Venturi 600 LM - The Forgotten Supercar From Le Mans Country
France has been playing hosts to the oldest and the most iconic of races in the World, the LeMans. The legend of Le Mans is so huge that no mention of motorsport is complete without it. Being a one of a kind event, where manufacturers from around the world try and showcase their engineering supremacy as much as top drivers around the world showcase their endured racing skills. So it is something for people to sit up and take notice of, when a manufacturer from the backyard of the Le Mans playground decides to build Supercars. Venturi started as a company that would specialise in building luxury sports cars in a post war thriving economy of early 1980’s.
Venturi turned up the boost on the turbos to produce 600hp on the cars used for racing application and called this the Venturi 600LM. Venturi put five cars on the grid for the 1993 24 Hours of Le Mans, with a best resulting in an overall 27th position. The Venturi 600 LM was homologated into the GT1 class of Le Mans by selling one road going version of 600LM to a keen buyer. In the brief lifetime of the Venturi 600 LM, the race car was able to score a couple of victories before disappearing into oblivion forever. During the 1994 season, Jean-Claude Basso and Henri Pescarolo won the 1000km racing in Paris in a Venturi 600 LM chassis no. LM009 which was followed by two more racing successes at the 4-hours race at Spa-Francorchamps and the British GT Championship at the Silverstone Circuit.
Comments
Actually, the Venturi cars used in the 1993 24h du Mans were 500LMs, not 600LMs.