24 Hours of Le Mans: The Aston Martin Berezina

For a team which had stated at the start of the season that it had the firm intention of coming up against Audi and Peugeot , finding yourself 20 seconds from pole in qualifying must have been difficult to digest? even if at Prodrive, we were talking about encouraging performances. But what about the performance in the race? At 15:25 p.m., only 25 minutes after the start, number 009 opens the list of retirements. The reason ? The water pump has failed. At the same time, #007 experienced a similar problem and was pushed to the back of her box.

“We diagnosed cracks on an aluminum pulley and decided to replace the element with a steel one, but this caused problems elsewhere. We are therefore restarting the 007 with the aluminum part” team manager George Howard Chappell said at the time.

The cutting-edge AMR-One returns to the track in the hands of Stefan Mücke. But one lap later, the German was back in his pit, never to leave again.

“I am extremely disappointed for the team and the fans of the brand who came to Le Mans to see a good race, which we did not offer them, deplores George Howard-Chappell. A lot of people worked really hard to put on a good show. It would have been easy, with the problems we were having developing the car, to give up and not participate, but we decided to push through. Thursday's practice seemed to show us that we could do quite well. We tried to do better than that, but in trying to solve a small problem we created a bigger one. It's car racing. We will not give up? »

Still, it is difficult to imagine that the AMR-One will one day fight with Audi and Peugeot, or even with Pescarolo or Rebellion. The technical choices made at the start may not have been the most judicious.

Discover in your AUTOhebdo magazine, currently on newsstands, a complete 42-page analysis of the 79th edition of 24 Hours of Le Mans by our special correspondents in Sarthe.