Is the Audi era finally over? After twelve hours, Audi has only one factory car left in the running. Audi, which has won eight of the last nine 24 hour races at Le Mans, has not always been the fastest car, but has always been the most reliable, the best-driven, and the Audi team has always performed flawlessly in the pits and in race management.
This year has been different. In the first hour, Alexandre Prémat ran the #3 Audi R15 TDI into the gravel at Indianapolis corner, apparently due to a power-steering failure. The car was able to continue, but it later developed cooling and fuel pressure problems, which necessitated pulling the engine entirely out of the car.
Later in the race, Lucas Luhr put the #2 Audi into the tire barrier at the Porsche curves, destroying the rear end of the car.
“I still can’t exactly explain the reason for the accident,” said Luhr. “I braked normally when the rear suddenly stepped out of line.”
“Le Mans is the world’s toughest race—as many people have unfortunately found out today,” said co-driver Marco Werner.
Rear suspension failure was suspected, but having breakage, driver failure, or really any kind of failure is totally out of character for Audi, whose R8 and R10s always ran reliably. This year, by the eighth hour, the only the #1 Audi, running third, was in the hunt for the lead. The other Audi factory car was running 42nd.
The Audi R15 TDI is pretty much an untested car. In an effort to cut costs, Audi only ran the car at the 12 Hours of Sebring. The New Audi was not sufficiently sorted out; the drivers were complaining of understeer.
Peugeot, whose 908 HDP is the product of three years of development, seemed finally to have the reliability to match its speed. Peugeot ran one-two for most of the first half of the race.
The day started with a pit-road incident which seemed not to bode well for Peugeot: Jean-Christophe Boullion in the privateer Pescarolo Peugeot clipped the right rear corner of Pascal Lamy’s #7 Peugeot puncturing the tire, Lamy had to make a full lap—eight miles—with the carcass of the tire tearing up the bodywork. Lamy made it back to the pits, and was repaired in two-and-a-half minutes.
Peugeot, which had always lost to race through pitwork and race management, showed that this year, such errors would be anomalies, not regular occurrences. The Peugeots ran strong, the pit stops were well-executed, and though the Audis seemed able to go an extra lap on a tank of diesel, Peugeot held the led, with the #9 car with Alexander Wurz at the wheel, in first place with a full lap lead over the #1 Audi of repeat winner Allan McNish, followed by the #8 Peugeot of Stephane Sarrazin and the #17 Pescarolo Peugeot with Simon Pagenaud at the wheel.
The new Aston Martin LMP1 cars, the fastest of the gasoline-engine cars, were still circulating after twelve hours; the 007 car was holding on to fifth, while the 008, which spent time on the pits with a severe vibration, was in twelfth. The 009 stone knocked the Bruichladdich Bruneau Radical AER into the tire barrier. Aston driver Stuart Hall was expelled from the race.
With 12:30 to go, the 008 Aston was penalized four minutes for pushing the Luc Alphand Corvette into the tire wall.
The Best of the Rest
Further back in the field, Porsche dominated the P2 class, with the RS Spyder of Team Essex leading the Navi Team Goh machine by four laps. These two traded the lead almost every lap for the fist several hours, until mechanical woes slowed the Navi Goh car.
In GT1, unsurprisingly, the Corvette racing C-6Rs led the field, with the Alphand Aventures C-6R in third. Oliver Gavin, a former F1 and rally driver, took over the helm of the leading #63 Corvette just before halfway.
GT2 offered its usual intense Porsche-Ferrari battle for the first few hours, with the Flying Lizard Porsche and the IMSA Performance Matmut Porsche trading the lead. The Porsches faded later however, allowing the defending champion Risi Competizione Ferrari to take over the class lead. The JMW Motorsport Ferrari F430 GT ran second in class, with the IMSA Performance Matmut Porsche in third.
Le Mans Now a Race of Speed, Not Attrition
Le Mans is no longer the Pyrrhic suvival struggle of the past. Because the cars are so strong, the race is now a twenty-four hour sprint. Through most of its history, Le Mans has been a test of the ability of cars simply to survive. Now, drivers have to drive flat-out throughout the race.
In the past, the most important driving technique was being gentle with the car, driving a bit slowly, to ease the car through the hours.
Modern cars have advanced to the point where they can be driven at full speed nonstop. This places demands on drivers and crew; every pitstop is a frantic exercise in orchestrated maintenance, where every second counts, and even changing drivers has to be done quickly and efficiently.
With only half the race completed, none of these positions really matter. Anything can happen at Le Mans; with fatigue affecting the drivers, teams, and the machinery; with traffic, where some cars are so much faster than others; with weather, from fog to rain to changing temperatures, there is no certainty, no security, until the final flag is waved.
Top Ten at Le Mans After Twelve Hours | ||||||
| Pos | # | LMP1 | Team | Car | Drive | Gap |
| 1 | 9 | LMP1 | Peugeot Sport Total | Peugeot 908 Hdi-FAP | Alexander Wurz | 194 L |
| 2 | 1 | LMP1 | Audi Sport Team Joest | Audi R15 TDI | Allan Mcnish | + 1 L |
| 3 | 8 | LMP1 | Team Peugeot Total | Peugeot 908 Hdi-FAP | Stephane Sarrazin | +12.024 |
| 4 | 17 | LMP1 | Pescarolo Sport | Peugeot 908 Hdi-FAP | Simon Pagenaud | + 2 L |
| 5 | 007 | LMP1 | AMR Eastern Europe | Lola Aston Martin | Jan Charouz8 | + 4 L |
| 6 | 14 | LMP1 | Kolles | Audi R10 TDI | Charles Zwolsman | + 5 L |
| 7 | 7 | LMP1 | Team Peugeot Total | Peugeot 908 Hdi-FAP | Christian Klien | + 6 L |
| 8 | 11 | LMP1 | Team Oreca Matmut AIM | Oreca AIM | Soheil Ayari | +1'49.496 |
| 9 | 16 | LMP1 | Pescarolo Sport | Pescarolo Judd | Joao Barbosa | + 7 L |
| 10 | 15 | LMP1 | Kolles | Audi R10 TDI | Christian Bakkerud | +11.416 |
