Mowlem's musings

It's funny how at the moment my races seem to be like London buses, I do nothing for weeks, and then three come along at once! Last week it was the Donington FIA round, I'm just back from Petit Le Mans, and tomorrow I go to Estoril for the last FIA GT race of the season.

At Road Atlanta, Randy Pobst and I qualified fifth on the GT class grid in our White Lightening Porsche, which wasn't particularly brilliant, but not too bad given the quality of the opposition, and the times were very close.

I took the race start and managed to overtake and pull away from the Risi 360 Ferrari. Then it was just a case of driving as hard as I could to try and stop the two Alex Job Porsches pulling out too big a lead. I wanted to avoid getting the overall leader between us when there was a full course yellow because that would mean losing a lap to them. Stephan Ortelli was in the Freisinger Porsche just ahead of me, and I managed to keep the gap to him reasonably constant, but although we were both pulling away considerably from those behind us, the number 23 car of Sascha Maassen and Lucas Luhr was pulling away from us both. The first full course yellow bunched us back up again so that I was right behind Ortelli and Timo Bernhard in the AJR Porsche, but Luhr got lucky with the overall leader, and managed to pull a lap on the rest of the GT field.

By the time I got in for my second stint we had slipped to fifth through a combination of pitstops and caution periods, but we managed to pull ourselves back up to second in GT by the end of the fourth hour. We'd been helped along the way by the fact that Ortelli and Bouchut's Freisinger Porsche had holed a radiator, and I'd been able to run down the AJR car as they began to experience a small loss of power.

I'd lost our front splitter early in the race, but by making some brake bias adjustments I'd helped get rid of some of the resulting turn in understeer, but never the less such was the pace of the lead Porsche that at the five hour mark, we knew we couldn't catch them on pure speed.

Because we were already a lap ahead of the third place Ferrari at this point, my team mate Randy and I decided to start looking after the engine and the car - shifting at 8000 revs (as opposed to 8,600) and keeping off all the kerbs as much as possible. What we didn't realise at this point was that the lead car was going to run into problems. First, Luhr went off on the grass after contact with an Audi, and then their engine started over-heating. I heard that at the end it was running 149 degrees C - it is unbelievable that it was still going! They pitted with 15 minutes to go and apparently there was steam and water pouring out of the car.

The Speed Channel TV announcers were going ballistic, but then the car went back out again! If the race had been 15 minutes longer then we would have won, but to be honest they deserved to win. They had the measure of us the whole race, as we did to the rest of the GT field by the two hour mark, and to get on the podium in such a prestigious and competitive race is no mean feat anyway.

I talked to the overall winners, Tom Kristensen and Dindo Capello, after the race, and they said they'd never seen such a competitive GT car field, and that it really showed for them, with having to lap us all the time! They were right, the race was like a GT world championship, as from the entry list you can see that only a couple of names are missing from have the best dozen or so GT drivers and teams in the world.

I am happy, I've now managed GT podiums at the Daytona 24 Hours, the Sebring 12 Hours, Le Mans and now Petit Le Mans. Only trouble is, they're all second places! Still, there's always next year, although before then I might get lucky at Estoril this weekend!