British Audi finishes second

Having dominated the first 16 hours the team was forced to pit to repair the problem. Even after the lengthy stop, the British drivers clearly had the fastest car on the track. In the last two hours of the race Herbert drove out of his skin, sometimes lapping four seconds quicker than anyone else on the track.

But in the end the gap to the Team Goh Audi that won was just too much and Herbert was forced to settle for second for the third year on the trot.

"It's frustrating but that's motorsport," he said afterwards. "It is difficult. Things don't always go your way. We had a lap lead early yesterday morning and then we had the problem.

"We lost time on track and then we had to fix it and then we lost the lead because of that. But that's the way it goes sometimes. Hopefully I can come back and maybe I can step on that top step of the podium again."

Both Herbert and Smith have won Le Mans outright in the past but Davies, a former Autosport Young Driver, was racing for his first win in the top LM1 class at La Sarthe.

"I just got my head down," he said. "I was very motivated to try and win this race. I knew that I had to go maximum attack always."

It looked like it as well on the first lap of the racel. Starting from pole, Davies headed out of the first chicane side-by-side with the sister Veloqx car, driven by Allan McNish and the pair touched.

"He hit me sideways," he said. "I didn't give him the chop at all. He was just trying it on like it was a one hour race. But it's a 24 hour race. I had the lead going up to the corner, I had the inside line and the next thing I knew I had a gouge in the side of the car."

Towards the end of the race, in Davies' last stint, he spun, but it later emerged this was not his fault: "Throughout the race we had some electrical boxes that were falling around in the footwell of the car.

"When I jumped into the car to start my stint we managed to strap the boxes down but then they moved loose again and they were falling in the pedals and my foot got stuck with the brake pedal and it just spun."