ELKHART LAKE, Wis. — It isn’t so much if the fat lady sings, but rather when, and Saturday she began her song about one lap early for the favored LMP1 Audi turbo diesel team in the four-hour Generac Road America round of the American Le Mans Series.
In a race that nearly surrendered to Mother Nature during a more than one-hour full-course caution period brought on by a lightning storm and biblical rains, the North American Audi team came up a little over a second short, and the Penske Racing Porsche LMP2 RS Spyder duo of Romain Dumas and Timo Bernhard scored their fourth — and the team’s sixth-straight overall — victory of 2007 on a track that most thought was ideal for the high-horsepower Audis.
The race came down to one of fuel economy and tires. On the final pit stop, in the gloom of the on-coming evening darkness, the Audi camp decided to put both its cars on new rubber, while their Penske opposition decided to leave Bernhard on his used Michelins, splitting the Porsche camp’s chances as they did put fresh rubber on the Ryan Briscoe-Sascha Maassen RS Spyder prototype.
The half a minute or so time saved gave Bernhard the margin he needed, as Rinaldo Capello, in the car he shared with Allan McNish, and Emanuele Pirro, in the Audi he shared with Marco Werner, were forced to settle for second and third, respectively.
Afterward, Capello, when asked if the outcome was a disappointment, replied, “Yes.”
In his post-race interview, Bernhard added to the feeling that Saturday should have been an “Audi day,” by calling the outcome an “upset.”
Indeed, throughout qualifying and practice, the Audi R10 diesels seemed to have the advantage, one that carried over to the race itself, as both cars led handily at various points.
Even so, the confluence of circumstances — weather, traffic, good pit strategy and a smaller fuel tank — conspired to thwart the turbo diesel squad’s attempt to capture its first overall triumph since March when it won outright on the temporary St. Petersburg, Fla., course following the triumph in the opening 12-Hour Sebring enduro early that month.
The fact that Audi has been relegated to dominating the LMP1 division where its opposition is nearly non-existent is due more to the way Roger Penske runs his operation than anything else. However, it is also clear that the LMP2 set, with its Porsches and the factory-backed Acuras, has indeed raised the performance bar, creating an excitement that has brought new life to the ALMS — life which was badly needed.
On Saturday, the Porsche-Acura contest continued, with Briscoe and Maassen fending off the Acura/ARX-01a of David Brabham and Stefan Johansson for fourth overall and second in class.
As for GT1, the large production car category remained the property of Corvette, with Oliver Gavin and Olivier Beretta coming out ahead of teammates Jan Magnussen and Johnny O’Connell once more. Even so, the Corvette squad may find itself having to contend with Freddy Lienhard’s Maserati MC12, which, after two years under a dust cover, proved to be able to turn lap times within half a second of the GM two-seaters, Lienhard and Didier Theys finishing third in class.
In GT2, Mika Salo and Jaime Melo in the Risi Competizione Ferrari 430GT out dueled the Rahal Letterman team Porsche 911GT3RSR by a little more than a second.