Audi fended off a tough challenge from Peugeot to win the Le Mans 24 Hours sports car race for the 10th time in 12 years on Sunday, with Germany’s Andre Lotterer taking the checkered flag.
Lotterer, whose teammates in the No. 2 Audi were France’s Benoit Treluyer and Switzerland’s Marcel Faessler, won by 13.854 seconds in the fourth-closest finish in the race’s 79 editions.
The No. 9 Peugeot driven by Simon Pagenaud, Sebastien Bourdais and Pedro Lamy finished second with the French manufacturer’s cars also finishing third, fourth and fifth at the Sarthe circuit.
Photo: EPA
“This year, we were beaten by a competitor stronger than us,” Bourdais said. “Audi has developed a highly reliable and fast car. We chose to work on reliability. The objective is met, but we missed by 13 seconds at the finish.”
The third-placed No. 8 Peugeot, driven by Nicolas Minassian, Stephane Sarrazin and Franck Montagny, finished two laps behind the leading pair.
Audi’s two other works cars, driven at the time by former winner Allan McNish and Germany’s Mike Rockenfeller, both crashed spectacularly on Saturday and the final result was in the balance to the finish as Lotterer held off Pagenaud to defend Audi’s title.
Photo: Reuters
“One more lap and we could not finish we had so little fuel,” Audi motorsport director Wolfgang Ullrich said.
“I gave everything. It was a tragic race for us,” said Lotterer, whose teammate Faessler was the first Swiss to win Le Mans. “I was really worried about Mike, I asked the team to give me news of him. In the end, there was only one thing to do which was attack.”
Both McNish and Rockenfeller were lucky to escape serious injury in horrendous crashes that triggered two of the five safety car interludes.
McNish went out in the first hour when he clipped a slower Ferrari, skimmed across the gravel and slammed hard into the tire wall with the car almost leaping over the barrier.
Debris showered nearby photographers and marshals, while wheels bounced around them, fortunately without serious consequences.
Rockenfeller then wrote off the No. 1 R18 TDI when he hit another Ferrari after sunset while traveling at full speed on the fast stretch leading to Indianapolis with eight hours in the books. The German was kept in hospital overnight.
The safety car was deployed twice more in the early hours after more crashes including an accident between a Corvette driven by Jan Magnussen and the Porsche 911 of Christian Reid.
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