Traffic Will Decide Petit Le Mans, Drivers Say

ROAD ATLANTA—With 53 cars competing on a 2.5-mile racetrack, traffic more than top speed will determine who will win Petit Le Mans, according to two top drivers.

Petit Le Mans, the American Le Mans Series’ season finale, a ten-hour, 1000-mile endurance contest, is also an Intercontinental Le Mans Cup race. It will be a showdown between the two European giants of the sports car racing world, Peugeot and Audi. Audi has won the race nine times since 2000, and Peugeot has won the last two.

Petit 2011 will pit the two against one another again, and it will be a very even contest.

The #1 Audi R18 TDI of Allan McNish was the fastest car on the Road Atlanta track—but only by two-thousandths of a second.

McNish’s lap of 1:09.768 is so close to the 1:09.770 turned in by Franck Montagny in the #8 Peugeot 908, the cars and drivers are for all intents even—after four days of testing, basically no one has a performance advantage.

Romain Dumas got the second Audi to within16 thousandths of his teammate; again, virtually identical performance. The gap to the #7 Peugeot Anthony Davidson–.115seconds off the lead—seems gigantic by comparison, yet in most series, a tenth of second is considered extremely close.

Basically, the diesels are all equally fast. The race will come down to execution—not making driving errors, not losing time in the pits, and not making strategy errors.

And traffic. At an ILMC press conference before afternoon practice, Audi’s Tom Kristensen—McNish’s co-driver—and Anthony Davidson both emphasized that traffic management would be the key to winning.

“Certainly this is a race we’d like to win,” Davidson said. “Traffic is going to be the dictator of that. With 53 cars out there it is going to be a tough challenge for everyone.

“It’s going to be close between Peugeot and Audi again; it’s been that way all season. It’s going to be about how you manage the traffic. That’s really where you are going to make or lose time in this race.”

Kristensen agreed. “With almost sixty cars here, it is going to be very mentally demanding.

“It’s a brilliant circuit. It’s narrow, it has a lot of blind corners—there’s off-camber, there’s plus-camber. Everyone loves it but it is maybe the toughest one on the calendar.”

Kristensen described trying to negotiate traffic around Road Atlanta’s blind corners: “Throw some stones on the floor and try to walk through blindfolded without touching them.”

Kristensen described Petit Le Mans as part of the “Grand Slam” of endurance racing—Sebring, Le Mans and Petit. “These three races are the main ones in modern sports car racing.

“The race track here, the crowds here—everyone loves it. You have Sebring at the beginning of the year and everyone hopes this one will stay as one of the of the last races of the year.

“It is called ‘Petit Le Mans,’ but I’d say this year Peugeot might call it ‘Le Mans Revenge,’ Kristensen joked.

Le Mans revenge? Audi did win Le Mans, unquestionably the premier sports car race on the planet. But Peugeot has beaten Audi at every Intercontinental Le Mans Cup race this season: Spa, Imola, Silverstone were Peugeot victories. Peugeot also finished ahead of Audi at Sebring, the other joint ALMS/ILMC race this season.

Ralf Jüttner, Technical Director of Audi Sport Team Joest, put it simply: “For Road Atlanta, there can be only one aim: all-out attack! We’ve got to finally win there again.”

Whoever wins, this race is going to be non-stop drama.

The 14th running of Petit Le Mans will start at 11:30 a.m. on Saturday, October 1 at the Road Atlanta racetrack in Braselton, Ga.

For ticket information visit the Road Atlanta website or call 770-967-6143, or 1-800-849-RACE. Tickets will also be available at the gate on race day.