The success of the Aston Martins in their first races actually motivated us very much in our preparations. But, when we came to the official test here on June 5 and found ourselves some way from the Astons' pace, the general assumption was that we were sandbagging, sticking strictly to the 3:55 rule.
That wasn't actually the case so, the week in between the test day and the race, our engineers went back to Detroit and worked like madmen to try and find us a bit more speed here and there and get us more comfortable in the car. They worked wonders because when we came back for the race, the car was far more comfortable to drive, and we could do a lap time that was respectable and reasonable. We knew we had a very good race car.
It was a great race though, wasn't it? I really didn't think it would be that close for that long after 22 hours there was a pair from each of our teams on the same lap. I followed both of the Aston Martin cars at various times during the race and, although we could close up under braking, and we were better in the Porsche Curves, we just couldn't touch them on the straights.
In my final stint, the team told me that we needed a certain lap time to make sure the Aston Martins would never catch us for the lead. That meant driving absolutely balls out, flat out, the whole time. In the configuration our car was in, that was as fast as it could go, but we achieved the lap time we needed, and they broke.
The only car problems we had were the two punctures. Le Mans uses the most amazingly sharp gravel in their gravel traps and that, combined with the number of rookies at the race who seemed to spend more time in them or spreading their contents over the track, definitely had an impact. A huge proportion of teams had punctures in the race. We were just lucky we had no damage as a result.
I've seen other people crawl back to the pits at 50 or 60 mph, but when you have to do it yourself, it's not funny with cars going by you at 200. Olivier also performed a miracle to save the car when his rear blew out - he went SO sideways in the Porsche Curves, but somehow he kept it off the wall.
Throughout the race none of the drivers or, in fact, anyone on the team, made any mistakes and we didn't damage the car in any way. Everybody knew exactly what they were going to do from the word go, and what the strategy was even when we changed things on the hoof such as single stinting tires instead of double stinting them. Communication was key. Yes, we wanted to race the Astons desperately, but we didn't want to sacrifice our reliability by chasing, chasing, chasing. I think they were trying to lure us into that. We ended up pressuring them, much like last year, though this year was far, far hotter and far, far tougher.
HAHA just like Gran Turismo). This of course meant that Ferrari got a gimme.
