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Scuderia Cameron Glickenhaus, the little car company owned by Jim Glickenhaus, the 71-year-old cowboy-hat-wearing New Yorker, had finished third and fourth to the bottomless-pocketed Toyotas in the 90th running of the 24 Hours of Le Mans a few hours earlier.
“It was a very emotional experience,” he told Autoweek on Sunday from France, not sounding all that emotional at all. But the gravity of the accomplishment was scarcely lost on him. Glickenhaus thinks that he is the first American manufacturer to be on the podium in the top class at Le Mans since 1967.
Yes, the Ford GT did that in 1969, but Glickenhaus—a car collector of some reputation—says the 1969 cars weren’t made by Ford, while the 1967 cars were. “Whatever you write, you’ll get a letter about it.
“We feel great about it. It was a grueling weekend—we had some good luck and some bad luck, but we fought through it. We repaired the one car, we didn’t lose bit about 12 minutes. But that put the car back to about 19th, but we pushed and got it back up to fourth.
“I think we showed people that a small manufacturer has a chance,” he said. “It’s emotional. Scrutineering in the town, and the drivers’ parade, and the track walk, it was all fantastic.” Glickenhaus’ campaign was not lost on fans, and many came up to him—recognizing him from the hat—and told him they supported his efforts.
When we wrote about Glickenhaus last week, he spoke of championing alternative fuels, especially hydrogen, for public consumption. “Now we have to get involved in the things we talked about in the story. We need to expand our production capacity, we need to figure out the hydrogen program that I told you about.
“One thing that sort of popped up this weekend was that the European Parliament outlawed ICE engines by 2035. We’re very strongly going to go into zero emission ICE using hydrogen to say, ‘Hey, there aren’t enough plugs in the world to plug in every car, let’s follow the science and try to get to zero emissions – don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.”
Glickenhaus is going to take a while to think about future racing options. “Racing in Baja and the 24 Hours of the Nurburgring basically sells our sportscars, and our Baja race truck.” There could be some World Endurance Championship races; “WEC is an entirely different level. With some support we could certainly benefit from the massive amount of exposure it can bring… and we can continue racing at Le Mans and in WEC indefinitely. But we honestly won’t know for another couple weeks until we see how it all shakes out.”
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