Indeed, Brabham, Turner and Rydell's success at La Sarthe came despite the GT1 class boasting arguably its strongest contingent in years, with a whole gaggle of DBR9s, the two bright yellow ‘Vettes and a brace of Oreca-run Saleens thrown into the mix for good measure too. And that's to say nothing of the challenging weather conditions.
“I think the GT1 competition this year was as tough as we've seen it for a long time,” the 41-year-old acknowledged, “and that made the victory even sweeter. The other Astons in the class were all very good cars; the Saleens I knew would be fast – the S7R is an extremely quick car with a great team behind it and we had a bit of a battle with them at the beginning – but I have to admit I thought they would be more of a factor in the race than they were, although it was their first time so the expectations may have been slightly high.
“Leading up to the race we got very little dry running, and because the race started dry that made it a bit of a guess on set-up. We weren't 100 per cent sure we had that correct, but as soon as I started doing a few laps and the tyres got up to the right temperature and pressure, the car was right on where we really wanted it to be. The guys did a great job in giving me that car, and obviously Darren and Rickard did a great job behind the wheel too.
“We had a very strong car for the race; we were expecting more rain throughout it, which I think would have been a bit tougher, but the car was quickest in the dry conditions and we got some pit-stops right with the strategy early on which gave us a bit of a gap. That meant when it did rain towards the end we had the comfort of actually having some time on our side to just take things a bit easier.
“The last two hours were pretty difficult; we run our car quite low to the ground compared to the Corvette, so we were suffering much more with aquaplaning than they were. I think right at the end they were the fastest GT1 car on the circuit and I was probably the slowest.
