What a race weekend. The 24 Hours of LeMans was run this weekend, as well as the Canadian Grand Prix. Congrats to the Audi R15 TDI team and the McLaren Mercedes team for winning thier respective races.
The more I watch racing, the more I think many elements of it mimic life. Take LeMans for example. It's one of the most challenging races on earth. Teams bring thier highly tuned, high performance machines to a circuit and run it for 24 GRUELING hours. It's a relentless affair. To put this into perspective, most races are less than 2hours long. LeMans is so taxing that teams not only change tires and refuel, but rotate three different drivers and other things that teams usually don't need to worry about such as brake pads and rotors. This year, 56 cars entered the race and only 28 finished.
The part I want to focus on is the LMP1 race at LeMans today. Two major teams battled it out for the class win. Peugeot with it's 908 HDi, and Audi with the newly revised R15 TDI. The Peugeot was the favorite, and just as people expected, it had a very strong showing in the begining hours of the race. Dominating early on, they ran in first through fourth. The race seemed grim for Audi, most of the R15 TDI's were several laps down... but they came to race, and while the Peugeots set blistering lap times one after the other, the Audi's held thier pace. If things continued, there was no way for Audi to win. Before long however, things went very wrong for Peugeot. One after another, all of the 908 HDi's retired from the race, and eventually, none of them finished. The Audi's however, not only made it to the finish line, but eventually took the top three spots. What I really liked was however, when a reporter interviewed the team captain of Audi after the lead Peugeot caught on fire, he said something to the effect of "we are racing ourselves, we are running our own race, and will continue to do so".