The racing is over and what a year it has been. But before I talk about 2008, let's go through what happened at Laguna.
As we had no chance to win the LMP2 championship, we were all out to win the last round of what has been an amazing season of racing. The goals I set in my mind were a pole, a fastest lap and a win.
So qualifying was going to be the first target and at the beginning of practice on the Friday it was not looking great. We were off the pace a bit and we had some work to do.
Following a good look at the data and a few meetings with the engineers though, we came up with a new set-up. As we got closer to qualifying it was looking better, but with so many red flags in the sessions, it was difficult to gauge what the real pace would be.
I did my normal mental preparation before and did a lap in my head and got ready to go. We waited for some of the cars to go out first, as I was concerned that the GT cars had put dirt onto the track in their qualifying session. We then saw a gap in the traffic and went out to do the time.
The car felt in good shape and so I pushed as hard as I could. Robin on the team said that the fastest time was a 1m 10.6s, which was the fastest time of the week. I pulled out a good one and did a 1m 10.1s - good enough for pole and then a red flag came out.
When I came in we were 0.4s up on the field, which is a lot there, so we were pleased with that. I went out again, as everyone else did, but no one beat it and we got our third overall pole of the year - a fantastic effort by the team especially after the last race. The team really showed character.
I did get some satisfaction beating my mate Gil and Tony Kanaan in the AGR car. The Fernandez car was also very quick and Luis Diaz came very close to beating my time at the end of the session. So an all Acura front row was fantastic and all four Acura's were in the top five. Great stuff.
I started the race and was looking forward to a long successful one, but it didn't turn out that way.
I got a good start and lead into the first corner. Just as I was about to turn into the hairpin, to my surprise Gil was on the outside of me trying to go around. I thought he was brave as the tyres were cold and it really tricky at Laguna on cold tyres. He didn’t pull it off though and so we led the first few laps. The car was in great shape and I thought if it stays like this, then we can do really well.
