Ludwig-Stuck Porsche Routs Field at Sebring

Klaus Ludwig and Hans Stuck set a brutal pace during Saturday’s 12 Hours of Sebring at Sebring, Fla., that exhausted the field and led them to a nine-lap victory Saturday.

The West Germans averaged 108.782 m.p.h. around the bumpy 4.11-mile Sebring International Raceway to shatter the record of 101.859 m.p.h. set last year by Bobby Rahal and Jochen Mass in the same Porsche 962.

The winners were more than 36 miles--the largest winning margin in 20 years--in front of the second-place Porsche of West Germans John Winster and Frank Jelinski and Italian Paolo Barilla.

What had been a bumper-to-bumper challenge from a Porsche driven by Price Cobb and James Weaver became a walkaway in the ninth hour when a broken clutch forced the Cobb-Weaver machine into a lengthy pit stop.

Cobb and Weaver held on for a third-place finish, 11 laps off the pace, while another Porsche 962 of A.J. Foyt, Rob Dyson and Hurley Haywood finished fourth, 14 laps behind. John Hotchkis, John Hotchkis Jr. and Jim Adams were fifth, 15 laps down, to give Porsche a sweep of the top five.