Matra MS660
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The Matra MS660 was a sports car prototype that Matra used from 1969 to 1972 in the World Sports Car Championship .
Racing history
The MS660 was the successor to the MS650 . In contrast to the MS650, which still had a tubular space frame, the MS660 had a monocoque chassis. The 12-cylinder engine was derived, as in the MS650, from the Formula 1 - Matra MS11 . The MS660 made its racing debut in 1970 at Le Mans . In addition to two MS650s, only one MS660 was used, which was driven by the two long-time works drivers Jean-Pierre Beltoise and Henri Pescarolo . The race turned out to be a complete disaster for Matra, as all three works cars failed with engine damage in the seventh hour of the race. After the race it turned out that the defects were caused by damaged piston rings.
At the end of 1970 there was the first and only race victory for the MS660 in a sports car race. The three-time Formula 1 world champion Jack Brabham , who also competed in Le Mans for Matra in 1970 , and François Cevert won the 1000 km race in Paris in Montlhéry .
In 1971 the racing car type came to grief when Jean-Pierre Beltoise had a momentous retirement at the 1000 km race in Buenos Aires . On lap 35, Beltoise, who was fifth, ran out of gas just before the pits. Since it was only a few hundred meters to the pit area, Beltoise decided to push the MS660 there to refuel and to hand the vehicle over to his team colleague Jean-Pierre Jabouille . The Italian Ferrari driver Ignazio Giunti was in second place at this point and had already passed the dropout twice, warned by flag posts. Beltoise had to push the car across the track to reach the pits. Giunti had obviously not expected that, who wanted to overtake a Porsche 917 driving in front of him exactly at the said point and crashed head-on into Matra, which was suddenly on the road. The Ferrari 512S went up in flames and Giunti died at the scene of the accident.
At Le Mans in 1971, Matra only reported one MS660, as overall victory did not seem possible in advance against the strong competition from Porsche and Ferrari with their 5-liter racing cars. Again there was a failure. Beltoise and his racing partner Chris Amon had to park their MS660 after driving 149 laps just before 2 a.m. with a defect in the fuel injection.
At the end of the year, the defect-prone vehicles were successively replaced (at Le Mans in 1972 an MS660 with David Hobbs and Jean-Pierre Jabouille was at the start; failure due to clutch damage) by the new model MS670 , with the Matra 1972 the first triumph in Le Mans celebrated.
literature
- José Rosinski: Matra, La Saga . ETAI, Boulogne 1997, ISBN 2-7268-8301-X .
