At the beginning of 1997, the 29-year-old Dane, who was in danger of becoming a journeyman and had raced a little bit of everything in the last few years, missed out on a drive with the newly-formed (and soon to be ill-fated) Lola Formula One team.
By the beginning of June he was leading the F3000 championship, where he'd found refuge, and little did he know that just two weeks later he would be a Le Mans 24 Hours winner.
Kristensen narrowly missed out on a drive at Le Mans two years earlier when he was pencilled in to share a McLaren F1 GTR with JJ Lehto and Masanori Sekiya, but was replaced at the 11th hour by Yannick Dalmas. The fact that that car went on to win the 1995 race made his own unexpected, last-minute success in 1997 all the sweeter.