, Alan McNish, sports car racing has rarely seen a more pugnacious driver. The combination of Kristensen, McNish and the wizened Italian Dindo Capello was a formidable one, to say the very least.
Sure, Audi had the budget, technology and the thirst for success, but none of that matters if you don’t also have a driver capable of putting your car at the pointy end of the field. TK did that, time and time again. In recent years, he has played a significant Kristensen elevated Audi’s crop of younger drivers, and with Capello and McNish retiring in recent years, has become the elder statesman to the up-and-coming fleet of superstar drivers that Audi are slowly bringing into a program once dominated by the old trio, the Audi rat pack of TK, McNish and Capello, fast friends and faster drivers.
Guys like Marcel Fassler, Mike Rockenfeller, Andre Lotterer and Benoit Treluyer have benefited immensely from having come up with Kristensen as their racing mentor. So, TK’s legacy will last at Audi for many years into the future.
It’s hard to pinpoint Kristensen’s best win. Is it 2004 in the Audi R8, his sixth win, equalling the great Jacky Ickx’s record? Or a year later, when he broke Ickx’s record – one that most pundits doubted would ever be equalled, let alone bettered?
Both were superb history-making drives, but I can’t go past the 2013 edition of the 24 Hours of Le Mans. It was a tough race, with Kristensen’s fellow Danish driver Alan Simonsen tragically died after crashing his Aston Martin heavily into the barriers at Tetre Rouge early in the event. At the behest of Simonsen’s family, the race continued, and after twenty-four gruelling hours, Kristensen (with McNish and Frenchman Loic Duval) came out on top after a knock-down-drag-out battle with Toyota and with his own emotions after Simonsen’s death.
We’ve rarely seen such emotional scenes at the Circuit de la Sarthe as we saw that day. Kristensen dedicated the race to his father, who had died of cancer a few weeks earlier, and Simonsen a few hours earlier – the two had been friends, and Simonsen was well liked by all – and I daresay that the entire motorsports world had tears in their eyes as we watched the Great Dane celebrate on the podium. The legend of TK grew even more that day. Aside from everything else, it was his ninth – and, we now know, final – win at Le Mans. To be able to drive through the grief he was surely feeling makes it, to my mind, is most legendary triumph.
Most importantly: by all accounts, Kristensen is as good a man as he was a racer, which is, by all accounts, more than can be said for someone like Vettel, and proof of that is in the warm tributes that have been flowing from all corners of the globe since TK announced his retirement, and will continue to stream in well after he turns his final laps of competition in the World Endurance Championship finale next weekend in Brazil.
Legend is an over-used word in sport, a tag attached too easily for my liking, but Tom Kristensen, Mr. Le Mans, is a legend in every sense of the word, a man whose accomplishments will live on for decades and decades after his retirement and, indeed, after he is dead and buried. Will we ever see one man dominate the 24 Hours of Le Mans as TK has dominated? I doubt it.
Thanks for so many memories, TK. As race fans, we’re better for having watched you over the years. Sports car racing won’t be the same without you on the grid.
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