Audi wins Petit Le Mans at Road Atlanta

Braselton — The Petit Le Mans at Road Atlanta and the NASCAR Sprint Cup race at Talladega Superspeedway seem to have a lot more in common than the fact that they’re run on the same weekend. Both races have a way of rocking along for the majority of the laps then ending in dramatic fashion.

Saturday’s 11th running of the Petit offered late-race drama at its best.

Allan McNish, who drives an Audi in the elite LMP1 class, pulled off a stunning comeback after missing the first two laps of the race because he crashed his car pulling around to line up for the start. But he battled back onto the lead lap and wrestled the lead from the Peugeot of Christian Klien with a bold, bump-and-run move in traffic in Turn 6 with less than an hour left in the 10-hour, 1,000-mile run.

A caution flag at Lap 374 wiped out the five-second margin that McNish had built over Klien. But on the restart, he bolted to a three-second advantage at the flagstand and had better than a four-second lead after just two laps.

Klien was unable to close the gap, and McNish sailed under the checkered flag as Klien came down the hill at Turn 12, 4.51 seconds behind.

It was his third straight and fourth overall Petit triumph for McNish and co-driver Dindo Capello. Emanuele Pirro, the Petit winner in 2005, also drove the winning Audi on Saturday.

McNish gave much of the credit to his crew, who repaired his car and planned the pit strategy that helped get him back in contention.

“All I did was drive the beast,” he said, describing this victory as “one of the sweetest.”

Two-time Indy 500 champion Helio Castroneves, a day after being in court on tax-evasion charges, teamed with Ryan Briscoe to win in LMP2 for Penske Racing, his first American Le Mans Series victory, and finish fourth overall. Afterward, he did his trademark fence climb, even though the fence was about a six-footer. And he seemed to be putting his court troubles out of his mind, at least for a time.

“We just won,” he said with a big smile.

Flowery Branch’s Johnny O’Connell and his Corvette Racing teammates Jan Magnussen and Ron Fellows were victorious in GT1 and won the Green Challenge in GT. The Green Challenge is a new award that recognizes teams for conserving fossil fuels. The Ferrari of Mika Salo and Jamie Melo took the GT2 class. The overall Green Challenge winner was the No. 6 team, owned by Roger Penske, an LMP2 car.

The pole-winning Peugeot 908, driven by Klien, Stephane Sarrazin and Nicolas Minassian, proved to be a formidable competitor to the Audis, which have won nine straight Petits. The Peugeot, with its unique canopy over the driver (the rest of the LMP cars have open cockpits) isn’t a regular competitor in the ALMS, of which Petit is a part, but it performed flawlessly throughout the day-into-night grind. The race was slowed several times for crashes, the worst of which occurred after dark, on a restart at Lap 349. It badly damaged the cars of Georges Forgeois and Franck Montagny.