Hello Kansas City, welcome back to the Bespoke Automotive Refinement Podcast. We are so glad that you’ve joined us tonight. Thomas and I are actually sitting out enjoying a nice fire out on the patio with our dogs who’ve recently discovered a possum in the yard and worked actively to keep us safe.
And we get to talk about cars, which is, I think, at least for Thomas, I actually really enjoy it too. It’s one of your favorite things to talk about. It is.
I could do it forever. I love talking about cars. Have you ever gotten tired of it? Have you ever gotten to a moment where you’re like, no more cars? No, no.
It’s a toxic trait of mine. Something that if you know Thomas, and is the most fun thing in the world, is to watch a movie with him. Now, if you’re one of those that has to watch a movie non, like you can’t stop it beginning to end, nine bathroom breaks, this would not be your thing.
But if you actually want to know some interesting facts throughout the movie, understand the significance of different things, watch a movie with him is a blast, because he knows all things about cars. Whether you’re watching something like Fast and Furious, to the cartoon Cars movies, to even just a regular movie, he’s like, oh my goodness, you and I are watching some movie with Channing Tatum, and you’re like, oh, that car’s really significant for this and that, and you know all the ins and outs of what made that valuable. And that’s something that I never understood before.
It’s kind of funny with that movie 21 Jump Streets movie you’re talking about. I just finished a Kansas City car detailing package on an extremely rare car, and like, I was 99% sure that the car in the movie, in the background, it wasn’t even like the hero car, it was just in the background of the movie, but it was one that I just finished a Kansas City car detailing package on. So.
It looked identical. It did. It was, you know, percent identical twin.
All right, today we’re going to be talking about the top 20 best Le Mans cars of all time. Now, have you watched Le Mans very often? I’ll kind of pay attention to it. I have.
You know, I have a Kansas City car detailing client who actually raced in the 24 hour of Le Mans. He won the 24 hours of Daytona in 2020, I’m sorry, 2013. I follow like GT, the GT touring series, but I don’t, I don’t follow like the drivers, the teams, but I do like seeing every year who wins it, what manufacturer takes the, takes the gold, because there’s, there’s a lot of really interesting rivalries between those manufacturers.
You know, the, the big one is Ford and Ferrari. I mean, they’re all through the 60s and even into the 70s, man, they were like, they hated each other. What are some of the top cars that you can think of that have done well Le Mans? Well, Ferrari.
Bandini was a, he was, he was a force to be reckoned with through the 60s. Ford, when they brought out the Ford GT, Carroll Shelby helped design that car and build that car. And Ken Miles was one of the best race car drivers of all time.
So it was really cool that, you know, a big movie production company out of Hollywood actually gave him the glory that he deserved. Corvette, you know, during the 60s, Corvette had the, the Z06 with the C2 Corvette and the Z06 was their, their grand touring GT2 car that ran at Le Mans. And then in the late, or in the early 2000s, up until now, they pay homage to that with the Z06 Corvette.
And so it’s, it’s one of my favorite cars. Porsche, Porsche was never really like through the 60s and the 70s, it didn’t really produce a great car, just because they couldn’t produce a lot of power. So, um, but they could handle and they could corner better than really anything else, any other manufacturers coming out with.
So, um, definitely Ford, Ferrari and, uh, and Saleen. I grew up with a Saleen in my garage and I gotta pay homage. I gotta, I gotta pay tribute to Steve Saleen because he built some pretty insane cars and he actually raced at Le Mans for a few years.
Really? That’s cool. Yeah. So he had a pretty good understanding of what would do well.
Steve Saleen was like the modern version of what Carroll Shelby did with the Ford GT. Okay. So.
All right. Well, number one on the list is a Porsche 956. So it raced from 1982 to 1985.
It was a four-time winner, groundbreaking aerodynamics, and the first car to lap Le Mans at over 150 miles per hour. I know what car you’re talking about and it looks wicked. That’s a good one.
I don’t know a lot about it, but I know that it’s a wicked, wicked looking car. The aerodynamics of that car, especially in the 80s when a lot of these manufacturers had real boxy looking cars. Yeah, the 956 was.
It looks like a race car. I know, I know. They never made a street legal version of it.
It was just a track car, race car specifically, but that brought out a new, a new type of design for the GT series racing. Number two is a car that you really like is an Audi R8 from 2000-2005. Dominated the early 2000s with five wins in six years.
Reliable, fast, and a benchmark for modern endurance cars. And I love the R8 because it’s like you get the, you get the powertrain on the street car side. You get the powertrain of a Lamborghini Yardo, but you get the, the interior of a German car, which they’re just better.
I mean, the Italians aren’t known for making interiors that hold together. The Germans are. So the R8’s kind of like you get the best of both worlds.
Yeah. Number three is a Ford GT40 from 1966-1969. Four consecutive wins, famous for ending Ferrari’s dominance, immortalized in Ford versus Ferrari.
Yep. That’s a movie you probably highly recommend. I do.
It was funny when I went over to the other day to your parents’ house and your dad, like first words out of his mouth were, that’s one of my favorite movies. Have you ever seen that movie? Uh-huh. And like, yes, it’s, there’s, there’s so many cool, cool parts of that movie.
Just, you know, a company like Ford that made regular cars, they didn’t make sports cars. Yeah. You know, they would have been like, Ford back then would have been like Kia now, you know, Kia doesn’t make us supercars.
So Ford going after a company like Ferrari that only made supercars. And, um, I listened to an interview Carol Shelby did before he died. And they talked about that whole deal.
This is actually before the movie Ford versus Ferrari even came out. Um, and he, he tells that story and it’s just every part of it’s true, which is so cool. That’s awesome.
Number four, a Porsche 919 hybrid from 2015 to 2017 had three consecutive wins, hybrid technology, masterclass, and a pioneer in modern endurance design. Now, you know, real quick, I can’t, I can’t think of what that looks like. I think it looks like the nine five six.
It’s got that, that it’s a GT one car. It’s not a GT two car. I don’t think.
Yeah. It’s also a GT one car. Um, so it’s interesting about cars that run at Lamar, which is the GT touring series is the GT one cars run in a different class than the GT two cars, which are like Corvette, Lamborghini, Ferrari, but they run, they run literally at the same time.
Oh, really? Yeah. So they run in two different classes. So it’d kind of be like, if, um, if there would be a college football game going on, on the same field as an NFL team.
Oh, wow. At the exact same time. Oh, wow.
Like it’s, that’s, what’s cool about Lamar now, but you know, those cars aren’t street legal. That’s part of the GT one series, but yeah, I’ve actually a video of that car at the Nurburgring coming up over a hill and it goes like this and it just lifts up off the ground and it flies through the air. Really? That’s cool.
So aerodynamic that it literally took flight. So if somebody is wanting to get ahold of you to talk more about Kansas city car detailing services, Kansas city car detailing packages, if they’re interested in talking to you about Lamar or any race car, or especially about Corvettes, if you have any questions about Corvettes, I think you could talk about it all day. How would they go about doing that? Best way to get ahold of me to discuss anything car related or Kansas city car detailing related specifically is to call 620-282-0402.
You can also go online to bespoke refinement.com there. You can check out a list of all of our Kansas city car detailing packages and Kansas city car detailing services.