When you win it at your second attempt – or your first attempt as some have done, like Alex Wurz, for example – then you think it's reasonably easy because it has gone reasonably easily for you that time, but then over the course of years afterwards it reminds you that 'bloody hell, this is some race', and it is a hard one. More often things go wrong than go right, but you've got to pick yourself up, dust yourself down and keep on fighting, and to some extent that's Le Mans. Whether it be through the race itself or before or whatever, things will happen and you've just got to keep your head down and keep on fighting away.
Q:
Looking at your season so far with Audi, obviously you took part in the Sebring 12 Hours in Florida back in March, and then you've been racing in the Le Mans Series too – does that give you confidence approaching the 24 Hours, or do you feel apprehensive perhaps..?
AM:
I would say that the thing that gives us confidence is that we are making moves forwards. We're making the car faster; we've reacted to the fact that Peugeot were quite a bit quicker at the beginning of the year. Also we've got under control I would have said the reliability problems that afflicted us – we had a brake disc failure at Sebring, which was unheard of.
A lot of people were saying 'oh, this is going to be a problem for Audi, they're now under real pressure and they're cracking and failing and so on', but as we've seen in the LMS races, we've got those things sorted out, we're producing consistent, very, very fast performances and improving the car at the same time. Our pit-stops are excellent, and I think our strategy is very, very good, so all-in-all we are in I would say quite a secure position. If anything, the cracks are starting to appear at Peugeot. I'm not really sure why, but that seems to be the case right now.
Q:
How important was it to Audi to have that first head-to-head of the year with Peugeot back at Sebring?
AM:
I'm not really sure, because we knew what they were capable of last year at Le Mans – remember they were on pole, and their fastest lap at Le Mans last year was just three or four tenths slower than mine; it wasn't that much. Where they were down last year was that in race trim they were very inconsistent and couldn't keep the pace, whereas we could do it wet, dry, intermediates, day, night – didn't matter. They've learned from that and they've come back stronger.
I don't think there's anything we saw at Sebring that was a surprise except – and they did it again at Le Mans on the test day – I have to say I was surprised at how quickly they could put in a lap time. They did it within ten laps I think at Sebring, and then at Le Mans their first lap time was a 22.7s and their second was a 22.2s. That was pretty impressive, and you can't get away from it. I tip my hat a little bit to that – I didn't like it when I saw the times, but I tip my hat to it! That was really the thing that surprised us – not their ultimate pace and not some of the problems they had either, because they were some of the problems they'd had in 2007.
Q:
On the subject of the recent test day, last year's qualifying and race were affected very much by the weather, and so was the test day this year; how difficult did that make things?
AM:
Well, you go to the test day to make sure that everything you have tested and everything you believed in simulations from the wind tunnel and everything else is all correct and relates one-to-one with Le Mans. You also try to make sure that all your fuel mileages are as you expect, and have a little look at what everyone else is doing. We didn't get any of that whatsoever.
Everything was run in changeable conditions; I don't think I did two corners in two laps consecutively that were the same, just because of the weather. The reality is that all it gave us was maybe a bit of an idea of what it is we need to think about if it is wet and damp, but it didn't give us an impression of what I think the race week will actually be like.
We're in the same boat as everybody else, though, so I suppose from an Audi point-of-view it was actually not bad, because we've got much more information on Le Mans and how to go about it all – especially in changeable and tricky conditions as we've seen this time – than probably anybody else on the grid.
Q:
