LE MANS, France — The late Steve McQueen would have been proud. The movie actor and sometimes race driver dramatized the annual Le Mans 24 Hour endurance classic in his 1971 fictional movie of the same name.
This past week in the 76th running of the Sarthe event, the movie script was on display again, only this time it wasn’t fiction and the players weren’t Porsche or Ferrari, but Audi and Peugeot.
In the end, it was the Audi R10 wheeled by Allan McNish, Tom Kristensen and Rinaldo Capello that ended the twice-around-the-clock grind in victory lane.
Yet, after that it was hard to tell the real storyline from its Hollywood counterpart of so many years ago. The 2008 Le Mans race had been touted as a major showdown between the turbocharged diesels from the two manufacturers, with the Peugeot 908 contingent trying to wrest away the stranglehold Audi has had on the 24 Hour since 2000, initially with the gasoline R8 V-8, and for the previous two editions, its subsequent boosted R10 diesel.
In 2007, the 908 struck fear into its rival in its Le Mans debut, displaying a speed that the R10 brigade couldn’t necessarily match.
However, with that speed came fragility, and in the end, Peugeot was forced to accept second place overall and defeat as overheating and other mechanical issues derailed its march to victory. During this past winter, Peugeot worked to make its cars as reliable as possible while increasing their speed against that of the R10 design. The result has been a string of victories in the European-based Le Mans Series and the experts’s pick as the favorite to win Le Mans.
That bet seemed sure after qualifying, following Stephane Sarrazin’s pole time of 3:18.513, nearly six seconds better than the Audi of Capello, Kristensen and McNish, the best placed of the R10s at 3:24.105.
Ultimately, all three of the 908s wound up in front of their three R10 counterparts on the grid. With that as a basis, there weren’t many putting their money down on the Audis. As far as the majority was concerned, the race would be a French coronation.
Here this weekend, the Peugeot camp had taken care of everything except the weather, and thus, watched the prize they so desperately sought slip away yet again. In this case, it was the very thing that made them so fast when compared to their opposition that did them in: their suspensions. With the power of the French and German prototypes about equal, the advantage for the 908s could be found in their stiffer spring; good for dry-weather running, but far less so in the wet. And rain was in the forecast, showing up just a little past the halfway mark at around quarter after four Sunday morning, neatly bisecting the event into two halves.
The first, the dry section, clearly belonged to Peugeot with the car of Marc Gene, Nicolas Minassian and Jacques Villeneuve holding sway for the most part by nearly a lap over Kristensen, McNish and Capello. The sister 908 of Frank Montagny, Ricardo Zonta and Christian Klien kept the R10 of Lucas Luhr, Mike Rockenfeller and Alexandre Premat at bay, as Sarrazin and his teammates Pedro Lamy and Alexander Wurz in their 908, along with Frank Biela. Emanuele Pirro and Marco Werner in their R10, trailed behind after encountering mechanical gremlins along the way.
In the end, Montagny and company would wind up third, with Rockenfeller and his fellows fourth, the Biela trio fifth and the pole-sitting Sarrazin and his cohorts sixth. That left everyone to focus on the war up front, and what a war it was. Within an hour after the rain came, that was followed by periods of relative dryness, McNish, Capello and Kristensen had pushed themselves into a lead that varied between more than a lap to just seconds, depending on how wet the track might be.
For the last stint, it was the best against the best as Kristensen got in the Audi and Minassian the Peugeot. The 908 driver, who was at one point more than a lap down, stormed back cutting huge chunks from the R10’s advantage, the pressure showing on Kristensen who had not one, but two potentially disastrous brushes with other cars, fortunately escaping without any serious damage.
With less than a half an hour left and the course getting wetter, both men pitted for fuel and tires. However, within a lap, the Peugeot was back in to replace a flat right rear, and the war was over. Officially, the gap was measured at just over four minutes, both the winning Audi and the second-placed Peugeot having covered a record-setting 381 laps. For Kristensen, the results made him an eight time Le Mans winner, his closest rival in that department, while Audi has nine in a row, Porsche coming in second in the department with seven-straight overall triumphs.
For Porsche, this year’s Le Mans brought both good and bad news. The good was the German manufacturer’s one-two sweep of the smaller LMP2 prototype division with its RS Spyders; first going to the Van Merkstein Motorsport entry of Jos Verstappen, Jeroen Bleekemolen and team principal, Peter van Merkstein, with its Team Essex counterpart, driven by John Neilsen, Sascha Maassen and Casper Elgaard, second.
The bad news came in the GT2 assembly line category where Porsche was totally left out of the picture as Ferrari posted as a one-through-five 430GT performance led by the American Risi trio of Mika Salo, Jaime Melo and Gianmaria Bruni.
In the top-rated GT-1 production car arena, it was Aston Martin again, as it was in 2007, beating Corvette. The DBR9 of David Brabham, Antonio Garcia and Darren Turner just outrunning the Corvette of Jan Magnussen, Johnny O’Connell and Ron Fellows, with the somewhat troubled second Corvette of Olivier Beretta, Oliver Gavin and Max Papis third.