The race waiting to be made into a movie, 20 years on

A Trinidadian diamond trader in Antwerp. The journey from a team run out of a horsebox to Le Mans winner. Racing driver cramp. An errant camera man. The joke to cause all heart attacks. Strap yourself in for a Hollywood-movie level story.

It’s the 20th anniversary of the Champion Racing team’s breakthrough first 12 Hours of Sebring win in 2005. It was a record sixth win in a row at the event for Audi’s R8, a car that defined an era of sportscar racing.

To celebrate in the lead up to this year’s event, RACER called Champion’s most famous driver, Tom Kristensen, and the team’s technical director at the time, Brad Kettler, to retell the story.

Starting with Sebring would be chronologically sensible, but to really understand this ‘band of brothers’ united in taking on massive corporations and some of the biggest teams in motorsport, and to appreciate the feats it achieved, you have to understand where it came from.

Dave Maraj was the aforementioned diamond trader, and he started Champion Racing alongside his car dealership group of the same name. While being focused on selling cars and his successful business from 1989, his goal since coming over to America – initially operating out of that horsebox while racing in the early 90s – was to win Le Mans one day.

“He never wavered in that goal,” acknowledges Kettler, who worked at Champion for a decade from 1999 and later became one of the most recognizable engineers in sportscar racing in North America, working with Audi until 2018. He’s done just about every job there is in motorsport, and has his own skunkworks shop in Indiana.

Initially the team wanted to work with Porsche, but the marque’s aborted sportscar project led Champion to the mistake of trying to build its own car before teaming up with Audi for 2001.

Maraj operated the program out of a shop near his dealership in Pompano Beach, FL, and every year it would get a bit bigger, a bit better, and harbor more resources until it was a team that should genuinely be considered a threat in international competition, and that was mostly down to Maraj.

“His expectations were very high, and he went about the building of the team in a very, very methodical manner,” says Kettler.

“He understood way more than many others do, that the operation of a team like this is about the people, and the people are what make it happen.

“He was a friend and I loved working for him, we had a great relationship as an owner, and as his engineer, technical director guy.

“I had a face-to-face meeting with him every day, three or four o’clock in the afternoon, in his office. We did swap emails, but he didn’t have a cell phone. A very, very conventional man, and he liked to do business face to face. Word is bond.”

Maraj was almost always to be found at the back of the garage as the “guy under the baseball hat”, rarely giving interviews. It’s easy to see how his team became a success.

In some ways the logical place to start the story of the 2005 12 Hours of Sebring event is a few months earlier, at a cold January tire test for Michelin where Champion’s pair of R8s comfortably racked up 12-hour race distances. It was there Kristensen and JJ Lehto – the duo who would share the No.1 car with Marco Werner – drove each car respectively, and the fierce but friendly rivalry to establish a pecking order set the tone for that year’s race.

Kristensen was ‘only’ a two-time Sebring winner when he suited up for Champion Racing in 2005 (above), and had six Le Mans wins to his credit. More were to come on both counts… Rick Dole/Getty Images

“For all these years I competed against Champion,” says Kristensen, who joined from Team Goh the year before.

“So when I got there, in a way, you can say their preferred driver for the testing, of course, was JJ. So when I turned up, and was part of that as well, there was this bonding, camaraderie. Yes, also healthy competition.”

Kettler recalls the drivers so motivated by each other’s rapid pace that they would almost stumble out of the race car and lie on the pitwall gasping for air after their stints. They even switched cars later on and immediately were on each other’s pace.

“I still get goosebumps,” says Kettler. “I’ve never experienced a greater display of driving talent.”

And that was just the test!

It was the first year Champion would run two cars at this level for the whole season, and that helped create some healthy rivalry in the team. But even more so, the competition in the American Le Mans Series that year – MG-Lola and Aston Martin – was not on par, albeit close enough to be threatening at times. You could argue Champion needed its two cars to push each other to the heights that external competition would normally do.

For the race, the No.1 car qualified on pole with the sister No.2 of Frank Biela, Allan McNish and Emanuele Pirro in second.

The drama started when the No.1 car wouldn’t start just before the pits opened to go to the grid. Luckily, the team had developed a special home-built apparatus for changing the starter motor and managed it in mere minutes to get the car out on time. It was a sign of the drama about to unfold, but also of the level the team was operating at.

Prior to the 2005 race, Kristensen only had two of what would become six 12 Hours of Sebring wins, so he wasn’t the most successful driver in the event’s history yet. But it wasn’t that which drove him to deliver for Champion, it was a much more unusual – and what he deems embarrassing – form of motivation to get the victory.

“I felt I had to do something well for the team because early in the race, I got cramp,” says Kristensen, acknowledging his and McNish’s late arrival at the event due to Audi deeming the primary program for the pair to be DTM. They had tested, flown and drove to Sebring in order to jump straight in the car for the night practice,

“It was a hot day, so when I did my first stints, I got cramp and I had to abort and finish my stint a bit earlier.

“So believe it or not, we were out of sync . It might have been clarified later with full course yellow or whatever, but at that point, I was really feeling a little bit embarrassed, so I was eating a lot of bananas, getting electrolytes, and just very scared to be back in the car again, because with cramp, you can’t drive.”

It quickly became a fierce rivalry between the two Audis, and ultimately the race would be decided by strategy. The No.2 team would do a triple-stint with McNish to finish the race, while Kettler was worried about the tires over that distance and wanted to do a double-stint with Kristensen to the end.

But Kristensen, Kettler and the No.1 team knew taking a longer stop after McNish was in the car – with hot tires – would make it nearly impossible to overtake him on track. Kristensen flagged this to the team and a masterstroke unfolded.

“TK himself, I’ll give him credit for this, he came to me and Mike Peters – Mike did a lot of the strategy stuff – he huddled with us, and he said, ‘guys, if you put me out even on new tires behind Alan, there’s no way I’m gonna get by him. There’s just no way. And we all know this, the terrier is not gonna let anybody by,'” says Kettler.

Aside from the number on the sidepod, pretty much everything about Champion Racing’s Sebring-winning R8 was the same when it showed up at Le Mans that summer – including the final result. Getty Images

“So we talked about it a little bit, and I think it was actually Mike who came up with the idea; said, ‘what if we short-filled on the change and got you out in front of him, and we would have a fuel deficit, but we could be in the front, and if you could build a lead, you might be able to build enough of a lead put the extra fuel in?'”

With no tire warmers, it meant at the penultimate stop – if it went to plan – Kristensen would get out ahead of McNish but on cold tires compared to McNish just stopping for fuel on hot tires. Kristensen would then have to build enough of a gap to do a longer final stop to get enough fuel in to get to the end.

“It was the race of a lifetime,” says Kettler.

McNish was also held up by an accidentally-interfering camera crew, and even if that wasn’t a deciding factor, it was perhaps a sign that the day would belong to the sister No.1 car.

Despite the intensity of the fierce but ultimately good-natured fight, there was even time for some Kristensen humor.

On the last lap, he joked “do you want a photo finish?”, which nearly gave Kettler a heart attack as it was already going to be one of the closest finishes in Sebring history – eventually just 6.365s after 361 laps and over 12 hours.

“Keep the hammer down!” was Kettler’s animated reply, which is no doubt remembered fondly by many familiar with this race as the radio clip was broadcast and played on the public address system near live and on TV too.

“Immediately he was in shock,” remembers Kristensen. “NO, KEEP THE HAMMER DOWN! KEEP THE HAMMER DOWN! KEEP THE HAMMER DOWN. Screaming at me!

“That was a joke that worked well on Brad…”

It’s no doubt Kristensen was the star of the show, even if looking back he’s still the kind of person to credit everyone around him for all of his success.

“It really comes down to the fact that TK was astute enough to understand the situation that we were going to be in with three stints left to go,” adds Kettler. “I give him full credit.”

After the race, the car went to Maraj’s dealership. He’d made it clear what he expected of the team and Kettler in the build-up, and he got exactly what he wanted and more.

‘No pressure, but we need a winning car’, Kettler says Maraj told him before the race, because he was opening his new multi-million dealership. He got what he asked, for plus the second place car on his red carpet behind a velvet rope. The sticky rubber, oil, fuel and detritus of the gladiatorial battle was swapped for confetti and champagne one week later.

Maraj set the highest possible expectations for his team, but preferred to keep himself out of the spotlight. Thomas Murray/Audi Sport

Eventually the car made its way to its current home, the Audi museum in Ingolstadt, via a sojourn at Le Mans…

While this is a story about Sebring, we’d be remiss not to touch on Le Mans, where Champion took an ex-Tom Walkinshaw Racing Formula 1 trailer set-up – some step up from the horsebox – to fight the Pescarolos, Domes and Courages.

Only, the R8 was pegged back with downforce penalties, a smaller restrictor and 50kgs extra weight, so it was a “week of being demoralized” in the build up according to Kettler.

However, in the race, the Pescarolos hit trouble, with one struck by a shifting issue and another in a crash with a car in a lower class. The Champion car – No.3 for Le Mans instead of the No.1 used at Sebring, although it had the same driver line-up – led or was right up there for so much of the race.

“It was an extremely stressful race, because we felt like we were going to lose it for over 20 hours,” says Kettler. “ When you see somebody coming after you at three and a half, four seconds per lap, you feel like this isn’t gonna hold.”

Some in the team didn’t think they could pull it off.

“You shouldn’t interview JJ, because he thought that year we couldn’t win!” laughs Kristensen.

“We got penalized a lot. I remember we had discussions, and ‘JJ, we have to get on with it’.

“We had a narrow rear wing. Then we had 50 kilos more, and then we had a smaller restrictor. Basically, the performance was taken away.

“But we knew the car well, and we were just always just simply going flat out with the car. I think we were more than three seconds slower than the Pescarolo car. They might be a little bit more hungry in terms of fuel, but I think we should also praise that we were sticking to our very, very aggressive strategy, very aggressive driving. And we did only marginal mistakes.

“I would say we always took a mistake each lap in some way, because we were pushing so hard, we were not doing any major thing. And then I think that the competition, they did some mistakes, for sure, but they also had some issues. But of course, that’s the name of the game.”

It wouldn’t be Kristensen’s last Le Mans win, but it was the one which made him the most successful to that point, overtaking Jackie Ickx. Ickx left Kristensen a voicemail while he was still on track completing the final stint, congratulating him on the victory. From that point on Kristensen would stand alone and just move further ahead on his pedestal at the top of Le Mans’ pantheon of greats.

For Champion, it became the first U.S. team to win Le Mans since the Ford GT of A.J. Foyt and Dan Gurney in 1967, a feat which hasn’t been matched since. And for Maraj, it was the realization of a dream.

The team competed at the top level for another three years, but 2005 was the year the major goals were ticked off.

Kristensen, who went back to Audi’s factory teams for 2006, saw Maraj sometime in 2016 in Florida, and Maraj offered his son some work experience around that time.

Just two years later, Maraj tragically lost his life while sailing in Florida in what is undoubtedly the saddest element of this story of what should be just about incredible human achievement.

“He was a hell of a man, and I miss him, I really do,” says Kettler.

“God bless them, there’s a few people in the team who have left us,” adds Kristensen.

It’s a better tribute to Maraj’s legacy to focus on and celebrate the success and the achievements of everyone at Champion Racing, who through the hard work and backing of the great entrepreneur, rose to dominate some of the biggest endurance races, against teams far bigger and more well known.

Twenty years on, we remember this achievement and the incredible people who made it happen.