In yet another marvellous race and an amazing event filled with exuberance and thrill, Audi took the top honours at Le Mans 24 Hours Endurance Race 2010. Audi, who have been long running masters of the course here at Le Mans with their diesel powered LMP cars, have famously lost out to Peugeot in their amazing bid last year for the title with their capable HDi powered LMPs. However, things seem to be back in the German’s hands with Audi clean sweeping out the stakes at Le Mans with all first, second and third places bagged by the Ingolstadt based Manufacturer.
Reliability issues bugged a lot of manufacturers and teams this time when even Peugeot had their leading 908s retiring and Audi Sport North America team with drivers Mike Rockenfeller, Timo Barnhard and Romain Dumas clinched the overall victory. The other two factory run teams wrapped up the podium for the brand with the 4 interlocked rings. Audi proved a significant point or two this time again while again projecting their diesel technology into the limelight at rocket speeds. The deal closer this time has to be their new variable geometry turbine for the turbo charged diesel engines in the R15 TDI LMP racer.
In the GT class too, this trend of lacking reliability continued with Teams like Rizi Competizione Ferrari retiring due to gearbox troubles. While a controversial move by GT2 class leading Corvette’s driver Anthony Davidson crashed the corvette rendering it out of the race, in GT1 class the leading Matech-Ford GT1s also retired. The GT2 class title was clinched by the Team Felbermayr-Proton running on Porsches.
In a race that seemed to be quite eventful, only 50% of the competitors finished while the winning Audi team also set the record for the longest distance covered by completing 397 laps thus doing an impressive 5410.7km. That should sound like great news for endurance racing fans. It is undisputable that Le Mans has proved itself to be quite the phenomenon that it always remained.
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