Nine thousand kilometres away from Le Mans, in South Africa’s Northern Cape province, in the city of Kimberley, is the Star of the West bar. Opened originally in a zinc shack as Diamond Lil’s Tavern, it catered for fortune seekers in the diamond rush of the early 1870s.
Kimberley had mushroomed, with hundreds of thousands of fortune seekers quickly crowding into its sprawling shacks, tents, houses and compounds; diggers working 3,600 10m by 10m individual claims clustered in and around what became Kimberley’s Big Hole. A process of consolidation of the smaller concessions inevitably followed the increasing chaos of deeper mining, including cave-ins and flooding.
The rivalry ended when Rhodes bought out Barnato for £5.4-million in March 1888, an amount equivalent now to more than £2-billion. Out of this emerged De Beers Consolidated Mines – and in the process diamond mining and marketing was transformed from an idealistic rush centring on the wild activities of frontiersmen to a stable industry supported by bankers, financiers and romantic consumers.
In late April 2019, our small racing team, known optimistically as Team Africa Le Mans, was delighted to receive confirmation of a long-shot entry into the Road to Le Mans. We had tried before, but it was an almost impossible target given the challenges of finding, hiring, buying, or borrowing an eligible car and given that we were not entered into the full season of racing in Europe.
The local Le Mans organiser, the ACO, or Automobile Club de l’Ouest, was a bit special. The accreditation system for the team was complex and confusing, the volume of correspondence and requirements almost overwhelming.