24h Le Mans
Paul Newman (1925-2008) raced at Le Mans in 1979 and just a year later, another actor was on the starting grid: Frenchman Jean-Louis Trintignant.
Paul Newman’s passion for racing was triggered in his forties when he played Frank Capua in Winning, filmed at the 1968 Indianapolis 500. That shoot sparked the beginning of a racing career that was capped with second place at the 1979 24 Hours of Le Mans, in a Porsche 935 with Dick Barbour and Rolf Stommelen. For Trintignant though, racing runs in the family. The actor is none other than the nephew of Maurice Trintignant (1917-2005), the first Frenchman to win a Formula One race (the Monaco Grand Prix in 1955 and 1958) and outright winner of the 1954 Le Mans 24 Hours with Ferrari. When Jean-Louis Trintignant starred as racing driver Jean-Louis Duroc in the 1966 film A Man and a Woman, director Claude Lelouch made no secret of the fact that the character was based on Maurice Trintignant.
Like Paul Newman before him, Jean-Louis Trintignant drove a Porsche 935 at Le Mans. It was a K3, the car designed by the Kremer brothers that won the 1979 race. Just like the previous year, it was raining in Le Mans and the media keenly reported the actor’s every move. He and teammates Anny-Charlotte Verney and Xavier Lapeyre were comfortably in the top ten from the halfway mark. But on the Sunday, just before 8 am, Trintignant’s tyre threw its tread on the Mulsanne Straight. He hit the rail but managed to limp back to the pit minus a back wheel and with a bent front axle. The yellow Porsche resumed the race after repairs but retired in the seventeenth hour due to gearbox trouble. Neither Newman nor Trintignant ever raced at Le Mans again. Newman formed the successful Newman-Haas team in 1983. They claimed eight titles, including four for Le Mans-born driver Sébastien Bourdais and won over a hundred IndyCar and Champ Car races in the USA.
Read the previous episode in our series of 45 stories of Porsche at the 24 Hours of Le Mans.
Jean-Philippe Doret / ACO - Translated from French by Emma Paulay
Photo: LE MANS (SARTHE, FRANCE), CIRCUIT DES 24 HEURES, LE MANS 24 HOURS, SATURDAY 14 & SUNDAY 15 JUNE 1980, RACE. Just like Paul Newman the previous year, Jean-Louis Trintignant and his teammates had to deal with wet weather for the race.
