He overtook Schumacher’s Mercedes to win Le Mans but never got to the podium, this is a story of Johnny Herbert’s Mazda 787B

30 years ago on 23-June 1991, Johnny Herbert drove a Mazda 787B to cross the finish line of France’s Circuit de la Sarthe to win the 1991 Le Mans 24 Hours – the world’s toughest, oldest, and most prestigious circuit racing event.

In doing so, Mazda became not only the first Asian manufacturer to win Le Mans, but also the first non-piston engine-powered car to do so. It’s probably the last too, since rotary engines have since been banned from Le Mans.

However, photos of the 1991 event’s podium ceremony showed only two out of the three drivers piloting the winning No. 55 Mazda 787B. Volker Weidler and Bertrand Gachot were present but Johnny Herbert was missing.

The reason? After winning the race, Herbert was so exhausted, he had collapsed almost immediately after getting out of the car and had be transported to a medical facility.

He is probably the only driver in motorsports history to win the prestigious Le Mans title but never got to receive his trophy on the podium.

The Le Mans 24 Hours is very gruelling not just on the car, but also the drivers and technicians. If drag racing is a 10 second sprint and Formula One 1 is a 1 hour 40 minutes marathon, then Le Mans is a relay run, with the baton being passed between three drivers over the course of 24 hours.

Unlike other races, endurance racing places greater emphasis on team work. For example, since the driver’s seat is shared between 3 drivers and since this is a race car, there is no easy adjustment of the seating position. Every driver has to make some compromise, including not getting your ideal seating position.

Drivers also have to exercise great self-control. For a race car driver, pushing hard is easy but Le Mans requires patience as much as speed. Knowing when to save tyres, fuel and brakes is just as important as knowing when to push.

Unlike open cockpit F1 cars, the top-class (then-called Group C sports cars) Le Mans race cars are of the closed cockpit variety, so it gets really hot inside the cabin and since drivers spend far more hours inside the car than in any other race, it’s very strenuous mentally and physically.

Herbert had injured his leg in a bad F3000 crash a few years earlier but in the gruelling Le Mans, the after-effects of the injury were reappearing. He was in pain but had to keep pushing.

Herbert was supposed to pit for a driver change earlier but since his pace was good and thanks to the lightweight and smooth rotary engine, the Mazda’s brakes and tyres were wearing out slower than rivals’ Mercedes-Benz C11, Jaguar XJR-12, and Porsche 962C.

Herbert had already passed Michael Schumacher’s No. 31 Mercedes, which had to make additional stops due to mechanical troubles. The Mazda, despite its rotary engine’s reputation for poor reliability, was running like clockwork.

Racing legend Jack Ickx, who was brought in by Mazda to serve as Sporting Director, made the call for Herbert to stay out and to do a double stint and finish the race.

Herbert would later recall the final moments of the history-making race win in an interview with Spirit of Le Mans magazine, excerpts of it retold by UK’s Motorsports Magazine.

“Le Mans is so draining mentally, it was a really hot day, and I’d drunk all the water in the car, so for the last hour my stomach had that horrible empty feeling – and I had [Jaguar’s] John Nielsen right behind me putting the pressure on.”

“My concentration, and the gear changes, they were OK, and it wasn’t until the finish that it hit me. The closer I got to the line, I really didn’t feel well. In parc fermé I got out, stood up, felt like I’d left my body in the car, my head was so light. I wandered around the car, saw my father, sat down and collapsed into his lap. So I missed the podium, but it didn’t matter. We’d won Le Mans.”

It would be another 20 years later, when in 2011, Herbert was reunited with his No.55 Mazda 787B – restored by technicians from the 1991 season for the anniversary event - at Circuit de la Sarthe, that he walked up the podium to finally take his symbolic podium finish.

Mazda’s win was a big surprise even to Mazda themselves, because the 787B’s 4-rotor engine lacked power and nobody had expected it to win.

The R26B engine could do 900 hp but Mazda had detuned it to 700 hp (608 Nm) for reliability, because to finish first in a race, you have to first finish.

Rather than outright power, the 787B was designed for top speed and had very low downforce - good for long straights, bad for corners.

Mazda was banking on using La Sarthe’s 6 km long Mulsanne Straight to outrun its rivals. But in 1990, the French race organizers announced that for safety reasons, they will introduce two chicanes to break up the high speed stretch.

This sudden change was a disaster for Mazda as there wasn’t enough time to redesign the car. Jaguar, Mercedes-Benz, and Porsche had more power and could accelerate out of the double chicanes faster.

The race strategy was then switched to one of minimizing pit stops, which means conserving fuel, tyres and brakes.

Somehow, all the odds were working in Mazda’s favour, as rivals either crashed out or had mechanical problems.

But that’s how Le Mans is. You can plan and do your best, but the mythical spirit of Le Mans will determine who will win.

It’s a story that will perhaps not be repeated for another…maybe 50 years. A tiny little car company from Hiroshima, which had been bombed to ruins just 46 years earlier, won against the mighty Porsche and Mercedes-Benz.

Yes, Toyota too has since won Le Mans (2020), but with Audi and Porsche no longer participating, it's a win without worthy rivals and as such, Toyota can’t tell its story the way Mazda could.

Also, did you know the Mazdaspeed, the factory-backed Mazda racing team that won Le Mans, didn’t even originate from Mazda?

Unlike Nissan, Toyota or Mitsubishi, Mazda is a lot smaller and the company didn’t have the resources to go into motor racing in a big way.

Instead, Mazdaspeed's history started with a small dealer in Tokyo, Mazda Auto Tokyo. The owners of the dealership were huge fans of motorsports (and rotary-powered Mazdas) and in 1974, funded their own privateer-entry into 24 Hours of Daytona with an RX-3, and later an RX-7 at Le Mans.

It wasn’t only until 1983 that Mazda Auto Tokyo’s racing team was absorbed by Mazda.

Also, did you know that Mazda was very well liked by many of its competitors in the 1991 Le Mans season?

Mazdaspeed’s team principal Yojiro Terada, who is known as “Mr. Le Mans” in Japan, sometimes joked that he will use Japanese hospitality to “win over the enemy.”

To win Le Mans, the well-being of one’s mental health is just as important for physical stamina, not just for the drivers but also for the rest of the team.

The Mazdaspeed team had about 120 members from all over the world – Japan, UK, France, Germany, Ireland, Belgium, Sweden, and Brazil.

How to feed these 120 mouths is also part of Terada’s responsibility and for this, he called upon a Japanese culinary student working in Paris at that time, Masayo Waki.

Waki made an effort to ensure that suitable food was available to all members, regardless of their dietary habits, religious background, and culture. As a gesture of Mazda’s inclusivity, the food menu was written in three languages.

Soon, some members from rival teams were approaching Mazda, asking if they could join the Mazda team for meals. A rare moment in motorsports history? Probably.

This little anecdote is often left out by many, us included, as the focus only on the cars but we often forget that Mazda is actually one of the more human-centric car maker out there.

Most companies set their corporate targets based on financial metrics and CO2 reduction targets (a big challenge today), but Mazda’s corporate vision is one that is framed around making people happy.

For Mazda, there can be no sustainability if happiness is ignored. Which is why Mazda isn’t focused on top-speed, or attaining the highest power output, but they seek to deliver a deeper, more meaningful connection with the driver’s soul, hence then Jinba-Ittai philosophy.

The era of rotary engines may have passed (today’s emissions regulations makes it nearly impossible for rotary engines to be used on road cars), but the spirit of Dr. Felix Wankel’s invention will still live on future Mazda road cars, as a compact, lightweight range extender engine to charge high voltage batteries of electric vehicles.

Also read: Mazda cancels rotary engine development for MX-30

More importantly, the ‘can do’ spirit, the same spirit that drove the original team to do what others said was impossible, is more alive in Mazda than any other company, regardless of its country of origin.

After winning the 1991 Le Mans 24 Hours, Mazda's then chairman, the late Kenichi Yamamoto - the father of Mazda’s rotary engine, the engineer who fixed what the Germans at NSU, the original inventors of the rotary engine, said couldn’t be fixed - erected a monument at the test course of Mazda’s Miyoshi Proving Ground in Hiroshima.

The monument has a picture of the 787B, and it reads "Aki naki chosen" (“never stop challenging”), dated June 23, 1991, the day the Mazda 787B won the 1991 Le Mans 24 Hours.

Fast forward to today, which other car company is making regular mass-market cars with better craftsmanship and attention to detail than Audi, and speaks to a driver’s inner soul better than BMW? That’s right, it’s Mazda.

How are they going to make money out of such high-cost cars? Mazda probably don’t have an answer, just like they did back in 1991. Mazda is a strange company, run by strange engineers and artisans who love cars but make terrible accountants.

But their deep love for cars means that they can’t help it but to build the best car with the best materials they can afford, and to wrap it with the best looking body.

Will the ruthless marketplace grant this plucky little company with a shockingly high level of carelessness in cost control, all due to their deep love for cars, the same luck as Lady Le Mans did back in 1991?

Senior Managing Executive Officer Masahiro Moro once said in 2012 that Mazda could solve all its problems today if it does what others are already doing - it's a proven formula. But the people at Mazda just can't wake up every morning to merely exist like everyone else, doing the same soul-robbing thing. They love cars and see cars as art. 

"You know, we could just do what everyone else does, business as usual, but that's not how we think at Mazda. We're a different breed. We choose the less trodden path," he said.

There’s not a lot of unconventional thinking manufacturers out there anymore.

NSU is long gone. Citroen used to fit the description but today’s Citroen are not that different from a Peugeot. Bugatti no longer makes cars the way Ettore Bugatti built the Type 57 SC Atlantic. The German trio of Audi, Mercedes-Benz and BMW are now just more of the same, and with EVs becoming mainstream, their identity will become even more similar.

Mazda is the last stand for those who refuse to be assimilated into the sea of people buying practical, high resale value, low maintenance, spacious cabin, sensible consumer goods with wheels that they dare call a car.