the race. Bob Akin's team had developed their own variation on the Porsche 935, which debuted at Le Mans. Unusually, it had a bonded and riveted alloy monocoque. The silhouette bodyshell took the shovel nose from a Lola T600. Unfortunately the build was finished late and it had to be shipped to France direct without any shake-down testing. A 3.2-litre engine would be used for qualifying, with an alternative 2.8-litre, trimmed down to 2670cc and 630 bhp. But it was also the heaviest car in the race, at a hefty 1150 kg Four Ferraris were lined up against the Porsches. Two were run by the North American Racing Team, with Alain Cudini and Preston Henn as lead drivers, along with Ron Spangler's Prancing Horse Farm team with Pierre Dieudonné, while the fourth was French Ferrari-agent Charles Pozzi, who had his regular team drivers Claude Ballot-Léna and Jean-Claude Andruet. Mazdaspeed was still preparing its Group C project, so in the interim worked with the Mooncraft company to develop the RX-7. The uprated RX-7 254i was more aerodynamic and its twin-rotaries could put out 320 bhp to reach 275 kp/h (170 mph) Cars were prepared for European racing by Tom Walkinshaw Racing. Walkinshaw led one car while works driver Yojiro Terada led the other. This year, Steve O'Rourke's EMKA team switched the BMW from Group 5 to the GTX class. O'Rourke was also manager of Pink Floyd and the band's drummer Nick Mason joined him as a co-driver. IMSA GTO, Group 4 and Group B The Brumos Racing team of Peter Gregg had been dominant in American sports-car racing through the 1970s. After the death of Gregg in 1980, his wife Deborah took over running the team. She arranged a deal with tyre-manufacturer BFGoodrich to enter a pair of the homologated Porsche 924s with the new 2008cc turbo engine. Although using Dunlops to qualify, the intention was to race the high-performance road tyre. One car had Americans Jim Busby and "Doc" Bundy, while the other had Manfred Schurti, Patrick Bedard and Paul Miller. A third Porsche, with the older 1984cc engine, was entered by Richard Lloyd and had achieved a very good 5th place overall at the Nürburgring round. For Le Mans his co-driver would be Andy Rouse. Despite a disappointing run the previous year, Billy Hagan's Stratagraph team returned with two big Chevrolet Camaros. Both cars were given smaller engines and