Braking into the first chicane in a GT2 car, I think our terminal speed is about 185mph and the prototypes are doing 225-230. We brake at 175 metres lets say, conservatively, and they are nailing the brakes at 100 metres and when you consider that our speed has already halved, the difference in speed when the hit the brakes is about 150mph and we are both there at the same time. That is the hardest thing to get your head round, the braking and having things that you see in your mirrors that are miles away as you enter a corner, suddenly appear alongside you half way through it. That is the hardest part of Le Mans, making sure that you don't do anything daft and don't get in peoples way.
You have to learn to use the prototypes properly because they can help you and there are peculiarities between them. At slow corners like Mulsanne and Arnage, we take those corners faster than the prototypes because they are so reliant on aerodynamic grip so you go barrelling along in the fast stuff and they just rifle past you at some speed, but then you get into the slow corners and have to make sure that you don't drive into their back-sides because they brake earlier for the slow stuff and their apex speed is lower. The experience was great and now we have an entry for this year, like everything, there will be some familiarity in knowing the circuit and knowing what the car will do and knowing some tricks of what you should and shouldn't do in certain places. I think that will be really helpful.
Q:
You may not have won the race but you must have been delighted with the result, a result that could have been better had it not been for another little problem in the shape of a stuck wheel nut…
Chris Niarchos:
Every time I think about it I get depressed, because again it was just a small part, a wheel stud, that snapped off and it spun the wheel on the hub and put us in the garage for 18 laps – which is about an hour and a half at Le Mans – and then we only finished something like three laps off the lead. We just have to be pragmatic about it and we know we had a great result at Le Mans.
Ferrari was ecstatic, they'd never had a car at Le Mans in GT2 that had finished at that kind of level, the team had only started its international career a year earlier and turned up at Le Mans to get on the podium at the second attempt – and my first.
