An evening with Allan McNish and Tom Kristensen

Written by Justin Clarke Monday, 17 October 2011 00:00

Last Saturday evening I headed to the Audi Quattro rooms in London for the Motor Sport for an evening with Allan McNish, Tom Kristensen plus Audi engineers Howden ‘H’ Haynes and Leena Gade, the first female engineer to win Le Mans.

We were whisked straight up to the Audi Quattro museum with a mix of road and race cars plus the Le Mans 2011 winning car, complete with race grime and Peugeot scrapes!

The evening started off with a showing of Truth in 24, the film Audi made about their 2008 Le Mans season. One of our customers at Le Mans this year told me about the film, but it isn’t available in the UK, so I was looking forward to this exclusive showing and it didn’t disappoint. It was really interesting to see how the team strategy developed over the season and how they remained upbeat even though they knew that Peugeot were consistently faster.

For me the highlight was the scenes at Le Mans when Howden Haynes calls Tom Kristensen towards the end of the race to change to intermediate tyres. Kristensen challenges the decision, but does pit at the same time as the lead Peugeot, which stayed on slicks. When the rain does come down, the Peugeot is all over the place and Kristensen takes the lead to win! In real life the discussion between H and Kristensen on whether to pit or not was ‘very lively’!

After the film showing we had a Q&A session with the drivers and engineers. Two surprises for me were that both engineers are English, I just didn’t expect this from such a strong German team. No surprises that a lot of the questions were to McNish about the crash at Le Mans this year – he didn’t realise how bad the crash was and when the car came to a stop the first thing he did was try to restart it! There were lots of questions about petrol and diesel performance to H and Leena, H’s parting shot was that even if all teams had the same engines, Audi and Peugeot would still lead the field, not arrogant just a reflection on their dedication and investment.

All in all a great evening, rounded off by a prize draw for two tickets to the Motor Sport Hall of Fame awards next February, which I won!

It’s worth going to the Audi Quattro rooms just to see the cars on display and if you get a chance to see Truth in 24, it really is one of the best Le Mans documentaries around.