Nervous wait for McNish after smashposted in LMANS10 | 06 | 2011
SCOT ALLAN McNISH faces a nervous wait to see whether his Audi R18TDI Coupe will be rebuilt in time to allow him to start tomorrow's 79th running of the Le Mans 24-Hours.
The 41-year-old from Dumfries, twice a winner of the world's most demanding endurance race, is scheduled to start from fifth on the 56-car grid when the action starts at 3pm.
But McNish, along with his team-mates, Italian Dindo Capello and Dane Tom Kristensen, are hoping heir Audi crew can repair their wrecked car after Kristensen lost control of the car at the end of qualifying.
"The car's pretty beat-up," McNish admitted today. "It was a high speed accident and the important thing is Tom's ok; all he has is a grazed elbow, which just highlights how tough the Audi is. It was a big smash."
Watch Allan McNish's brilliant animated Le Mans preview
Such was the impact of the crash, which happened as the Dane was on his fastest lap of qualifying at Tertre Rouge where the Audi was travelling well in excess of 120mph, only the car's monocoque survived intact.
Everything else on the car which will — hopefully — make it to the grid will be new, including all the body panels, plus a new engine and gearbox. If the car is rebuilt in time, McNish will have only a short warm-up tomorrow morning before the race starts.
"Yeh, it's not ideal, but that's motor racing," he said philosophically. “Tom’s incident was unfortunate, but these things happen; it’s part of pushing.
"Of course you wouldn't choose to go into a race with the car just having been rebuilt, especially as we'd been working on-track all week to get it to the point where the car was the best its ever been.
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"But we are where we are, and we just have to get on with it. We've complete faith in the guys who'll rebuild the car. It's definitely not a lost cause, but the incident puts us on the back foot."
If there is any encouragement for McNish and his team-mates it is that the front five cars on the grid are covered by just over a second.
"That really bodes well for us," admitted McNish, who watched at the second Audi of Marcel Fassler grabbed a surprise pole position with a best lap of 3mins 25.961secs, 1.736s ahead of the Scot. That means we've a fantastic race ahead.”
Read our full Le Mans preview interview with Allan McNish
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Jim McGill