Audi's forgotten winner that still holds a Le Mans record

It's the - almost - forgotten Audi in the German manufacturer's line of LMP machinery straddling nearly 20 years, and the ugly duckling of the pack. Yet the R15-plus TDI didn't just add to the marque's tally of Le Mans 24 Hours victories in 2010, it did so at a record speed. Timo Bernhard, Romain Dumas and Mike Rockenfeller broke the long-standing distance record set by Helmut Marko and Gijs van Lennep in 1971 and hold it to this day.

There was, however, a massive element of good fortune to the ninth of Audi's 13 wins at Le Mans in the battle of the turbodiesels 10 years ago. The final incarnation of the V12-powered Peugeot 908 HDi outgunned the revised version of the R15, which had endured a disastrous debut at the Circuit de la Sarthe 12 months before. But what looked like certain victory for the French manufacturer was lost with a major engine issue on Sunday morning.

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The leading Peugeot shared by Franck Montagny, Nicolas Minassian and Stephane Sarrazin held an advantage of two laps when almost bang on 7am the first named pulled over with flames licking from the right-hand exhaust. The remaining two 908s, both striving to make up for earlier delays, would succumb to the same problem before the race was out.

Audi and the Joest Racing squad knew they were in for a tough 24 hours after qualifying. The best of its three cars ended up fifth on the grid behind the trio of factory Peugeots and the works-supported ORECA 908. The best R15-plus time set by Rockenfeller was 2.2 seconds shy of the Peugeot pole mark recorded by Sebastien Bourdais.

"Their pace in qualifying was a shock, so we really didn't expect to win going into the race," says Bernhard. "The goal for Romain, Rocky and me was to be the best Audi and maybe get on the podium."

Bernhard and co more or less led the chase of the 908s from the end of the opening hour, their position as top Audi cemented when the other two cars ran into minor delays. And they looked a decent bet for a top-three finish long before midnight on Saturday.

By then the pole-winning Peugeot was long since out of the race, retiring in hour two when a wishbone mounting point pulled out of the monocoque. The car shared by Alex Wurz, Marc Gene and Anthony Davidson lost three laps to an alternator change in the seventh hour and the ORECA entry went down four laps shortly afterwards when a driveshaft failed.

But Bernhard knew there was no way to take the fight to the undelayed Peugeot, which slowly stretched its lead at the front of the field.

The loads at Le Mans proved too much for an engine that had completed a 30-hour simulation at Paul Ricard without problem

"We were closer in the race, but we were still one-and-a-half seconds a lap off and sometimes two," he says. "It felt like they were playing with us a little bit."

Arguably Montagny, Minassian and Sarrazin were doing just that.

"Because of the rotation, I wasn't seeing much of Franck, so we would message each other saying which kerbs we were no longer taking and how we were using the gearbox," recalls Minassian. "We had a comfortable lead and were beginning to save the car, even though we were ultra-confident about its reliability."

Minassian reckons the in-house Peugeot team based at its Velizy motorsport headquarters had taken another step forward since its victory at Le Mans in 2009 with Wurz, Gene and David Brabham.

"We were better as a team than in previous years," he explains. "We were improving every year on all those little details that make the difference at a race like Le Mans. I would say in that last year of the original 908, we were stronger than we had ever been."

Peugeot also never stopped trying to improve the 908, which was now a four-year-old design. A new version of its 5.5-litre V12 had titanium connecting rods for the first time. This final development of the V12 before a new 3.7-litre V8 diesel came on stream with a new rulebook in 2011 proved to be the French marque's undoing.

The loads at Le Mans proved too much for an engine that had completed a 30-hour simulation at Paul Ricard without problem. The long-time leaders' engine went bang in hour 17, the Wurz/Gene/Davidson car just over five hours later - shortly after making it back onto the lead lap - and then the ORECA entry shared by Olivier Panis, Nicolas Lapierre and Loic Duval in the 23rd hour.

"It was just one of those things," says Minassian. "The engine was strong and reliable, but it is difficult to replicate the loads that the machinery is put under at Le Mans on all the long straights."

He believes that even with the older spec of engine, the 908 would have had the pace to win Le Mans in 2010. Using the previous-generation powerplant, which had steel rather than titanium conrods, was actually part of Peugeot's original plan for the race.

"We wanted to mix the configuration of the engines and have two with steel conrods and two with titanium," explains Bruno Famin, who served as Peugeot Sport's technical director throughout its LMP1 programme. "We had an issue with a supplier and had a major problem on the dyno, so we couldn't mix the specs as we wanted. Unfortunately the remaining spec was the wrong one."

Famin dismisses the argument that Peugeot tried to push the envelope too far.

"The problem we had every year was to know what Audi's level of performance would be," he says. "We were convinced that the R15-plus would be very fast, but it was not. Can you imagine what people would say if you did not put everything you could on the car and you fell short?"

Peugeot's failures allowed Audi to score a fourth one-two-three victory with a car that had been well and truly outperformed. A trouble-free race for Bernhard, Dumas and Rockenfeller, only a handful of safety cars and no rain allowed them to complete 397 laps and 5410.713km (3362.061 miles) to break the previous distance record held by Marko and van Lennep since 1971.

"It was one of those races where there were zero mistakes from the drivers and zero issues with the car," says Bernhard. "It was just regular pitstops apart from when Romain hit a cameraman in the pits."

The injured man was left lying in the pitlane in front of the Audi boxes for what Joest team boss Ralf Juttner remembers as "at least 20 minutes"

A handful of seconds were lost at this pitstop in the fourth hour and a few more a couple of stops down the line when race control demanded that the wing mirror taken off by the tumbling cameraman be replaced. But it could have been much worse for Audi.

The injured man was left lying in the pitlane in front of the Audi boxes for what Joest team boss Ralf Juttner remembers as "at least 20 minutes". Audi's doctor wasn't allowed by French law to attend to him, which meant waiting for a circuit medical team to arrive.

"It would have been a real headache if we'd had to pit one of our cars," he recalls. "Fortunately they were all full of fuel and nothing happened to make us bring any of them in."

What followed when the medics did finally arrive was a comedy of errors. The trolley stretcher on which the injured man was placed collapsed, dropping him on his head, and then the team had to lend a hand push-starting the ambulance behind the pits after its battery went flat.

That was the only technical failure the Joest crew had to deal with during the race. The delays for the second and third-placed cars were the result of incidents that left them one and three laps behind respectively at the chequered flag. All three Audis surpassed Marko and van Lennep's 1971 distance of 5335.313km set in a factory Porsche 917K.

Equally important was a track that remained dry throughout the 24 hours and the small number of safety cars. The 2010 tally of four compares with last year's nine, and that's not taking into account the local slow zones where virtual safety car conditions and a 80km/h speed limit are enforced.

The introduction of slow zones since Bernard, Dumas and Rockenfeller set the record is just one of the reasons it might stand for as long as the 39 years of the old mark. Should it not fall this year, and the odds are against a completely dry race in September, it could be set in stone.

Think about it. The target race lap time for the new LM Hypercar rules that will come into force next year and the LMDh regs due to follow in 2022 is 3m30s. That's 10 or so seconds slower than the Toyota TS050 HYBRIDs were doing at Le Mans in 2019 and eight slower than the winning R15-plus back in 2010.

The 78th running of the Le Mans 24 Hours was a super-fast affair that ultimately played into Audi's hands. Had there been more safety cars and some rain, then Peugeot might well have claimed a second consecutive victory.

The French manufacturer's post-race analysis of its engines revealed that they had spent longer at full throttle than it had expected or been able to simulate on the track. Had just one of its V12s lasted, the R15 would now probably be almost entirely forgotten, relegated to a footnote in Audi's 17-year history at Le Mans.