24 Hours of LeMans : Lammers’ Jaguar Leads Field at Halfway Mark

LE MANS, France — The Jaguar driven by Jan Lammers of the Netherlands, Patrick Tambay of France and Andrew Gilbert-Scott of Britain held onto first place Sunday, midway through the Le Mans 24 Hours endurance race.

Jaguars and Mercedes split the first four places 12 hours and 1,600 miles into the race.

Tambay, a former Formula One driver, started the second half of the race with a lead of about 12 miles over the Mercedes team of Italians Mauro Baldi and Gianfranco Brancatelli and Briton Ken Acheson. Tambay’s team had done 195 laps.

Another Mercedes, driven by West Germans Jochen Mass and Martin Reuter and Sweden’s Stanley Dickens, was third. Both Mercedes were more than a lap behind the lead on the 8.41-mile circuit in the French countryside.

Johnny Nielsen of Denmark, Andy Wallace of Britain and Price Cobb of the United States were fourth, another lap back, in a Jaguar.

Hans Stuck of West Germany and Frenchman Bob Wollek were fifth in a pink Porsche. They led the race for six hours until the early morning, when a broken hose joint caused a 14-minute pit stop and erased their 19-mile advantage, allowing Lammers to take the lead.

Stuck and Wollek returned and started running fast laps in the darkness, promising to be a threat when daylight came. Earlier in the race they had a fast lap of 3 minutes 22.45 seconds, more than 150 m.p.h.

About five hours into the race, the caution flag came out after American Dominic Dobson’s Porsche burst into flames and struck a wall. Dobson escaped uninjured, but the car burned for about 20 seconds and was destroyed.