In 1953, it was a foregone conclusion that Ferrari would win the Le Mans 24hr race.
They had the Ferrari 375 with the massively powerful 4.5 litre V12 engine.
They also had Alberto Ascari, the world champion, driving for them.
Jaguar had the C-type, but it only had a 3.4 litre straight 6 engine. And, instead of a world champion driver, they had Duncan Hamilton and Tony Rolt driving.
The final blow was the day before the race, Jaguar were disqualified on a technicality. They were out of the race before it started.
Hamilton and Rolt went to a bar to get drunk. They were still in the bar at breakfast when the owner of Jaguar, Sir William Lyons, found them and said he’d agreed to pay a fine and they were racing in 6 hours.
Well even if the car was okay to race they weren’t. They hadn’t slept, they hadn’t sobered up, and they had 6 hours to face the best car and the best driver in the world.
They did the only thing they could, they drank strong coffee mixed with brandy, and at pit stops they drank more coffee and brandy.
And both stimulants seemed to have worked. Hamilton and Rolt broke the lap record (they also broke the windscreen and the driver broke his nose).
They raced for 24 hours against the best in the world and they won. They won Le Mans by 4 laps, half an hour ahead of the next car to finish.
They were the first drivers ever to average over 100 mph for the entire 24 hours of the race.
It’s tempting to ask: “If coffee and brandy work so well why doesn’t every driver take it before and during every race?”
Well, the truth is, it wasn’t the coffee and brandy that gave the drivers an advantage. It was something the Jaguar had none of the other cars had.
Disc brakes.
Disc brakes were brand new at that time, and the other racing cars didn’t think they needed them. Slowing down wasn’t what racing was about, going faster was what racing was about. That’s why Ferrari had a bigger, more powerful engine.
But however fast you are going on the straight you will need to slow down for the bends. This was the creative part of Jaguar’s thinking.
Ferrari, like all the other cars, had drum brakes.
Drum brakes have the brake pads on the inside pushing outward, with no way to disperse the heat.
If heat can’t disperse the brakes fade and stop working.
Disc brakes have the brake pads on the outside pushing inward, so they’re open to the air and cool down much faster.
Jaguar’s disc brakes meant they could consistently out-brake the Ferrari, turn after turn. Which is exactly what they did for 24 hours.
The Ferrari had to slow down for the corners because the brakes would fade.
The Jaguar went through the corners faster because their brakes didn’t fade.
Jaguar changed the game so that all the power Ferrari had under the bonnet didn’t matter. It was the dawn of a new type of creative thinking about winning races.
It’s worth remembering that.
The people who write the brief will usually tell you exactly what the convention in the market is, and they’ll expect you to do something similar.
They think it is their job to give you the rules for the market and make sure you follow the rules.
But if you follow the same rules as everyone else, you can’t do anything different.
And if you don’t do anything different you can’t change things.
What the brief won’t tell you is how to get an advantage by doing something new and different.
The brief won’t tell you how to do something everyone else isn’t doing.
The brief won’t tell you that, because you need to break the rules to do that.
And you need creative thinkers to break the rules.
Interesting. Wonder what jaguar had in mind with their recent rebrand work.