Liz Halliday made her return to the American Le Mans Series at Petit Le Mans, although her pleasure at making a comeback was tinged with disappointment after she was forced to retire from the 1000mile Road Atlanta event.

Halliday joined forces with Stuart Hall and Dean Stirling in the #888 Creation for the event, which marked her first ALMS outing in the LMP1 class.

Hall was given the job of starting the race and made progress up the order before pitting to hand the car over to Halliday, who also enjoyed a solid stint despite a spin in traffic.

However, Stirling then had an incident at turn one just after the three hour mark which saw him go off into the tyre wall and the car was forced into retirement.

“It's too bad that we didn't finish, but sometimes these things happen in motor racing,” Halliday said. “The good news is that Dean is ok. I was lucky in my incident because the Ferrari was about to turn into me and I had to turn sharply to avoid a serious accident, which resulted in a spin, but thankfully I didn't hit anything and we managed to get going again safely with some help from the marshals.

“I haven't raced at Road Atlanta for two years and it is my first time here in a P1 car which was pretty exciting! The car felt really good and we were all quick during the week which is credit to the team who worked hard and did a good job.

“Now we've got to look towards Laguna Seca in two weeks time and focus on getting a good result there.”