South Korea’s forgotten project Genesis will hope to surpass

Genesis, you might think, will become the first South Korean manufacturer to compete at the Le Mans 24 Hours when its forthcoming LMDh takes to the grid in 2026. But you’d be wrong. Thirty years before the Hyundai brand’s intended arrival there was another campaign at Circuit de la Sarthe by a car maker from the Asian country.

SsangYong made an assault on the French enduro back in 1996. It was an intriguing one, not least because it was put together by an ex-Formula 1 driver with a Le Mans victory on his CV.

Bertrand Gachot, the winner at Le Mans in 1991 with Mazda who enjoyed (or perhaps endured) a nomadic F1 career with Onyx, Rial, Coloni, Jordan, Larrousse and Pacific, was in the process of hanging up his helmet and looking for new career opportunities when he was recruited by a manufacturer that was just breaking into Europe. It had started selling cars in the UK in 1994.

“I wanted to get out of driving and into business,” says the Franco-Belgian, who had raced at Le Mans in 1994 and ’95 with Honda during his final seasons in F1 with Pacific. “I felt that I’d done my bit, had my time.”

To that effect, he travelled to South Korea with Ko Gotoh, who had been a shareholder in Pacific and, says Gachot, “had business interests all over the world”. A meeting with SsangYong resulted in a request to take a brand that came into being in 1988 to Le Mans.

“They were an upcoming brand and wanted to change their image, which had been more focussed on things like trucks,” recalls Gachot, whose time in F1 will always be remembered for the race he didn’t do rather than any of the 47 he did – Michael Schumacher made his grand prix debut with Jordan at Spa in 1991 when the home driver was incarcerated for assaulting a London car driver. “They asked if we could take them to Le Mans and gave us a very small budget. It was a crazy project.”

Gachot says the deal offered didn’t stretch to seven figures and came with only one stipulation: whatever car was taken to Le Mans bearing SsangYong’s name had to be powered by a Mercedes engine. That was because it had a technology tie-up with the German manufacturer and used its powerplants across its range.

Gachot’s response to SsangYong’s request was to select the quirky central seat LMP2 chassis built by Welter Racing, one of which had claimed outright pole for Le Mans in ’95. Into it he put a Mercedes two-litre four-cylinder engine in turbocharged form in place of the original Peugeot unit.

Gachot struck a deal with Nicholson-McLaren Engines in the UK to turn the four-pot Mercedes road engine into a racing powerplant. “I asked them what they needed, and they said, ‘Five blocks but you have to get them from a scrapyard’,” he recalls.

He now had an engine to go with a WR chassis of 1994 vintage – and only minor revisions to the engine mounts and the bellhousing were required – but what he didn’t have was a team

The reason for the strange request? Cast iron engine blocks get stronger over time as they go through heat cycles. Which is why the major castings of the BMW turbos that took Nelson Piquet to the F1 world championship in 1983 with Brabham were far from brand new. Stories of personnel from BMW engine guru Paul Rosche’s department urinating on the blocks to somehow accelerate the ageing process may or may not be true.

“Nicholson-McLaren built us a very good engine, very powerful,” explains Gachot. He now had an engine to go with a WR chassis of 1994 vintage – and only minor revisions to the engine mounts and the bellhousing were required – but what he didn’t have was a team.

“We didn’t own one screwdriver,” recounts Gachot, who linked up with sometime Le Mans entrant Jean Messaoudi to create a structure to run the car. “We put together a kind of virtual team: we rented everything and brought in some mechanics I knew from F1.”

Gachot obtained an entry for the race under his own name, prefixed by the acronym PGM: it stood for Pretty Good Management and was the company under which he operated as a racing driver. His slot from race organiser the Automobile Club de l’Ouest, however, only got him into what we now call the Test Day. Back then it was a competitive session, at least for some of the competitors: Gachot would have to prequalify at the end of April if SsangYong’s entry was to proceed to race week in June.

Nicholson-McLaren Engines turned the road-going Mercedes engine into a racing unit for Gachot’s SsangYong WR

Photo by: John Brooks

It didn’t work out as planned. Gachot, the only driver to take to the wheel of the WR-SsangYong in prequalifying, didn’t make the cut. A problem in the afternoon, which this writer remembers not being disclosed at the time, stranded the car out on track, only for it to be hit by another entrant – one of the works WRs! It wouldn’t make it back out on track.

That isn’t the end of the SsangYong story at Le Mans. Gachot and the car were back at the venue in September for an event known as the Autumn Cup on the permanent Bugatti circuit.

What Gachot’s WR might or might not have shown at this event isn’t entirely clear, partly because he concedes that his memory of the project is a bit shaky 30 years on and because contemporary reports, including Autosport’s, were short and sweet. A motley field didn’t demand significant coverage: the entry was limited, though the four-hour affair was attended by Courage Competition with a pair of Porsche-powered LMP prototypes and the works WR squad.

Speaking to Autosport, Gachot was initially convinced that the appearance of his WR on the short circuit at Le Mans came prior to the prequalifying day, not afterwards. He remembers a throttle problem, which he is sure came at the Bugatti event – and insists that the WR-SsangYong LM94 led one of the pair of two-hour heats.

His recall isn’t backed up by Autosport and the history books. But the SsangYong-powered P2 Gachot shared with Emmanuel Clerico did set second fastest qualifying time behind the Welter Racing entry, just over nine tenths in arrears.

They finished eighth in the first heat but didn’t see the chequered flag in the second. That may or may not have been a result of the throttle problem of which Gachot talks.

That was the end of SsangYong’s tentative Le Mans programme. It didn’t renew the deal with Gachot – the following year the company was taken over by Daewoo at the start of a peripatetic existence. The brand would fall under the control of Mahindra and Shanghai Automotive over the years and is today known as KGM, which stands for KG Mobility.

The Belgian continued to do a bit of racing – in 1997 he contested a handful of All-Japan GT Championship rounds and was back at Le Mans in a customer Porsche 911 GT1 – but in the same year, he started importing the Hype energy drink into France. By 2000 he became CEO of the company.

Gachot returned to Le Mans one last time with Kremer-run Porsche 911 GT1 in 1997 after the SsangYong project concluded

Photo by: LAT Photographic

But he has good memories, however blurred, of his time as an entrant with a South Korean car maker most people had never heard of.

“You know the story: the older you get, the faster you were,” he says. “I hope I’m not joining that club, but we were quick on that little Bugatti circuit against the big cars.

“I’m sure we led at some point before the problem, but I definitely remember leaving the circuit happy that we’d proved something. We were disappointed, but we knew we had done well. Our little package was super-fast.”

Despite its lack of success, Gachot has fond if hazy memories of the SsangYong WR project

Photo by: John Brooks