Pescarolo: rules benefit diesel cars

His Pescarolo Sport team, whose C60 cars are fitted with normally-aspirated Judd petrol engines, lost out to the diesel-powered Audis' better race pace and fuel consumption, which allowed longer stints and therefore less pitstops.

At the end of the 24-hour race the first-placed Audi stopped a total of 27 times while covering 380 laps at the La Sarthe circuit. The second-placed Pescarolo, which similarly had a rather trouble-free event, had to stop five times more than its rival, managing a total of 376 laps.

"With these regulations it's impossible for a normal car to beat a diesel car except if there are some reliability problems," the Frenchman told autosport.com.

"It was a difficult race because it seems the regulations are much better for diesel cars than for normal-engined ones.

"If the ACO (the 24-hour race organizers) is not going to change the regulations there will be no more cars like mine in Le Mans, because you are eight or nine seconds slower than a diesel car and there's no reason to come back here if we have no chance at all.

"Manufacturers like Porsche, Nissan, Toyota or Honda will never come even if they want to, if they have to be far behind another car."

Asked how the regulations could be changed to make a more even playing field, Pescarolo replied: "It's very easy to change them because you can work on different aspects: the size of the restrictor, the turbo pressure and the capacity of the engine.

"You wouldn't want to do the latter because it's very complicated to build a new engine, but to force different turbo pressures and sizes of the restrictor is very easy to do, even for us."

Pescarolo, however, thinks the result his team were able to achieve is still positive.

"Of course we are a little bit disappointed because nearly all the problems occurred to the same car," he said, referring to his No. 16 car that suffered various reliability problems.

"But to be second between the two Audis for a small team like mine is very good. For all the work we've done here it's very important to be on the podium.

"The important thing was never needing to stop for anything except for changing the tyres and refuelling, as it happened with car No. 17. Of course we are disappointed with the No. 16 car."