McNish predicts tough race at Monza

The Scot, who along with co-driver Rinaldo Capello will start third on the grid behind the two Peugeots, said that while Audi have made progress with the R10 TDI, it is not likely to be enough to challenge the French car in the race.

"Looking towards the race I think it is going to be pretty tough," he said. "There is not necessarily going to be the traffic situations that we can take advantage of as we did in Barcelona.

"So I am not expecting us to be able to compete so aggressively as we did in that particular race. However saying that the pitstops were good [last time out] and I expect the Audi guys to be fast in the pits and to bring us back into the fight.

"But it is going to be quite a long 1000kms tomorrow."

But Audi Sport Team Joest technical director Ralf Juttner expects them to close the gap to Peugeot in race conditions.

"Even though the time gap is big, I think that, like at Barcelona, we'll be closer to them in the race than in qualifying," he said.

"Our youngsters are catching up and our two cars have a similar speed. That's good because it means we've got two cars with which we can attack."

McNish added that Audi is still learning about the Le Mans Series and he felt that the team had made progress in that area so far this weekend.

"This is our first time here at Monza with the R10 TDI, and coming into the second LMS race we have learned a little bit more about how we run the sessions leading up to qualifying," he said. "We managed to get a very good balance on the car actually, as good as I think we can and optimised our sheer performance.

"Dindo took the maximum out of it in qualifying, but unfortunately the Peugeot as we saw in Sebring and Barcelona was a bit quicker."