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IN THE COCKPIT: Allan McNish, Silverstone WEC
Silverstone was a race of new situations for both Tom and I...
Allan McNish  | allanmcnish.com  |  Posted August 28, 2012  
Allan McNish and Tom Kristensen drove to a third place finish in Sunday's FIA WEC Six Hours of Silverstone. (Photo: LAT)
It's always nice to race at home in your own country. Now it's only once a year. For the last few years, I've actually raced in the U.S. more than I've raced in the U.K. It's the small things, like when you drive in through the gates at Silverstone, it's been the same man at the security gate for such a long time.

There are friendly faces that you see all the way through your junior career. There's a legendary guy called 'Silverstone Sid' who was still popping around, even though he's now retired. He was the one who sort of beat us young guys into shape.

For Tom and I, it was a race of new situations. It was our first time in the Audi R18 ultra. We had never raced that car before, as we had been racing the e-tron quattro up until now. And it felt like such a long time ago since we last drove.

It was also a new engineering crew for us. We were working with Kyle Wilson-Clarke and Dave Brown. Previously, we worked with 'H' at Sebring and Dominik and co. at Spa and Le Mans. So there were a few things for us to get used to. We had to try to understand how they exactly work over a race weekend, the same for them to us, and also how the car works as well.

There is definitely a slightly different characteristic. You have to keep the momentum a little bit more because you don't have that hybrid boost coming out of some of the slow corners. You have to think about your setup and work in a slightly different way.

I think we did a very good job. We qualified on the front row of the grid, one-hundredth of a second from the pole position, which equated to 25 inches when they worked it out!

But the slightly frustrating thing was, in our internal meeting at night when they pulled up the Audi data, I was actually 1.8 tenths faster. It was just the difference from where our beacon was, coming out of the last corner, to where the official beacon was, later on up the start/finish straight. I presume a little bit of hybrid boost kicked in there for Ben!

The car felt good through practice and qualifying. For us in the ultra, we looked at the race in a very different way. We knew Toyota was going to be fast; we knew we had to try to counteract their speed in the race runs in a different way. It was the same for our sister car as well. So Tom and I were working on a fuel strategy which came to fruition quite close to the end of the race.

I'm sure it would have set us up very well. I got into the car after Tom's double stint and did three or four laps and started to pull away from the Toyota that was behind me that had already stopped, as had we. But then I got a puncture, a right-rear. I got the radio call, looked down on my display, and we've got the tire pressure monitoring system. The right-rear was at 1.5 bar and dropping.

I had to come into the pits quickly to then replace that tire and get on our way. But that effectively put us out of sequence. It ruined the strategy we had for the race and put our car out of contention. From that point on after that, it was a chance to see if we could hopefully get second place. But unfortunately we came out after the final stop just behind the Toyota and that was it.

We finished third and sadly lost the lead of the championship. I have to say the championship has been a bit topsy-turvy since the beginning of the year, so I'm sure that's not the final standings.

Looking at Toyota, they were very good. They impressed at Le Mans. They impressed in the pre-test and they impressed at Silverstone. They weren't necessarily the fastest in qualifying. But when it came to the race itself, Alex Wurz overtook Tom with the acceleration at the start and then overtook Andre in traffic and proceeded to pull 20 seconds. He had a very strong race car.

There were areas where they are not as efficient as Audi, fuel economy being one of them. But their lap pace is very good. I think it will be a big problem in Sao Paulo, because they seem to be very fast in low speed corners and that looks like to be one of their strengths.

But from our point of view, we're going there with out heads held high looking to take forward what Tom and I learned, how we integrated with our new team and our new car. I had one hour of Skype with our engineers getting ready for Brazil and talking about Silverstone on what we learned and what we can improve.

For Sao Paulo, we'll also be joined by the local hero, Lucas di Grassi. I'm sure he knows where the good places to overtake on the circuit are and I'm very sure he knows where the very good Brazilian restaurants are at night!

~Allan

Allan McNish, a two-time 24 Hours of Le Mans winner, is a factory driver for Audi Sport, competing in this year's FIA World Endurance Championship. A three-time ALMS champion, McNish has also racked up multiple wins at Sebring and Petit Le Mans. For more information, visit allanmcnish.com and follow him on Twitter @AllanMcNish.
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