Allan McNish: Going the Distance

I've never believed in bad luck, but just recently I've begun to wonder! Spa-Francorchamps was the third race in a row where things went wrong for us.

In a five round championship you can't afford one race dropped, never mind three. But it has become standard procedure for us to find ourselves four laps down, half-way through the race and facing an Allan McNish/Rinaldo Capello fightback.

Then again, though we've had our fair share of things go wrong when we've been on the limit and fighting at the front, we could have taken the other option, which is to sit back and drive within ourselves, keep up with the Peugeots, and be competitive enough to finish second or third.

That's not the way I go about my motorsport and I don't think it's the way Audi Sport or Dindo do either. We'd prefer to attack and try and be in with a shout of victory, not settle for a safe podium.

Everything that goes wrong in motorsport can usually be traced back to something else.

You could say that the incident with Alex Wurz, when he collided with a back-marker and hit Dindo halfway through last weekend's race at Spa, was bad luck because we got caught up in an accident that we weren't initially involved in.

But if we'd been a bit quicker, we might have been five seconds up the road and our R10 TDI wouldn't have been anywhere near the spinning Peugeot.

There are certain circumstances that you can do something about and some that you can't. When you're not in the car, and something goes wrong, it's frustrating but you've got to lift yourself up very quickly.

It's key because the mechanics and engineers all feed off you as well. So if you're down in the dumps before the race has even finished, it's hard for those guys to go into the next pitstop, pull out a fast one and move you forward.

Moping around doesn't help anybody, but it is difficult sometimes, there's no question.

Realistically, we're out of a chance of winning the Le Mans Series championship now, but our Audi Sport team-mates Mike Rockenfeller and Alexandre Premat share the points lead with Peugeot's Nicolas Minassian and Marc Gene after a run of consistent points finishes.

As a driver, I want to go out and try to win the last two races but I know that our team-mates could use our back-up. So we go in to Nurburgring and Silverstone with two things in mind, to take victories if we can, but also to support the other car if at all possible.

On the positive side, I think we made a move forward in performance last weekend.

That's mainly because we're also taking more out of everything in the team. We're learning more about the car and the circuits than we ever have before.

We've been racing the R10 mostly on bumpy little street tracks in the American Le Mans Series up until this year. Now with Barcelona, Monza and Spa, we've got big wide circuits with long, fast corners, and we're tuning the R10 TDI more effectively with each race.

In a way we're mentally preparing ourselves for what's coming up at Le Mans. We know that to be competitive there we're going to have to be absolutely on the limit of everything, including the pitstops, so we've been pushing the boundaries further. That showed at Spa, where we were more competitive with Peugeot than in the first two races.

For example, I started the race from the front row for the first time in the LMS this year, and that was because in qualifying we opted for a clear strategy to go out at the beginning of the session.

I'd seen a lot of dust and dirt on the track from when people did their simulations on new tyres at the end of practice, so I went out straight away, had a fantastic lap, and really knew that I wasn't going to go any quicker.

Then the red flags interrupted the session to our benefit because Peugeot hadn't qualified yet. So they had to line-up in a queue in the pitlane with their tyre pressures and temperatures dropping and they didn't get the peak performance out of them.

It was beautiful to drive around Spa in qualifying trim again.

I did an interview for the race programme beforehand and said that in my opinion, Spa had changed. Corners like Eau Rouge and Blanchimont were not what they once were because of the safety features around them, and also because the development of aerodynamics and tyres have reduced the challenge.

However, when you're singing through Eau Rouge at over 170mph and the car goes through the compression, bottoms out, then goes light over the top of the hill and you see the trees flicking past, you realise that it is still a pretty meaty corner.

It was lovely to come whizzing down the hill and see that tunnel effect before you get to Eau Rouge, where the barriers and the wall focus your eye to a small dot at the bottom, before you shoot off up to Les Combes. And then, later in the lap, coming down through Pouhon, trying to let the car roll into the corner in fourth gear before getting flat back on the throttle before you even get to the apex.

Never mind trying to get your exit clean out of the corner before Stavelot so that you can get back flat on the throttle to keep your momentum up.

You know when you get to the last chicane you've done 6.8km of really hard, fast and flowing, finger-tip driving. Then after all that, you can still easily lose half a second if you get it wrong at the chicane.

Allan McNish through the final chicane at Spa-Francorchamps © Audi Press

So when I came across the line and saw that 1m58.7s lap that put us on the front row, I thought: 'Yep, that'll do. That was a nice one.'

The start of the race itself highlighted a problem that has to be fixed before the next event.

We didn't get the opportunity to have anything like a racing start because it was delayed by a lap due to a car going off on the warm-up lap. We went around on another pace lap, before what was supposed to be the official [side-by-side] race start.

But Pedro Lamy, who was on pole, treated it as a [single-file] restart and shot off down the track.

He said afterwards that his understanding was that it was a restart, but it was clear in the regulations and in the communications we had with the ACO prior to the race that it was a race start. So he shouldn't have been 50 metres ahead of anyone else prior to going across the line.

I radioed in immediately, because I felt it was wrong and either we should have had another start or he should be penalised. I was quite surprised and disappointed that nothing happened.

So it appears that there's no real structure in the LMS for having a racing start at the moment. It has to be fixed before the next drivers' briefing because the three starts so far this year have been very unprofessional by the leading car, and I don't think I'm the only one who feels that way. I know at least one Peugeot driver that agrees with me strongly.

From my point of view, it meant the race-start was compromised for the television viewers, for the fans, and also for me and Dindo because it meant we didn't have any real racing on lap one which was what I was looking forward to.

I knew that we had to be in the fight and up there among the Peugeots to stand a chance of winning, so I was pleasantly surprised that I was able to stay ahead of Minassian for the best part of two stints.

We were consistently between six and 10 seconds behind the lead Peugeot, so even though their qualifying and best laps were quicker, we were able to hang on to them quite well.

And knowing our pitstops are definitely faster we were quite looking forward to the second half of the race but the incident with Wurz stopped all that.

Jacques Villeneuve climbs into the Peugeot 908 HDi FAP © Peugeot

It was interesting to note how Jacques Villeneuve and Wurz got on in their LMS debuts for Peugeot.

I knew in the stint I had against Jacques that it was a chance to exploit his inexperience of sportscar racing.

Jacques and Alex can drive cars fast. Alex has won Le Mans, Jacques is a Formula One world champion and you don't have the careers they've had by accident. But there are certainly some subtleties to our discipline that they haven't got down 100 percent just yet.

But in my opinion Jacques fared much better than he did at Le Mans last year. He seemed faster in traffic and his times were more consistent than they were in the 24 hours, so he's getting to grips with it.

I thought Alex would take to the LMS like a duck to water because of his 'thinking' style of driving and his experience. The incident overshadowed his weekend, but looking at his times, he was very fast whenever he was in the car.

The accident might be down to a lack of experience dealing with traffic, but it looked quite similar to Dindo's at Monza.

Don't forget we're threading the needle and trying to wiggle a big car at high speed through very small gaps. Imagine blasting round the M25 at 160mph while everyone else is doing 80mph, trying to thread your way through without hitting anyone. Sometimes you just misjudge it.

In Wurz's case there were catastrophic results, but I'm pretty sure that he'll not make the same mistake twice.

And that, to be honest, gives us a little bit of a cause for concern for Le Mans, because it means that the No.8 Peugeot will have a very quick driver combination at the wheel and we're going to have to keep a very close eye on it.

Until next time,