Le Mans 24 Hours 2007
Audi will be very pleased to have retained their Le Mans 24 Hours title after one of their cars crashed out in the second hour of the race, and a second suffered a similar fate 15 or so hours later.
The Number 3 Diesel engined R10 driven by Mike Rockenfeller crashed out early on Saturday and was travelling backwards when it hit the safety barrier. Later, with less than a third of the race left to run, it very much looked as if Allan McNish, Rinaldo Capello and seven time winner Tom Kristensen might triumph in the number 2 Audi, but they too suffered an accident after 16 hours when a wheel came off and Capello briefly became a passenger as the car ploughed into a tyre wall. Fortunately for Audi, their number 1 car was in second place at this point, and driven by Germans Frank Biela, Marco Werner and Italian Emanuele Pirro, was brought home to a second successive Le Mans 24-Hour victory for the Audi R10 Diesel.
The Audis were pushed hard in the race by another Diesel in the shape of Peugeot's new V12 engined 908 LMP cars driven by Sebastian Bourdais, Stephen Sarrazin and Pedro Lamy. The Peugeot 908 car came second having completed 359 laps to the winning Audi's 369 laps in 24 hours, and a second Peugeot piloted by Jacques Villeneuve, Nicolas Minassian and Marc Gené was running in second with just over an hour and a quarter to run when unfortunately it suffered mechanical failure.
After last year's race, the organisers vowed to bring in restrictions to limit the size of the Diesel powered cars' tanks to an equivalent energy rating as their petrol equivalents, but once again the R10 has won, and a second Diesel powered car has finished in the top three.
The Pescarlo Sport, Pescarlo 01 driven by Stéphane Sarrazin, Pedro Lamy and Sébastien Bourdais finished just one lap behind the Peugeot to take third place this year. In 2006, a Pescarlo C60 Hybrid driven by Sébastien Loeb, Eric Hélary and Franck Montagny had finished second, sandwiched between the two top running R10s.
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