After 1986, Le Mans wasn't my favourite place, but it has always been special and so - largely because I had a lot of friends involved - I went along as usual. A pal and I walked down the grid and we eventually found Eliseo Salazar, who was sharing a Spice Fiero with Almo Coppelli and Thorkild Thyrring. "Just the man I was looking for!" he announced, and drew me to one side for a chat. It turns out that he'd recently opened a chain of Hugo Boss stores in Chile and Argentina, and (IIRC) as his deal with the Spice team happened at the last minute, it meant he hadn't had the time to organise any Boss logos for the race car.
That's where I came in - would I make some up for the nose of his car, please? Oh, and the four spare noses too...? Unfortunately for me, there was a precident as the same thing had happened at the Birmingham Superprix two years earlier. So he knew I could do it... My question "Ok mate; what references have you got that I can use?" was answered with the production of a business card and a somewhat sheepish smile.
The bloke I walked down the grid with captured the very moment. You can almost sense my disbelief at being asked (again) to accurately create something quite large from such a tiny reference...
So off I went, with frankly no idea of how I was going to fulfill this particular favour. However, after nipping into a couple of friendly pits and blagging some raw materials - like some black plastic, a steel ruler, a pencil and a scalpel - I set about it. A wallpapering-style table being used for food was taken hostage for a flat surface and after something in the order of two to three hours, I'd done the lettering. Here you can see the aforementioned, as my mate Martin Haven drops in to enquire what I was up to...
That done, the logos had to be applied to the noses. The old pits were still in use, which made life a lot more difficult, but eventually all the noses for car #103 were suitably adorned. And, if you look closely at your pics from Le Mans that year, you'll be able to 'time' ones taken of that Spice according to whether it has BOSS on the nose or not!
It didn't look too bad in the end, given the circumstances!
The former mechanics on this forum have, I imagine, some far better stories than this...
