D-Brief: Reflections on a great year.

Tuesday, 20th November 2007

Sportscar star looks back over another busy - but successful - year.

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The other part of this story which is pretty cool is the renewed relationship with Nick Wirth of Simtek. We worked together in 1994 doing the Formula One season in an under-funded team, and it was a tough year. The team had no real money and the car wasn't quick enough either, but we forged a strong relationship in that year.

Losing my team-mate, Roland Ratzenberger, at Imola was a difficult thing for all of us to deal with, but, 14 years on, we are together again and what a different situation we find ourselves in. We have both got older, wiser and much better at our jobs, and it has been great working, not only with Nick, but all the guys at Wirth Research. What these guys did to a standard Courage was amazing...

When we went to the first race at Sebring, the team was about three months behind, as we’d got the cars late and the team was still coming together. Still, we finished the race and showed great speed as well. We then went onto St Petersburg and we found ourselves in a great position to win but for radio communication to go down at a crucial point.

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We still finished third and that was a great result, but we then went on to Houston and got an overall pole position which stunned everyone. As we got through the first few races, we showed that we were a very serious team.

Then we had the Le Mans break and I went off to do the race for the Aston Martin race team. This is my favourite race of the year and I was so looking forward to it as I could see that Prodrive was going to be very tough to beat. I had a strong sense we would do well and the preparation before the race was mega.

Well, as we know, we won the event and it was just fantastic for me to be part of history in winning for Aston Martin. One of my dreams had come true and I was so pleased for Prodrive and Aston Martin and the effort they put in with not a huge budget was awesome. What is funny is that I have now been on the podium at Le Mans with Jaguar, Bentley and Aston Martin - not bad for an Aussie!