Motor Sport: Mcnish Has Edge in 24-hour Scramble

Not many sporting events attract a crowd of 300,000, but the Le Mans 24 Hours does and among the throng that will descend on the French circuit next weekend will be 80,000 from Britain. The seventy-fifth running of the world's most famous sports-car race is likely to be the closest for many years, but there is a very good chance that when the checkered flag falls on Sunday Scotland's Allan McNish will be celebrating his second victory in motor sport's toughest endurance test.

Audi cars have won at Le Mans for six of the past seven years, but McNish, whose only win in eight attempts came with Porsche in 1998, has yet to stand on the top step of the podium as an Audi driver, despite being part of the team that has steamrollered the opposition for every year bar one since the turn of the millennium.

'I haven't competed every year but I've led every year that I have,' says McNish. 'Also, I've been in a position to win, but for one reason or another, thankfully outside of my control, it's sort of slipped away. We have had three podium positions in that time, but when you've tasted the champagne for winning you don't want to accept second place. I've got a love-hate relationship with Le Mans. I think the circuit is the best in the world, but it can be the most difficult because you've got so many variables.'

McNish and his Audi team-mates will not only have to deal with driving their R10 prototype at 200mph in the dead of night, but also the constant threat of tripping over backmarkers who are racing at much slower speeds. 'When you think about cars you'd love on the road - the Ferrari 430 or the Porsche 911 - they are really desirable cars, but they are the slowest thing on the circuit,' says McNish. 'We are 70mph faster than them through some of the corners - that's a whole national speed limit. It's fine in daylight, but at three in the morning you make an instantaneous judgment whether you go left or right and stand by the consequences.'

So does the 37-year-old suffer from the kind of fatigue the ordinary motorist has to deal with when driving at night? 'No, we never get anything like that,' he says. 'In terms of preparation we obviously have very high fitness levels, so we don't get physical fatigue. In the race, we are all going in one direction, so you don't have to deal with that blindness when someone's coming towards you when you're driving. I've got to be honest, when you are flying into a chicane at 210mph and braking at 110 metres from the corner then it keeps your focus anyway. I've never heard of anyone getting tired in the car or anything. The adrenalin keeps you going.

'That's one of the other angles of Le Mans. Jacques Villeneuve, for example, who's doing it for the first time, is a tremendous driver, but it's an area of driving and understanding that he will certainly have to get used to and learn because that is different to any other category he will have done before.'

Villeneuve, the 1997 Formula One world champion, will be driving for the Peugeot team that is expected to be Audi's closest challengers despite saying that this is only a learning year.

After they were fastest at the recent test, McNish does not underestimate the Peugeot threat. 'I think they are going to be very fast. We saw that in the test and we have seen that in the races that they have competed in so far. They are not sitting back, this is not a learning year. Also, the reliability aspect of it has been talked about quite a lot, but if you do look at the races they have competed in so far one car has finished without an issue, so I don't think that the reliability problems are quite as much of a factor as they are putting out right now.'

Le Mans is perfectly set up for a classic, 24-hour duel between Audi and Peugeot. McNish predicts that the pace at the front will be ferocious and neither team can adopt a tortoise and hare strategy to protect reliability. 'Why would I want to be in the tortoise car?' asks the Scot. 'If the hare car does succeed then you've lost. We're going to go flat out. The only team order we've got is, "Don't bloody well crash into each other". I think this is going to be one of the most open and exciting Le Mans races I've been involved in for a long, long time.'