I will note that this car was cornering at 195 miles per hour, with so much downforce and grip that one test driver is said to have cracked two ribs going flat out over a bump.

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Peugeot was the dominant team of this era, and its V10 was famous for wailing like an F1 car.

These were also painfully beautiful cars. The Peugeot 905, often running a biplane rear wing, is particularly close to my heart.

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So too is the pink-and-purple Jaguar XJR-14, a project from Ross Brawn of Ferrari F1 fame.

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The XJR-14 was later sold to Mazda, which put a Judd V10 in it and somehow made it look even more gorgeous.

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No top-level prototype has been as clean or as sleek in the years since.

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Neither has any produced the raw aerodynamic figures of these cars either. These sports prototypes would produce some 10,000 pounds of downforce at anything over 200 miles per hour.

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These were limit-pushing vehicles, genuine greats.

Several other factory teams built highly advanced engines and chassis under these rules. Nissan built its own V12 for an all-carbon car that the collapse of the Japanese economy killed before it ever made it to Le Mans .

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TWR and Jaguar built their aforementioned XJR-14 around an detuned but existent Ford F1 V8 that was quickly orphaned, living on as first a Mazda, then as a double-Le-Mans-winning TWR-Porsche.

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For 1991, Mercedes designed its first from-the-ground-up racing engine since the 1950s, a 180-degree ‘flat’ 12, which it raced for only a year.

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The series never made it past 1992. I don’t mean that this particular formula alone ended after the 1992 season. The World Sportscar Championship itself, which had been running continuously since 1953, ended.

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The problem was that there just weren’t enough cars running in 1992 to justify a 1993 season. Porsche had been pushed out years before, Mercedes left for F1, as did Jaguar, as did Peugeot a year later. Bernie Ecclestone, the then-head of F1 and behind-the-scenes operator everywhere else, actually announced that the championship would die before the 1992 season even started, but was persuaded to reverse his decree not long later, as racing photographer John Brooks remembered.

It’s easy to understand why: using F1 engines and F1-style car designs had made Le Mans racing programs as expensive as running a full team in Formula 1, only F1 had more races and significantly more exposure than sports car racing. One F1 team owner of the time explained the consequences of Le Mans’ F1-style rule change in blunt terms:

The rule change was also inspired by the wish to make sports car racing more professional. It gave the impression that at ACO and the CSI they had enough of all those Porsches 962 with their turbocharged engine hanging overall around, for now already ten years. What a lack of respect for such a formidable car! The new rules were not welcomed by the large crowds protesting against them at several occasions, even with large banners. The better initiated motoring enthusiasts, however, didn’t complain about the new rules as they brought several fantastic cars to the tracks allowing spectacular races among top teams. Main question was how the extremely expensive new formula could survive? Despite continuous promises that the races should receive full TV coverage, nothing of that could be made true. If major teams had to make high costs to use F1 equipment, why they should stay with sports car racing rather than making directly the switch to F1 racing receiving worldwide coverage in the press?

In 1989 a complete season of F1 with my Onyx team cost me $16,000,000 for a dozen of races. When in 1991 I spoke in May, at the Silverstone 430-kms, with the guys of Peugeot, Mercedes and Jaguar I heard year budgets oscillating from $10,000,000 to $15,000,000, and this for only eight rounds (one third less than in F1). So, after only three rounds, my conclusion was that it were fantastic cars, better than what ever before was seen in Group C sports car racing, but that it was fully predictable that the new formula could hardly survive during two or three years.

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Again, it’s no surprise that everyone left Le Mans for F1. Better exposure for the same cost to the manufacturer is hard to ignore.

The end of the World Sportscar Championship’s 40th and final season was particularly grim, as John Brooks recalled in Speedhunters:

The final indignity was the last SWC round held at Magny Cours. There was a crowd, as Peugeot bussed in most of their workforce from all over France but they only got to see 8 cars. Mazda like everyone else had lost interest in this charade. Two weeks before the race there had been a few lines in a FISA Bulletin “Due to the extremely small number of manufacturers interested in entering, the 1993 Sportscar World Championship has been cancelled.” So it was official this was the end of the road. Forty years of competition was finished.

The destruction of the Endurance Championship was an act of sporting vandalism that was breathtaking in its cynicism, but if you consider the perpetrators and their records it is not a surprise. The aim, which was to get manufacturers into Formula One, worked to an extent, with Mercedes Benz, Toyota, Peugeot and Jaguar all taking that route though only the Germans have enjoyed any real or lasting success. 

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It was Bernie Ecclestone, Max Mosely and Jean-Marie Ballestre (all infamous figures in the racing world) who were behind the swift change towards F1 regulations, and they were the ones who profited the most from manufacturers moving to F1. They collected F1's TV money.

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But it would be, I think, too much to say that Ecclestone and his accomplices killed Group C. Ultimately, it was the FIA who governed the switch in rules, and it was the FIA who should have known better. After all, they were the ones watching in the ‘70s when they had seen it all happen before.