Peugeot Increases ILMC Lead Over Audi With Silverstone Six Hours Win

Peugeot padded its points lead in the International Le Mans Cup series with a first-place finish at the 2011 Silverstone Six-Hour race Sunday.

The #7 Peugeot 908 of Simon Pagenaud and Sébastien Bourdais led 135 of the race’s 190 laps and finished nearly a lap ahead of the Audi R18 TDI of Timo Bernhard and Marcel Fässler. The second Peugeot, driven by Michael Sarrazin and Franck Montagny, finished eighth behind the second Audi of Alan McNish and Tom Kristensen.

This combination, plus the pole, netted Peugeot 21 points to Audi’s 19 for the weekend, giving the French manufacturer 153 points to its rival’s 108 with two races left in the series.

The race was not as lopsided as the numbers would make it seem. Peugeot and Audi swapped the lead repeatedly in the first three hours, when Fässler in the moved to the front on lap 94.

Unfortunately for Audi, the No. 1 car had collided with another car while maneuvering through traffic and picked up some minor bodywork damage   and had to pit on lap 130 to swap the rear bodywork and undertray.

The amazing Audi engineers took only one minute longer than a normal pit stop to change the back half of the body, but that one minute was more than the evenly-matched Audi could make up.

The winning Peugeot ran flawlessly; the drivers and pit crew made no errors. But the winning Peugeot was no faster than the losing Audi; the whole race came down to one tiny error in traffic.

Audi has won only a single race of the seven-round series (though it won the most important race, the Le Mans 24 Hours.) It seems unlikely that Peugeot could perform poorly enough to lose its 45-point lead.

The French team has succeeded all season by being very fast and very precise, while its German rivals have displayed un-Teutonic inefficiency and error. Silverstone was perhaps Audi’s best showing to date, yet it wasn’t enough.

The series comes to America for its next race, the ten-hour Petit Le Mans at Road Atlanta in Braselton, Georgia on October 1.

Peugeot has won here the past two years; is there a three-peat in the works, or can Audi reestablish their decade-long dynasty there?