Johnny Herbert: “We never stopped going at full throttle, from the first to the last lap”

Hello Johnny, so it is in a Mazda MX-5 that we are going back in time. In which direction?

Le Mans, of course, and more particularly Le Mans 1991. A wonderful journey started at Paul-Ricard with a 24-hour simulation which was not completed due to small electrical problems. Nothing that affected the car's vitals, however, and we arrived at Le Mans with the confidence that reliability would not be a problem. With Bertrand (Gachot. Editor's note) and Volker (Weidler. Editor's note), we came out of our Grand Prix world to drive as quickly as the team wanted. Volker did a good job in qualifying, something like 12th, which was ok. I remember that Ohashi-San (Takayoshi Ohashi, head of Mazdaspeed who oversaw the Le Mans project with Takaharu Kobayakawa then head of Mazda's motorsport activities. Editor's note) had made some small modifications which, in terms of performance, had put us in the Jaguar era, but we were far from the Mercedes. The idea (objective) was to go as fast as possible and see how far it could take us…

Was this your first experience in Sarthe?

No, the second. I had already competed in the 1990 edition with the same Mazda team and the same Gachot and Weidler. We didn't make it to the end due to electrical problems. The experiment ended around midnight.

Was it because you were driving in Japan at the time that you found yourself included in the Mazda Le Mans program?

I started running in Japan in 1990. What happened was that Takayoshi Ohashi was working with Pierre Dieudonné and David Kennedy who had a career in F1. David had worked hard to bring Mazda into competition first, then to Le Mans second. David and Pierre were very important in the early days of Mazdas