McNish: Audi need to find more speed

The Scot took the No.1 Audi R10 TDI in to the lead through clever strategy during an early caution period in the Barcelona 1000km race on Sunday, and he fought hard against the two 908 HDi FAPs early on.

But McNish admitted that while reliability problems had scuppered his and teammate Rinaldo Capello's chances in the race, the French cars had set the pace all weekend.

"We have got to be quite honest about it, we are not quite fast enough right now, and we have also had a couple of reliability issues which is not the hallmark of Audi," he said.

"Usually the R10 TDI is a very, very strong race car, and in this circumstance, with this competition, then I think we've got to work pretty hard before the next race."

Despite this McNish still feels that his Audi, which qualified third behind the two Peugeots, was still capable of winning in Spain, had it not been for a broken alternator belt and a slow puncture.

"It was quite clear to have a chance of victory we had to attack straight away and at the beginning I was able to get into second place," he said.

"The tyres in the first stint didn't feel 100%, that was partly because of the temperature and also because they came from qualifying, where we used them quite hard.

"At the full course yellow, the team did a very good job and we leapfrogged into first position and at that point I was able to control the race and pull-out a little bit of a gap to the second-placed Peugeot. Unfortunately we got a puncture on the left rear," he added.

"But then about 10 laps later the alternator belt broke and that meant a six lap pitstop which effectively put us totally out of contention. And with 27 LMP cars here and nearly 50 in total there was no real way to come back to any strong podium position.

"However we fought for the next four hours and got back to fifth position which I think was a pretty good recovery drive."