'We won in '70... but should have won in '69 and '71 instea d'

Of Richard Attwood's nine Le Mans 24 Hours appearances, his Porsche drives from 1969-71 were peak La Sarthe. He tells Andrew Frankel of his fears of the 917 and his strategy for staying alive

- RICHARD ATTWOOD

Richard Attwood strides into the pub, dapper as ever just days after his 85th birthday, and greets me with an enormous grin. The pub is significant, not for what, but where it is. When we were arranging our meeting he insisted on knowing the precise route I'd be taking from my home in the Wye Valley to his in the Midlands because he wanted to make sure it was as convenient for me as possible. If you know Richard, this will surprise you not in the very least.

There's so much we could be talking about. There is his unexplained escape from death towards the start of his top-level career, when during the 1965 Belgian Grand Prix he wrapped his Lotus 25 around a telegraph pole at the exit of the Masta Kink leaving him unharmed but entirely unable to extricate himself from the now banana-shaped Lotus until, that is, the whole thing went up in flames. “So I got out of the car,” he says, still entirely unable to say where the superhuman forces required to do so came from, other than his mortally threatened instinct to survive. Or his one-off return to Le Mans in 1984, 13 years after retirement, to race an Aston Martin Nimrod with John Sheldon and Mike Salmon which ended in another fire, this time putting the former in hospital with serious burns.

But while today's subject is indeed Le Mans, we're going to keep it to just three of his nine participations, when he was racing for the Porsche factory between 1969-71. Even so, I'm a touch concerned about the premise for this story, because if Richard doesn't agree with it, we're in trouble. So I think we'd better get it out the way nice and early.

“Would it be fair to say you should have won two of those races but didn’t, and should not have won one, but did?” I ventured.

Attwood thinks for a moment during which time I convince myself he's composing the words with which to let me down gently before he says, “Yes, I think that is absolutely fair to say.”