Jul 8 2009 by Our Correspondent, Dumfries Standard Wednesday
Well, here we are a few weeks since Le Mans, and we [Audi] weren't able to retain the title, that we had fought very hard for in 2008 and on this occasion, Peugeot got the better of us.
They had looked as if they could be able to this in the past but we stole the trophies from under their noses more often than not.
Sebring 2009 was another example of this but, you know, really this is racing at its best.
There is us, Peugeot, Aston Martin and if they had been a bit more consistent, they would have been in there all the time, in fact we had to watch over our shoulder for them at the end of the race and, all in all, I think right now sport car racing is probably at its most difficult.
Even the privateer teams like Oreca are definitely, in my opinion, of far, far higher quality calibre of a team than some of the manufacturers of 10 years ago.
The level of performance now is just so high. It means that the testing and development is very critical and all of our testing and development was behind closed doors all of the time and this is something, that unfortunately, we can't talk too much about and obviously we weren't in a position, or we didn't want to give any information away to the opposition, but they didn't want to give anything away to us either. Part of it was the performance to improve the R15 TDI and the low downforce “spec” that you are going to have at Le Mans.
Part of it was obviously reliability and that bit us a little bit at Le Mans, however. If we are quite frank about it, then a new car engine concept with the experience of Audi coming to Le Mans is very difficult and I didn't think it was logical or even likely in the slightest way that all of the cars would go through without a problem.
Unfortunately we “lost” a car very early on and we also had a problem with the other car and so from that side it kind of left us as the lone gunner up at the front, not the intention, but it's the way it turned out.
The final thing that we were working very hard on was the change of the regulations. You know the 30 kilos additional weight into the car that the ACO mandate, and I'm not big into the politics of it but I do know it's a wee bit of a headache for the engineers and designers to suddenly throw in 30kg somewhere.
It doesn't sound like very much but you can't just put it in one place, it's got to be spread around and the space just isn't designed for it in there.
But it had been a heavy workload for everyone at Audi Sport leading up to the race and there was also a lot of marketing as well which I had to do, in London, at Silverstone, Manchester, Dumfries and in Glasgow, with newspaper, radio and TV journalists, which was also very cool.
I also had a blast with the R8 V10 in Spain with UK media and now that V10 engine is just stunning in that car, absolutely no question about it.
One of the big strengths of Audi is their ability to use the Le Mans sportscar programme and drag the technology and development through to the road car production.
Also just to have that racing link between the two and now with the R8 LMS hitting the tracks and finishing second in the Nurburgring 24 Hours, having led much of the race, it was quite nice to have all that buzz around.
In May, I was also darting between the endurance test because some of my sponsors from Jewson were at the Monaco Grand Prix.
Also trying to grab five minutes of TV because it was the Indy 500 where I was thinking at one point that Mr Franchitti was going to make it a pretty special weekend again by winning but it didn't come together.
Then just prior to actually going to Le Mans, I went to Silverstone and this is something I'm very proud of as Dalbeattie High School again won the British Model Car Championship after designing, building and project managing and then finally racing their remote controlled car.
If you log onto http://www.allanmcnish.com/ and go to DBT McNish Racing, you will see how a group of 14-year-olds, basically ran a “mini” racing team.
They came back from their second position in 2008 to re-design the rear wing to have a better aero platform which they did in their own wind tunnel.
Even my engineer, Howden “H” Haynes, who came along with my data engineer, Lena Gade, were impressed with their little tyre warmers.
You get back to some of the basics doing this, how do you make a tyre warmer for a remote controlled car? Well they made a little box and put a travel hair dryer in there to heat it up. It's ingenious really isn't it?
Can you imagine if Formula 1 went back to that sort of basics - it would be quite good wouldn't it? But I was very, very pleased and proud for them because, like I say, they came back from not having won in 2008.
The other fact was that for the first time they were not the lone school from Scotland as they competed against a 100 other schools from the UK.
They were actually part of a five-school group coming from my region, Dumfries and Galloway, and two other of these schools picked up rookie awards.
You know I would say that the history of our region for the automobile industry with designers and engineers, never mind the drivers and things, is probably going to continue quite strongly if I just look at that.
But DBT's fight back from second position last year to first is a very good lesson for us at Audi Sport in so far as that you know you can be knocked on the nose, you can be beaten on a day by someone that basically does a better job than you and a reminder of how hard it is and then suddenly you have got to lick your wounds, you have got to get back out there fighting and take the charge to them and use that as motivation and so the group of Dalbeattie have certainly given us the impetus to just get back on track and we are very much looking forward to the next challenge of showing Peugeot what it is all about.
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