Home » Blog » Allan's Blog » Petit Le mans Part 3 - The End!
10 November 2008 | Posted in Allan's Blog
So I got back into the car when it turned dark with a couple of hours to go and at this point it was just a run to the chequered flag. We had basically two full stints to run and that was it for the 1,000 miles duration of this race. Peugeot were still out front with our sister car second. Then there was an almighty crash at a restart and I was able to get through it, but just through luck, not judgement at all. There were cars going in all directions and we came through and after that restart it was the most bizarre thing. Over the pit-to-car radio they gave me the race order: first it’s Werner, second is the Peugeot, third is Porsche, fourth is Porsche, and you’re fifth Allan!
And I looked ahead in the train of cars following the pacecar and there I was, with all of those cars directly in a line in front of me – I could hardly believe my eyes. It sounds stupid but there was only one slow GT car in between us so we dispatched that GT car and the two Porsches within a lap and two laps later I was on the back of Marco who had been overtaken at this point by the Peugeot.
I managed to get around him coming down the main straight on the right hand side and then set after the Peugeot. One lap later, coming through turn five in the depths of darkness with about thirty laps top go, the opportunity was there to overtake on the inside. I had to take a sharp intake of breath, a ‘down the inside’ manoeuvre – one that harps back to the Banff Scottish Kart Championship in 1982. Klien, who was in the Peugeot at the time, came back at me one lap later down the main straight and he went to the left.
It was his prerogative because there wasn’t much room there because I was holding my line on the inside and there was a lot of dirt on the inside which he went onto. He then lost quite a bit of time when he came to the chicane afterwards. When I overtook Werner I went on the right hand side on the clean part of the circuit to force Marco onto the dirty part of the circuit.
Christian opted to go rallycrossing himself and so then I thought ‘right we’re comfortable with a three-four second gap and then built that up to a seven second gap twelve laps to go seven second gap’. But... Then there was a yellow! Another yellow! My advantage had gone. I thought ‘we can’t surely have a 10-lap sprint to the finish – it’s a 1,000 mile for goodness sakes!’
There were five cars on the lead lap, line astern, but there was a GT car between myself and Christian. I’m not sure if he was totally aware of the restart procedures in America, because they are different to Europe, or that he was just ‘sleeping’ a little, but certainly at the restart as I came over the line I had a couple of seconds gap over him, admittedly with the GT car in between. On that next lap I pulled it out to 4.1 seconds, on the cold tyres, which gave me the breathing space that I needed to control the gap to the end.
So after 1,000 miles of racing I think we won by 3.8 seconds in the end. Behind Christian was the other Audi, about 2 seconds behind, and then a few seconds back from them were the two Porsches. What a 1,000 mile race! It was absolutely unbelievable. I screamed all the way round the slowing down lap. I was just relieved because of the shunt we had at the beginning due to the mistake I made. Proud because of the way everybody worked to do the job and happy because we had pulled off probably the impossible in a way, because I don’t think anyone would have guessed that we could give two laps away at the beginning of the race and then come back.
But it just reminded me what my Dad used to say to me when I was small. ‘It’s not the good shots that make the good golfers, it’s the good recoveries after a bad shot’. And by God we had made some recoveries out there that day. It was Dindo and my third victory on the trot at Petit Le Mans, my fourth career and Dindo’s fifth career. We have certainly got a record out there and we were very pleased to keep that going.
I would like to say a sincere ‘thank you’ for all the messages that came in after that victory because I enjoyed it and I know the whole team enjoyed it. I know we would have preferred not to have rebuild the car but certainly the whole event, with 116,000 people there over the race weekend, witnessed an unbelievable race with an amazing atmosphere. It had been really, really good to go back and race in the American Le Mans Series and have had that sort of competition, that sort of passion and knowledge about all the fans who were there as well. So thank you for all of that aspect of it but also thank you for all the messages because we certainly did need the support over the course of this one and we got it and hopefully we repaid you with entertaining racing.
I had a little bit of a rest after Petit, my final race of the year, but nipped across to the ALMS finale at Laguna. I was there for a PR event for Audi with Dindo and Tom. More of that later...
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