then Salazar had a big moment on the Saturday morning when a rear tyre blew at full speed on the Mulsanne. A temporary repair got it onto the grid in time. A similar issue had struck the favoured Vegla 935 earlier with a more serious result. The tyre blew just after the Mulsanne kink as Harald Grohs was travelling at 300 kp/h. He skated off the road, hitting the barriers on both sides then going into a wild series of rolls. The wrecked car then caught fire, but amazingly, Grohs was shaken but uninjured, and aided in a quick escape as the door had been torn off in the mayhem. Another unlucky entrant was Richard Lloyd who's Porsche 924 failed to qualify for the second year in succession, this time foiled by broken pistons on two engines, the second supplied directly from the Porsche factory. This year the IMSA cars were off the pace of the new Group C. The fastest Porsche 935 was Edgar Dören's Group 5 Kremer car in 18th (3:44.1). John Fitzpatrick's Joest special was a disappointing 26th (3:48.5) while the quickest Ferrari was the NART car with 3:54.1 (36th), outpaced by Bill Hagan's thundering Camaro in 32nd (3:52.6). After the end of qualification, a number of the top teams swapped out their engines for lower-tuned and smaller-capacity engines in the aim of improving their fuel economy for the race. On raceday morning, the Porsche team found another problem with the Ickx and Bell engine, and they took the precaution of changing the engine again – Bell considered they now had the team's 7th-string engine. The Pescarolo/Jaussaud team left it very late: after the Saturday morning warm-up, a fuel system problem forced them to do a five-hour full engine change in a fraction of that time, finishing just ten minutes before the deadline. Race Start Race-day was sunny and warm, drawing a huge crowd of 250,000. This year, the honorary starter was Luigi Chinetti, three-time Le Mans winner and founder of the North American Racing Team. The fiftieth anniversary celebrations included a grand parade of classic Le Mans cars, including the Chenard-Walcker, inaugural winner in 1923, a Bentley Speed Six, Jaguars and Ferraris. There was drama before the cars started with the Andretti Mirage being disqualified on a technicality. A random check by an official had found the gearbox oil cooler mounted 10 cm behind the gearbox