Kristensen picks his greatest races

After nine Le Mans 24 Hours victories and a host of sportscar titles - including the 2013 World Endurance Championship - Tom Kristensen called time on his professional racing career at the end of last season.

He talks AUTOSPORT's sportscar guru GARY WATKINS through the races he rates as the best of his life, from karting against Mika Hakkinen via Formula 3 and touring cars to shaping sportscar history.

June 1997: LE MANS 24 HOURS
Porsche WSC95 (Joest) - 1st (with Michele Alboreto & Stefan Johansson)

The passion that Tom Kristensen took to the Le Mans 24 Hours each year was evident almost from the very beginning of his career. He'd only managed 17 laps in qualifying ahead of his debut victory in the great race but, after his first stint aboard Joest's Porsche WSC95, his enthusiasm for the race and the eight-plus miles of the Circuit de la Sarthe was plain to see.

"I've seen an interview of myself after I got out of the car for the first time in the race," he recalls. "I sound ridiculous, like Donald Duck, so I was obviously impressed with driving at Le Mans in the night with all the traffic.

"Le Mans was something I always wanted to do one day, but when I got there it wasn't that I thought, 'This is it.' But during the race, I felt immediately that this was the ultimate form of racing."

Kristensen's quadruple stint during the night, which yielded a sequence of fastest laps and the lap record, is legend. He was already loosening his belts on the in-lap after three stints when the radio call came from team boss Ralf Juttner asking if a fourth was possible.

"I was ready for a fourth stint mentally, but at the same time those four stints wore me out," he recalls. "I was in a kind of trance of positivity, but absolutely knackered. That car had no power steering, an H-pattern gearbox with synchromesh and it searched around on the straights. I had bloody finger nails like a carpenter after the race because I'd been gripping the steering wheel so hard."

Kristensen's favourite memory from the first of his nine Le Mans victories is an off-beat one. It concerns his seat fitting at Joest's factory on the Friday prior to Le Mans week — his signing really was that late!

"They had a spare monocoque there, and I jumped in and sat in Michele's seat from the year before," he recalls. "I said the seat was fine, but trying to look professional, I said, 'Oh yes, but maybe you could bring the brake pedal back a little bit.' The mechanic, Jurgen Hordt, who hadn't left for Le Mans at that point, leaned in and said quietly in German, 'The fastest will decide.'

"After the race when we were celebrating with weisse beer and German sausages at a barbeque, I found Jurgen, pressed my finger in his back and said in his ear, 'Next year we will have the brake pedal a little bit further back.'"

March 2005: SEBRING 12 HOURS
Audi R8 (Champion) - 1st (with JJ Lehto & Marco Werner)

Sebring in 2005 is rightly regarded as one of the greatest races in the 60-plus years of the 12 Hours. But it deserves its place in sportscar folklore for a second reason: it was at this event that the seeds were sown of the successful partnership between Kristensen and Allan McNish.

Kristensen's late father, Carl-Erik, and McNish's dad, Bert, have been credited with coming up with the idea, and it made sense to the top two sportscar drivers of their generation who'd just been slugging it out over the bumps of the Sebring International Raceway in their pair of Champion Racing Audi R8s. Kristensen and McNish had just gone head to head over the final stints of the race, the margin between them just over six seconds at the flag.

Kristensen remembers whichever of the pair was on new tyres "absolutely flying in the cool conditions". By rights the Dane should have lost the lead when he took on a new set of Michelins at the car's penultimate pitstop, but the decision to short-fuel the car and a minor delay for McNish allowed TK to get out in front and exploit the advantage of new rubber. McNish later came back at the leader on fresh tyres, but ultimately fell short.

"We decided it was too hard on our fathers to watch that kind of race," says Kristensen, "so we decided that we'd better share a car in the future. That's how it started."

May 2000: BTCC - OULTON PARK
Honda Accord (WSR) - 3rd & 1st

The first of Kristensen's three victories with West Surrey Racing and Honda in his one-season foray in the British Touring Car Championship was a significant one.

"Your breakthrough win in any category or series is always so important, and that one was damn important," explains the Dane. "It was starting to get a little bit frustrating. We'd been losing points: I'd been knocked off several times - I remember at Donington Park Mr [Jason] Plato didn't give me permission to win - and we'd had some technical problems."

Kristensen led the feature race from pole at Oulton and emerged from the mandatory pitstops with the lead, which he extended to 10s before the finish. It wasn't as simple as it looked though. His Accord had a major oil leak over the final laps.

"It was important for me to win in the BTCC because I've always liked to prove my versatility," he continues. "Winning the final two races of the BTCC Super Touring era at Silverstone was a good way to finish the season, but I would like to have won more."

October 1991: GERMAN FORMULA 3 CHAMPIONSHIP - HOCKENHEIM
Ralt-Volkswagen RT35 (BSR) - 1st

"Getting that drive with Bertram Schafer Racing and Volkswagen for 1991 was my big chance: I knew I had to make the most of it and win the championship, so I was very conservative and always looking for points," reveals Kristensen, who had triumphed in just two races prior to the finale. "I won the title at the penultimate race, so I could drive at the Hockenheim finale without any pressure.

"I really wanted to prove that I was a worthy champion by winning that one," says a driver who was contesting his first full season in single-seaters. "I felt liberated and I was able to beat the lap times from the year before when Mika Hakkinen came over from British F3 with West Surrey."

JUNE 2008: LE MANS 24 HOURS
Audi R10 TDI - 1st (with Allan McNish & Rinaldo Capello)

Audi's triumph over Peugeot in arguably the greatest Le Mans 24 Hours of all time is quite rightly up there in Kristensen's list. But his reason isn't just that he, Allan McNish and Rinaldo Capello drove the perfect race. He calls it "the start of my second career".

The previous year's Le Mans had been the Dane's first race back since his giant shunt in the DTM at Hockenheim. He admits to not being at his best that year, and reveals today that everything wasn't back to normal 12 months later.

"You shouldn't underestimate the effects of such a big accident," he says. "It took me a long time to be back to 100 per cent, so I was worried about any after-effects. The only way I could do it was to avoid stress. I wasn't comfortable that I could end up in big pain if I couldn't control my situation."

That's an amazing admission of a man who, along with his team-mates, drove flat-out throughout an event in which many thought they had no chance. Peugeot's status as pre-race favourite only motivated him, says Kristensen.

"People were telling us we couldn't win that race, but that became part of our will to win," he continues. "We had the perfect race, and I'm not just talking about Allan, Dindo and myself. The same goes for our engineer Howden [Haynes], Leena [Gade, assistant engineer] and all the mechanics at Joest.

"Dindo summed it up best: 'It was the race where the men beat the machines.'"

NOVEMBER 1993: INTERNATIONAL FORMULA 3 LEAGUE - FUJI
TOM'S-Toyota 033F - 1st

Already a double winner in F3 with titles in Germany and then Japan, Kristensen saved his best to last. The end-of-season Fuji invitational event following the Macau GP was, he says, "almost certainly my best F3 race".

It was a race that Kristensen and TOM'S wanted to win. The team with which he had followed up on his 1991 German title in Japan that season was based a few miles down the road from the Fuji Speedway. It was serious about winning an event that ran from 1990-93 and had introduced a series of updates to test ahead of its'94 campaign. They actually didn't work, not that Kristensen got to test their effectiveness in the race.

"A rear wheelbearing failed in 100R [a fast, looping right-hander] and it sort of locked the rear wheel." he recalls. "I went straight off and barrel-rolled. The team managed to rebuild the car overnight around the same monocoque, but with the old aerodynamics."

Kristensen made it up to fifth in his heat from 15th on the grid, which meant he lined up ninth for the final. A storming first lap brought the TOM'S up to third, which became second a lap later. He then became embroiled in a battle with Roberto Colciago's RC Motorsport Dallara.

"Those races were real slipstreamers," he recalls. "We ran little downforce, which made the cars extremely skittish, and you had to duck your head down into the cockpit on the long start-finish straight."

Kristensen took the lead on lap five and swapped places with his Italian rival three times more before getting back to the front at the start of lap 17.

"I got the impression that he could pass me more easily than I could pass him," recalls Kristensen. "There was a yellow flag at Turn 1, which cleared for the penultimate lap, so I thought I was in big trouble. I really had to close the door on him that lap and I just managed to hang on.

"That was a thrilling weekend: we managed to turn a low into one of the big highs in my career."

JUNE 2013: LE MANS 24 HOURS
Audi R18 e-tron quattro - 1st (with Allan McNish & Loic Duval)

Audi's hopes were pinned on the shoulders of the winning line-up for nearly three quarters of the duration of an emotional race in which Aston Martin driver Allan Simonsen had lost his life. It was also the first Le Mans for Kristensen since the death of his father, Carl-Erik, and a significant win after the disappointments of 2011 and '12 for him and McNish.

"The pressure throughout that race was intense," Kristensen recalls. "It was a different race after Allan's death and a difficult race with the conditions. There was a lot of what I would call 'local' rain and much of the time we were on slicks. That made it so mentally tough."

March 1999: SEBRING 12 HOURS
BMW V12 LMR (Schnitzer) - 1st (with JJ Lehto & Jorg Muller)

"This is where the Sebring story started for me; it laid the foundations of my later success," says a driver who would go on to win the Florida enduro a record-breaking six times. "It was an important victory, along with our performance at Le Mans, because it resulted in the call from Dr [Wolfgang] Ullrich to join Audi for the following year."

Perhaps the most amazing thing about Kristensen's victory in the Williams-built and Schnitzer-run BMW V12 LMR together with JJ Lehto and Jorg Muller was that the cars weren't even going to Sebring the week before the race. Schnitzer had been testing at Homestead, down the road in Florida, and looked unlikely to take part.

"We finished the test on Friday and I went to bed believing that I'd be flying home to Europe the following day," recalls Kristensen. "It all changed overnight, and John Russell [who ran the project for Williams] was instrumental in making BMW change its mind."

Kristensen had to repel the advances of the Dyson Racing Riley & Scott-Ford MkIII in the closing stages, finishing just nine seconds up at the chequered flag.

"The BMW was a low-aero car designed for Le Mans and the Riley & Scott had a lot more downforce and was flying in the night," he says. "The lower temperatures meant that our tyres had fallen outside of their optimum operating window and there was a lot of sand on the track through Turns 10 and 11 all the way to Turn 13. It was a very tricky race at the end."

AUGUST 1985: NORDIC-SCANDINAVIAN KARTING CHAMPIONSHIP - BOHUS
Kali-Kart-Parilla Formula A - 1st

"This became a very important victory in my mind over the following years," says Kristensen of his triumph over future two-time F1 world champion Mika Hakkinen (pictured on the left) in Sweden in the summer of 1985. "He quickly went on to become a big star and was just about to enter Formula 1 when I got my first professional drive in F3 the same season in '91.

"It took me much longer than him to move up into single-seaters without the kind of support he had in Finland, but that race meant that I knew I had something to offer. I thought that if Mika can do it, so can I."

The end-of-season event was by all accounts a humdinger. Even Kristensen doesn't remember how many times he and Hakkinen swapped the lead.

"I'm told that it was eight times, but I can't be sure," he says. "All I know is that we were racing so hard that we didn't even notice the chequered flag."

August 1999: GERMAN STW CUP - NURBURGRING
Honda Accord (JAS) - 16th & 1st

This is the race Kristensen picks out as the highlight of his Super Touring career with Honda that straddled the German STW series and the British Touring Car Championship. A first-corner accident, after he had qualified second, left him beached in the gravel, out of the race and down in 16th on the grid for race two.

"I was really angry about that, but I had two more fresh tyres than everyone else because I hadn't done the first race," recalls Kristensen. "That anger made me really determined and I came from the back to win. I went completely mad and was really on it all the way."

March 2001: SEBRING 12 HOURS
Audi R8 - 2nd (with Emanuele Pirro and Frank Biela)

This is up there with Kristensen's 2005 performance at Sebring, even if it is one that got away. It is the drive that, for this author, secured his status as a sportscar great and one the driver remembers with fondness.

Kristensen took 20 seconds out of leader Rinaldo Capello in the sister car over the penultimate stint and looked as though he was going to be rewarded with victory. The charge had been a little too fast, however. He had failed to slow down sufficiently as he entered the pits for what should have been the final time and was handed a penalty.

"I know I was very fast at the end," he says. "Quite often it's the races you don't win where your performances stand out."

June 2003: LE MANS 24 HOURS
Bentley Speed 8 - 1st (with Rinaldo Capello and Guy Smith)

Kristensen picks his Le Mans victory with Bentley in 2003 as a highlight of his career for nothing if not for historical reasons, but he also believes it was a significant race in his development.

"I feel proud and honoured to have won Le Mans with an historic manufacturer like Bentley," he says.

Kristensen also believes this race marked a subtle change in his approach to Le Mans.

"I realised the importance of working with my team-mates," he explains. "It took some time for the team as a whole to gel, and I think I was at the right stage of my career in terms of my age to help make that happen."

That's Kristensen's way of explaining the crucial role he played in bringing the disparate elements of a team made up of Racing Technology Norfolk, Richard Lloyd's Apex Motorsport team and Joest Racing together into a squad capable of winning the 24 Hours.

There's also the small matter of Kristensen's pace throughout the event.

"We were fast that year; I remember I was flying at the test day and I put it on pole, which gave me tremendous satisfaction," he recalls. "We had a lot of bouncing on the straight at the beginning [caused by yield in the rear torsion-bar suspension], but once it settled down there was no way we were going to lose that race."

June 2001: LE MANS 24 HOURS
Audi R8 - 1st (with Emanuele Pirro and Frank Biela)

The race that stands out for Kristensen from his hat-trick of victories at Le Mans in 2000-02 was the '01 event held in wet conditions. The win was made all the more poignant because it came less than two months after the death of Michele Alboreto in an accident during testing at the wheel of an Audi R8.

"I'm most proud of that one because we had something like 19 hours of rain," he explains. "We were fast but we knew we potentially had an issue with the gearbox; Frank felt something might be wrong as we headed into the night.

"The stint I remember most came early on Sunday morning. I was put onto intermediates and endured the most frightening 20 minutes of my life. It was 20 minutes of near misses because I couldn't get any heat into the tyres.

"I complained to our engineer, Jo Hausner, but he remained very calm and told me to stay out. It was the right decision and by the time of the next pitstop we had extended our lead, but at the time I felt that it was too much weight for my shoulders to bear."

The gearbox issues did finally develop to the stage where a complete rear-end replacement was required, but Kristensen and his team-mates came home a lap ahead of their sister car.

July 2006: DTM - BRANDS HATCH
Audi A4 DTM (Abt) - retired

"I choose this one because it was a win that got away, which could have made the difference in the championship that season." That's how Kristensen sums up the events of round four of the DTM at Brands in 2006.

Kristensen was fastest during pre-event testing and ended up claiming pole by 0.25s - over the 1.2 miles of the Brands Hatch Indy circuit!

"I think it was pretty much just under a tenth in each of the three sectors," recalls Kristensen. "I really found a rhythm that weekend. I was leading and easing away when the front suspension disintegrated.

"If I'd won that race I'd have left Brands with a decent lead in the points. It would have given me real momentum and, I don't want to do Bernd Schneider [the eventual champion] a disservice, but I think I could have won the title or at least taken it to the final race without that.

"I'd put that disappointment up there with losing Le Mans from the lead in both 1999 and '07. It was still a special race for me; probably my best in the DTM."