Pescarolo stars again

"The car is really fast," said Bourdais. "We had a car to finish on the podium, but we lost more than ten laps in the pits. At one point before our retirement we would have been third if you added those ten laps to the mileage. It's a shame but that is Le Mans."

Engine failure stopped the Bourdais/Nicolas Minassian/Emmanuel Collard car late on Sunday morning, and the car had been hit by problems earlier in the race too. The team is running the Judd motor in place of its traditional Peugeot for the first time this year, and it looks like reliability has been traded for speed.



"There have been so many problems since Wednesday that I cannot even remember what happened anymore," said Bourdais. "I didn't expect unreliability like that, though I thought there might be some installment issues with the fact that the engine has not done much running in this particular car."

The team's "banker" entry is looking good for a fourth place, although it too has been hit by a few troubles including an off by Benoit Treluyer. The supposedly more conservative driver lineup of Treluyer, Eric Comas and Soheil Ayari ran as high as third earlier in the race.