NEWS
"The person who risks nothing, does nothing, has nothing"
" Motorsport, at least at the top level , is seen today as something largely out of reach for the ordinary guy " says Greg Mills, the man behind Team Africa Le Mans.
Sarel and the Superstars at 10 December Killarney Nine-Hour
South Africans are about to get a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to watch global racing superstars of Formula One, Le Mans, Sebring and Daytona racing fight it out on Cape Town’s Killarney raceway, which will host a special event on 10 December 2022 – The Cape International Nine-Hour endurance race.
This event has become a regular on the South African motorsport calendar. But this year the organisers have upped the game, securing the participation of several global motorsport superstars, with six Le Mans 24-Hour, three Daytona 24-Hour, three petit Le Mans, a 24-Hour Nürburgring and Kyalami Nine-Hour and two Sebring 12-Hour victories among many others between them.
All will be driving, appropriately, Team Africa Le Mans Ginettas, co-entered with the Western Province Motor Club which runs the Killarney facility.
And it’s an important moment to celebrate for Killarney.
Emanuele Pirro won Le Mans five times with Audi. But his distinguished motorsport career does not stop there. He drove for Benetton and Dallara in Formula One, and was the test-driver for McLaren during their all-conquering dominance with Alain Prost and Ayrton Senna. He is a two-time ALMS sports-car champion, and a winner at Goodwood and Macau among many honours.
Emanuele, who serves as a FIA steward, will be joined in the first of the Ginetta GT3s by his sons Cris, a senior engineer for Alfa F1, and Goofy, who like his brother is a graduate of the prestigious Cranfield engineering school and currently works in the Italian F3 championship. The Pirro family will be racing together, both Cris and Goofy having driven in single-seater formula in their ‘spare’ time.
Emanuele raced with Team Africa Le Mans at the Misano 24-hour in 2017, where the all-volunteer team finished third in class. ‘This is a special team,’ he says, ‘and this is a special event for the Pirro family, the first time we have raced together. It is both a great pleasure and privilege for us to come and race in Killarney. What sets this African team apart is that it is a team of friends. I can’t wait to be there.’
The second Ginetta will see Anthony Reid, himself a podium finisher at Le Mans, team up with SA saloon-car star Hennie Groenewald and Reid’s protégé Murray Shepherd in the second of the GT3 Ginettas. Reid, who made his name in the junior formula in the UK competing against the likes of Damon Hill and was once offered a Jordan F1 drive, was one of the highest paid saloon car drivers world-wide in the 1990s and 2000s driving for Ford, MG and Nissan during the series heyday.
And the third Ginetta will have Jan Lammers drive with WPMC President Greg Mills and its Chairman Tim Reddell along with the SA legend Sarel van der Merwe in the Ginetta GT4. In a career which took in 41 Grands Prix, Lammers has competed in a remarkable 24 Le Mans 24-Hour races, his results include ten top-ten finishes along with a famous victory in 1988 for Jaguar when he drove 13 hours, including the last four with the car stuck in fourth gear. This was Jaguar’s first outright victory in the event since 1957.
Jaguar’s main competition that year came from Porsche, whose works’ team featured one Sarel Daniel van der Merwe. Lammers was twice world sportscar champion. Jan’s last Le Mans appearance was in 2019 sharing a Bentley Continental with Mills. Now chairman of the Dutch F1 consortium, he says: ‘Racing at Killarney is an emotional experience more than it is just another event. This team and the track represent the very essence of the sport – competition with collaboration, professionalism with friendship, rivalry with integrity. Long may it continue and prosper.’
The Cape International Nine-Hour is the finale to the SA Endurance Series. Xolile Letlaka, the chairman of the series, says: ‘We are delighted to be hosted by Killarney once more, a circuit oozing history and enthusiasm. And it’s particularly memorable to be in the company of such stars like Emanuele and Jan, which illustrates where we want to take the Endurance Series in the future, in building the appeal of motorsport across the entire community of South Africans.’
The Nine-Hour includes a 40-car entry, with half of them international-spec GT cars.
But there is another reason to celebrate this event: the Killarney circuit is set for another generation of motorsport with the conclusion of a lengthy lease extension process. Established in 1947, and built entirely with members’ funds, ‘Killarney is an extraordinary asset for the City of Cape Town,’ says Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis. ‘The lease extension enables us to further develop the facility in partnership with Killarney, and to attract more international stars of the sort we will see at this year’s Cape International Nine-Hour.’
Killarney has responded to this long-term commitment by making a significant investment of its own towards ensuring motorsport is increasingly inclusive, from the perspective not only of competition, but also road-safety and economic well-being. The WPMC has just opened a bespoke spinning and drifting facility to bring in a new generation and community to the motorsport fold. In the same way, the SA Endurance Series is putting on a music concert at Killarney during the Nine-Hour with the intention of drawing more people to the sport.
Alan Winde, the premier of the Western Cape, says that ‘South Africa faces a crisis of jobs and governance. The answer lies in strengthening partnerships and raising economic growth. Killarney is an example not only of a can-do spirit, but what we can do together to use our assets to everyone’s long-term advantage.’
Killarney makes a R350 million annual contribution to the Cape economy through job creation and spend in extensive motoring tourism and other industries. With plans to revitalise international historic racing along the lines of Goodwood’s blue-ribbon event which attracts more than 250,000 spectators annually, the future for the race-track and Cape motorsport looks as bright as these visiting superstars.
01.12.22
Bruce Johnstone: 1937 - 2022
Early in 2022, Dr Greg Mills spoke at the funeral of Bruce Johnstone, South African racing driver.
“After I spoke at Eddie Keizan’s funeral in 2016, Bruce called me up. He had in fact joined Janet and I for the day, and had come to our home in Johannesburg, after which I had run him back to the airport. ‘I am just sorting out a few things,’ said Bruce, in those soft tones a few weeks later on the phone. ‘I wondered if you would be available to say a few words at my funeral.’ We did laugh about it afterwards.”
Read the full piece here.
Stars in the West: Sneaking Some Space for Nostalgia in Big-Buck Sport
Never interrupt someone doing something you said couldn’t be done’.
Amelia Earhart
252,500 spectators attended the 2019 24-Hours of Le Mans. Television coverage reached over 800 million worldwide, making it one of the top five sporting events in the world by most measures. 61 cars participated in the main event, operating on seasonal budgets as great as €100 million. But there is room, still, for a little nostalgia in such big-buck, high- technology motorsport, writes Greg Mills, particularly in an event with an unlikely South African connection.
By Greg Mills 17.06.19
Team Africa to Race at the Road to Le Mans, June 2019, advertising the Plight of the Pangolin
Team Africa is delighted to announce that it has been able to secure an entry into the prestigious Le Mans weekend. Greg Mills will be sharing a twin-turbo Bentley GT3 with the former F1 driver and Le Mans veteran Jan Lammers, who famously won the 24-hour race in 1988 for Jaguar, and has finished in nearly every one of the top-ten places in his distinguished career, certainly a good person to have on your side. As with Team Africa’s previous foreign forays, the team is reliant on a South African and Kenyan crew under the captaincy of former African rally champion David Horsey, and will be ‘dressing’ the car in the colours of the STOP! Poaching initiative.
Historians will remind that there is a longstanding and unique connection between South Africa, Le Mans and Bentley, given Woolf Barnato’s three-out-of-three victories in for the marques between 1928-30. The Barnatos of course made their fortune on the diamond-fields of southern Africa.
This entry would not have been possible without a large number of friends and sponsors who kept faith in the idea of an African team at Le Mans when it seemed a hopelessly wistful dream: Vipingo Ridge, Bruce Jack Wines, the Western Cape marketed by Wesgro, Matus tools, Richard Harper Logistics, Hollard Insurance, G&A Promotions, Castrol, Equalizer Agricultural Implements and Machinery, and the Ichikowitz Family Foundation, which is involved in a variety of anti-poaching initiatives.
The Team aims to assist in putting over a positive, ‘can do’ face of Africa to a different, large and diverse audience. Moreover, to turn this opportunity into something more than a motor race, it is advertising the cause of the fast-disappearing Pangolin, hence the Team’s new logo, which will be displayed on the Bentley.
The tiny Pangolin, with four species each in Africa and Asia, is the world’s most trafficked animal, its keratin scales (the material in fingernails) coveted in Chinese medicine. While nearly 70 countries are involved in the illegal trade world-wide, the largest source of this termite-eating mammal is from Africa. Seizures representing some 700,000 Pangolins were made between 2000 and 2018, according to National Geographic, but experts estimate that more than a million pangolins were poached from 2000 through 2013. All eight species are threatened with extinction, despite a ban on international commercial trade in the Pangolin.
The Team hopes that the Plight of the Pangolin will benefit from the spectatorship of 250,000 and 700 million or so television viewers that tune into Le Mans over the weekend.
For further details on Team Africa on the Road to Le Mans, contact Henry Sands at Henry.Sands@sabistrategy.com.
Between Ordeal and Sporting Odyssey: 72 Hours in 24
"US Army General Omar Bradley famously said “Amateurs study strategy; professionals study logistics”.
He’s absolutely right. But that truism makes little room for the emotional motivation to do things, aside from simply the need to get them done. It certainly does not explain why people set difficult, voluntary goals for themselves.
By Greg Mills for the Daily Maverick 11.07.217
No Horse Names Morbid Ever Won This Race
Dave Brabham is the youngest son of the three-time World Formula One champion, Jack, the tough-as-nails Aussie and the first and, so far, only driver to have won the championship in a car bearing his own name.
David, now 52, says that the most difficult thing about the Le Mans 24-hour race “Is when you are driving at night and it’s raining. You can’t tell if the black patches on the road are dark tar or puddles of water.”
By Greg Mills for the Daily Maverick 18.06.18
Le Mans 2016: Cool Runnings in the South of France
" With faux leopard skin jackets and the large cheetah emblazoned on the bonnet of our Ginetta G55 racecar to highlight Motorsport SA’s anti-poaching cause, we, similarly, “talked African”. And, largely, we were. Gathered in the paddock of the Paul Ricard race-track in the south of France on the weekend of 16-17 July 2016 were seventeen South Africans, two Kenyans, three Brits and a Dutchman making up Team Africa Le Mans. Out of solidarity with our home base, we carried decals for the Gauteng Growth and Development Agency."
By Greg Mills for the Daily Maverick, 20.07.16
Horse(y) Power: When a Peugeot 504 bakkie ruled Africa
"David Horsey, 61, got into rallying in Kenya as a navigator for his brother. He soon shifted to the driver’s seat, finishing runner-up in the Kenya championship in 1983 in a Datsun 1300 bakkie, and winner of the African championship the following year in a Peugeot 504 bakkie. The top of the Anwar in his Mombasa dining-room is piled today full of Safari trophies. Greg Mills found out more."
By Greg Mills for the Daily Maverick 03.02.15
SA Nine-Hour endurance race: Playing Guitar with Bob Dylan … en Sarel
" The Team Africa Le Mans Ginetta G55 driven by South African racing legend Sarel van der Merwe, Le Mans 24-hour winner Jan Lammers and Dr Greg Mills finished first GT car home, second overall and won the Index of Performance in the South African Nine-Hour race at Killarney race track on Saturday 12 December 2015. This is their story. "
By Greg Mills for the Daily Maverick, 16.12.15