BOWMANVILLE, Ontario — Some days it’s better to have no luck at all than have the kind of luck that befell Allan McNish and Audi R10 turbo diesel partner Rinaldo Capello on Sunday at high-speed Mosport Park.
The duo’s bad luck resulted in the fifth victory of the American Le Mans season for the Penske Racing Porsche RS Spyder team of Timo Bernhard and Romain Dumas.
From the start, the Audis were faster and with less than 15 minutes to go, McNish  had a 26-second margin over Bernhard and an even larger advantage over Sascha Maassen and Ryan Briscoe in the second Penske Porsche.
All seemed set for Audi’s first overall triumph since March when it was on top of the podium at St. Petersburg after winning Sebring outright. Since then, it has been all Penske and the Porsche that as of Road America had racked up seven-straight outright victories, four by Bernhard and Dumas to three by Briscoe and Maassen.
Now, it seemed as if was the turn of the feisty Scotsman and his Italian partner to set things right. But suddenly, the electronically controlled shift mechanism began to fail, leaving McNish only a couple of gears.
Two laps from the end, Bernhard passed, and while McNish showed his talents — repassing his Porsche rival for the lead — he couldn’t hold on. As the last lap started, Bernhard quickly moved around the crippled Audi to take the checkered for his fifth and the team’s eighth triumph, virtually assuring the Penske team its second-straight LM2 division title as Briscoe and Maassen helped the cause by claiming third overall and second in the division.
For the frustrated McNish, there was little more than the terse post-race comment, “We’ve never had that kind of failure before, and I’m sure that the engineers will figure out what went wrong and fix it.”
If there was any sunlight left in the day for the Audi camp, it was that McNish and Capello’s winning LMP1 performance ensured the German manufacturer yet another season LMP1 ALMS championship, a string that stretches back to 2000.
Third in LMP2 and fifth in the outright standings despite some early problems was the Andretti Green team’s Acura/ARX-01a with Marino Franchitti and Bryan Herta behind the wheel. Ben Devlin and Jamie Bach brought their Mazda Lola home right behind the Acura duo.
In GT1, it was almost the usual Corvette story, except that for Mosport the team entered a third car for hometown favorite Ron Fellows and Andy Pilgrim on the eve of what most believe will be Fellows’ retirement, the two taking third in class behind the winning Corvette of Johnny O’Connell and Jan Magnussen after Oliver Gavin and Olivier Beretta were pushed off into the tire wall earlier in the race and forced to settle for second place in their GM two-seater.
As for GT2, there the story was all Ferrari, with Jaime Melo and Mika Salo leading Gianmaria Bruni and Eric Helary in a two-car Risi Competizione sweep over the Rahal-Letterman Porsche 911 GT3RSR of Tom Milner, Jr. and Ralf Kelleners, the performance putting Salo and Melo along with Ferrari back in the class point lead.