Reigning American Le Mans Series champion and 1998 Le Mans 24 Hours winner Allan McNish takes a wistful look back at the Audi R8 he and his Audi team-mates piloted to a staggering 50 victories during its seven-year lifespan.
I’ll be having a sentimental look at the Audi R8 on the BEN/MotorSport stand at the Autosport International Show this coming weekend. It’s the actual car I raced in the 2004 Le Mans Endurance Series and at Le Mans that year, but also in which I scored a win at Silverstone in 2005. However, my last R8 races were actually last season – an incredible six years since my first R8 race.
Dindo (Capello) and I were doing the full ten-race ALMS championship, and Audi Sport’s philosophy was the same as back in 2000 when we gave a race debut to the Audi R8 at Sebring but then reverted back to the older R8R for the next two races at Charlotte and Silverstone while the R8 was further tested in Europe in readiness for Le Mans. So for the Houston and Mid-Ohio races last May the R8 – the ‘Old Girl’ – was dusted off while the R10 TDI was put through its paces testing back in Europe in readiness for the big one in France.
Having driven in Le Mans Series races at
Silverstone, Nurburgring and Istanbul in the second half of 2005, I knew how hard it was to achieve top results in the Audi R8 with the regulation changes so thought we’d be hanging on just trying to claim points at Houston, Mid-Ohio and also Lime Rock in July – a race which would come too soon after Le Mans to get an R10 TDI out to Connecticut.
But at Houston, two things came our way. It was a very, very bumpy street circuit and the race was staged in the evening. While we were able to run 100 per cent from the first laps in testing to the last lap of the race and get the best out of everything that we had, for a variety of reasons the opposition didn’t.
