Audi Presents Petit Le Mans - 06/10/2001   Andy Wallace Column So Nearly At Laguna Seca   He seems to like all the ALMS tracks...and is looking forward to the last one. I’ve got my favourite circuits, but that list seems to include all of them at the moment. Laguna Seca hasn’t got massively fast corners, but they all flow in their own way. And it’s got the Corkscrew. We were looking forward to making amends for Mosport and Mid-Ohio. But straight off, we had masses of understeer, which is becoming an annoying feature recently. With the medium speed corners at this track, understeer really hurts your lap times. Basically, we were stuck in the 1:17s, and weren’t looking like getting any quicker. We do have a good feel now for what it is that’s giving us the problem, and we’re hoping for a change in time for the Petit Le Mans. So a great track, but we were a bit off the pace. It was my turn to qualify, and we’d worked hard at the car to dial out as much of the understeer as we could; basically by biasing the car more to the front, getting rid of some rear grip, and by running slightly softer front tyres. Suddenly, we were nine-tenths quicker than either of us had run so far. But it wasn’t exactly a clean session for me. Ed, our spotter and chief strategist, had a great view of most of the lap from the top of a hill. He was telling me on the radio that I’d had a clean quick lap so far. “Keep it up”, he said, “you’re on a quick one”. Well I got as far as the Corkscrew, then up ahead I saw a Cadillac on a slow lap (presumably an out lap). I assumed that he would be paying attention, and would keep out of the way or in any case off the line, as he descended down the Corkscrew. It’s so steep there once you turn left, that you can’t see the apex of the right hand part, but as the nose fell away, there was the Cadillac, right there. I was half way down the hill, and he was right in the way! I had to swerve to the right to miss him. I still believed that he must have left me at least some room between his car and the (still invisible at this point) right-hand apex. Not so. I suddenly realised that he was tight to the apex, and I was in fact driving across the kerbs and the dirt. He swerved left to finally get out of the way, but it was too late to save my lap - I was late on the power, and had a load of dirt on my tyres. Next lap and Frank Biela had spun at the same point (on the dirt I had left on the previous lap?). There were waved yellows everywhere, so that was that lap gone. But after that I did three or four almost identical laps (1:16.4), absolutely clean, the best the car could manage – and despite that nine-tenths improvement, we were sixth. If we’d been half a second faster we’d have been on the front row, but that’s not much of a consolation. In any case there are too many “if onlys” in Motor Racing. And as the saying goes, “if my Aunt had balls”... The weather had been very warm for each session so far, and we know that higher track surface temperatures make our understeer worse. After Qualifying, we spent a lot of time on the problem, and looking at the weather forecast. It looked like it would be cooler on raceday. In the (08:25 in the morning) warm up, it was quite chilly. The Audi was wonderful – virtually no understeer – a really big change. We were fastest, and both Johnny and I managed laps that were faster than the second quickest car in the session. And we were running on full tanks. The race was due to start at 12:00 noon, and with heavy cloud cover, the ambient and track surface temperatures stayed relatively low. Johnny started, got a really good one, then Lemarie spun in the middle of the first corner, then Dindo looped it on the exit; the cool track temperature had made it hard to generate sufficient tyre heat on the warm-up laps. Johnny managed to miss everyone, so we were third right away. He had a good fight with Biela and Magnussen, and it came down to Johnny chasing after the lead Panoz. Remember when I just nudged the Saleen at Mid Ohio and got a penalty? Well, as I watched the monitor in our pit, I saw Jan Magnussen dive inside, then collide with, one of the Corvettes. No penalty though... He did wipe off his dive planes on the left side, and so must have picked-up an understeer after that. Johnny told me that Magnussen began running wide on the exit of some corners as a result. He apparently ran wide on the right-handed penultimate corner. There’s a short chute leading to the final (left-handed) turn, and normally you go right to line up for it. If you’ve lost momentum though, and you’ve got someone breathing down your neck, you’d stay left to protect the inside. I wasn’t there and didn’t see what actually happened, but according to my team-mate, Jan moved right, which was probably his first mistake. Johnny had the momentum and went to go past on the left. On seeing this, Magnussen moved left to try to block, but was a bit late getting there. The two cars touched – sending the Panoz spinning backwards down the pit lane entry and into the tyre wall. But there was no video evidence, and we were given a 20 second penalty for the contact. We tried explaining what had happened, but there was no escaping it. I had to sit there for 20 seconds when I got in the car, while Pirro was driving his Audi into the distance. It was getting hotter as the race wore on, but the car was still behaving itself, without too much understeer. I was gradually catching Emanuele Pirro, and he had a stop still to make. He decided not to change tyres at the stop, and that was the key to the final stages of the race. I was about 40 seconds behind, got my head down, and the gap came down by the lap. The 20-second penalty hadn’t helped, but what really lost us the race was the amount of time I lost trying to lap one of the Cadillacs. I was doing 1:18s, but I just got stuck behind it. There were waved blue flags everywhere, but for some reason he decided not to make life easy for me. Laguna Seca is narrow, and there isn’t much room to pass. My 1:18s became a 1:20, then a 1:21, then another 1:20 on the lap I got past, so there went seven seconds wasted. He had nothing to gain by doing that: I always move out of the way in that situation. It got worse. There he was again! He must have ducked into the pits for his last stop – and then come back out in front of me. I lost about the same amount of time getting around him again. A couple of times he cut right across me going up the hill, and I had to stand on the brakes to miss him. There were blue flags everywhere – again. I really don’t know what his problem was. So although I’d been catching Pirro at three to three and a half seconds per lap towards the end of the race, I just needed a few more laps. The other drivers were all very aware of what was going on behind and who was trying to pass and where. The BMW drivers especially, are top quality. They always see you coming and react in the right way. They stay in the right place – not necessarily move out of the way – and they’re never a problem. So we lost out by just 1.6 seconds, but at least we scored a second place. That was great for the team, who’ve done a terrific job this year – but we’d all love to win one before it’s over. So we’re all looking forward to Road Atlanta. The track and the format are both excellent. It should be a cracking race, and if we can conquer the understeer, we’ll have a really good chance. The entry is approaching 50 I believe. It should be a really good punch up. These ALMS races are proving to be classic Motor Races. We’ve got a test a week before the race, and believe it or not, that will be our first test of the year. You get so little time at the meeting – you need to go testing, and at last we are. We should be able to try some radical things to work on the understeer. The only other driving I’ve done since Laguna, has been in the Champion Lola-Porsche, at Daytona. Owing to the horrific events at the start of last week, and then the weather on the second day, it was basically a glorified shakedown. The Lola with its 24 hour endurance synchromesh gearbox and the Audi with its electro-pneumatic paddle shift gearbox, are like chalk and cheese. The Audi shifts gears in a few milliseconds, but in the Lola.. it takes a bit longer... The mood at Daytona was obviously very downbeat. New York has shaken everyone very badly. A few words about driving with Johnny. Over the years, I’ve driven with a number of F1 and ex-F1 drivers. I’ve always found that they were very quick, but although they would keep you on your toes, I could match them for speed. When it became apparent that I’d be driving with Johnny for most of the year, I was more concerned that he’d be difficult to work with (than whether I’d match his pace). But he’s been a complete gentleman; very fast, very fair, never wanting to dominate time in the car, great fun to be with, a real team player. He won three Grands Prix and did a great job in F1, but he’s basically the same guy he was in FF1600 & F3, and everyone in the team gets along well with him. Andy Wallace link Copyright ©2000-©2023 TotalMotorSport