Mowlem's musings

Not because the BMWs were any easier to beat, in fact if anything the fast sweeping corners of Road Atlanta suited them over Porsche more than any other race track bar possibly Sears Point. No, the main reason for me feeling satisfied was that for the first time this year we had the other factory Alex Job Porsches on the run.

After just under six hours of the 1000-mile race, we were the leading Porsche, fighting for third in class and in the top 10 overall. In fact at one point we were as much as one lap ahead of the leading Alex Job #23 Porsche.

For the 10-hour Petit Le Mans we were again going to get the latest evolution pieces from Porsche, as we had at Laguna, but our race engine wasn't delivered until the qualifying day, so in all the practice sessions on Wednesday and Thursday we had to run our standard motor. Never the less, we managed to achieve a really good race set-up on the car and we were always running competitively in each session.

The only downside was that we would only be able to run the new engine for the first time in qualifying, which meant that we would have to make some educated guesses on subtle gear ratio and set-up changes. Despite this, I still qualified the best I had all year, (in the ALMS anyway!), only one tenth slower than the No 23 Porsche of Sascha Maassen and Lucas Luhr.

This was very pleasing for me because the Petersen/White Lightning team are a great bunch of people and we have had our ups and downs this season, so it was very nice to be able to remind them that when we have similar equipment we can take on any other Porsche team.

Just a couple of tenths ahead of me in qualifying was the PTG BMW of my old 1999 and 2000 Porsche teammate and friend David Murry, who had switched allegiances for the weekend. It was nice to see him do so well that BMW let him qualify the car instead of their regular drivers. At one point a few months ago it looked like he might be driving with me again for this race, replacing my normal partner Timo Bernhard, (who was on Porsche duty at the Nurburgring, securing the German Porsche championship), but it wasn't to be.

I can't complain because I was partnered instead by ex-Sauber and Williams Formula 1 star Jean Christophe Bouillon, and also ably backed up by American star Porsche driver Mike Fitzgerald. I had never met 'Jules' before, but he fitted into the team very well and achieved the not-so-easy task of mastering the Porsche GT3RS and also the Road Atlanta track, which is probably one of the trickiest to learn that I have ever driven. Mind you, I wasn't expecting any less, him being a star and all!

I started the race and all hell broke loose before we'd even got to the start finish line - I thought rolling starts were designed to avoid startline pile ups!). Angelelli's Cadillac tapped Jon Field's Lola into a spin and into the concrete wall on the left of the start/finish straight. It's funny how it's always the same bloke ruining other people's races, he did the same to us in this race last year after only 6 laps...

The outcome of all this was that they deployed the safety car after only one lap of racing, and this sequence continued for about the first hour, with the pace car being brought out on at least four occasions. I stayed in the car at our first stop and did a double stint, and after the first two hours plus of racing we were the leading Porsche, a full lap ahead of the #23 car.

Now I'd like to take all the credit for that, but unfortunately most of it was down to some clever strategy from our team and a bit of luck! However, by the time I drove my second time, that gap had been eroded to 30seconds, but I had the most fun I've had all year trading laps with Sascha Maassen to maintain that gap for my whole stint.

So there we were after six hours, lying fourth in GT with the third placed Schnitzer BMW of Wendlinger, Lehto and Ekblom in our sights (typically they would later run into problems), the leading Porsche and in the top 10 overall. Things were looking rosy so it's bloody typical that on this occasion, the race was 10 hours long!

I was due to get back in and do the last two stints in the dark to finish the race, but just as Jules was due to come in to the pits for our second to last stop, he said he felt something wrong with the front of the car, and sure enough a bolt had sheared in the front left suspension, holding the bottom A-arm. All I could do was sit in the car in the pits while the boys did an excellent job of fixing it in 15 minutes. Still, we lost 10 laps which put us right out of the hunt, and so I just drove as hard as I could in the dark to finish a disappointed sixth in the GT class, 16th overall. A very poor reward for the team after all their hard work.

But after the race, when everyone was coming up and congratulating us on a good effort, I began to get over the initial disappointment and realise just how well we'd been doing up until that suspension failure. Even cynical, hard-bitten journos like Gary Watkins (!) reckoned afterwards that we would have been third and I know that this was very much on the cards. We came away from the race with our usual top six finish, but the difference this time was that we were a contender, not just making up the numbers.

Finally, I'd like to thank the whole team for their support throughout this whole year. As I mentioned earlier, we have all had our ups and downs, and obviously losing good old Bob Wollek was the lowest point for everyone by far. Everyone in the team still talked about him a lot, and I think he would have been proud of our battling spirit.

Mike Petersen and Dale White are great people to drive for, and I enjoyed their company immensely (I can't tell you some of the antics they got up to in their rental cars 'cos it might get them into trouble!), and the crew from Walter Gerber and Harry Haggard down were amongst the best I've worked with. As ever for a racing driver, my plans for next year aren't confirmed yet, so who knows what the future may bring. But I would drive for them all again anytime.