I attended my very first Petit Le Mans last weekend, a 10-hour endurance race hosted at the incredible Road Atlanta road course.
Thank you Audi Canada for the invitation. It’s extremely rare for me to be invited to attend races, I think it’s only happened five times in the past 25 years I think!
The Petit Le Mans is like a shorter version of the famous 24 Hours of Le Mans – in the Georgian countryside. But it works. There were so many peopled milling about the track that it was hard to walk around. And the pit lane open to ticket holders? Ha!
Two Peugeot 908s were pitted against two Audi R18s making their debut on American soil. Audi took home the honours at Le Mans last June, but Peugeot was determined to win the Intercontinental Le Mans Cup at all costs.
Race day dawned bright and beautiful. The sun was shining, a refreshing breeze was blowing and the thermometer hit 20 degrees Celsius.
From the start I would’ve sworn I was watching a young drivers race starring the next Sebastian Vettels. The R18s and 908s of the feature LMP1 class set an absolutely blistering pace. Um, this isn’t a 30-minute race here, guys! Had the whole “endurance” thing slipped their mind?
The four cars were welded together, barrelling down the track as one. It’s a bit tricky to wind your way through the incredibly dense traffic that way.
With a field of 53 cars, half of which were clearly inferior GTs (an average of 18 seconds slower per lap than the LMP1s), we were treated to some truly suicidal passing manoeuvres. As soon as a driver spotted the teeniest opening between slower cars, he dived. A moment’s hesitation meant falling back one position.
The Audis and Peugeots all collided with other competitors, sometimes emerging unscathed, other times leaving behind a few feathers. In fact, it was a bold lapping gambit by Romain Dumas that took Audi Number 1 out of contention three hours before the end of the race. But poor Dumas didn’t have a choice, he had to pass between the head Peugeot and a straggler’s Porsche. Bam!
It’s the same kind of daring straggler-passing move that caused the terrifying wipe-outs of Allan McNish’s and Mike Rockenfeller’s Audis at the 24 Hours of Le Mans. They could both have been seriously injured. What needs to happen for us to start thinking about solving this problem?
Thank you Audi Canada for the invitation. It’s extremely rare for me to be invited to attend races, I think it’s only happened five times in the past 25 years I think!
The Petit Le Mans is like a shorter version of the famous 24 Hours of Le Mans – in the Georgian countryside. But it works. There were so many peopled milling about the track that it was hard to walk around. And the pit lane open to ticket holders? Ha!
Two Peugeot 908s were pitted against two Audi R18s making their debut on American soil. Audi took home the honours at Le Mans last June, but Peugeot was determined to win the Intercontinental Le Mans Cup at all costs.
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| Photo: René Fagnan/Auto123.com |
Race day dawned bright and beautiful. The sun was shining, a refreshing breeze was blowing and the thermometer hit 20 degrees Celsius.
From the start I would’ve sworn I was watching a young drivers race starring the next Sebastian Vettels. The R18s and 908s of the feature LMP1 class set an absolutely blistering pace. Um, this isn’t a 30-minute race here, guys! Had the whole “endurance” thing slipped their mind?
The four cars were welded together, barrelling down the track as one. It’s a bit tricky to wind your way through the incredibly dense traffic that way.
With a field of 53 cars, half of which were clearly inferior GTs (an average of 18 seconds slower per lap than the LMP1s), we were treated to some truly suicidal passing manoeuvres. As soon as a driver spotted the teeniest opening between slower cars, he dived. A moment’s hesitation meant falling back one position.
The Audis and Peugeots all collided with other competitors, sometimes emerging unscathed, other times leaving behind a few feathers. In fact, it was a bold lapping gambit by Romain Dumas that took Audi Number 1 out of contention three hours before the end of the race. But poor Dumas didn’t have a choice, he had to pass between the head Peugeot and a straggler’s Porsche. Bam!
It’s the same kind of daring straggler-passing move that caused the terrifying wipe-outs of Allan McNish’s and Mike Rockenfeller’s Audis at the 24 Hours of Le Mans. They could both have been seriously injured. What needs to happen for us to start thinking about solving this problem?