American Le Mans Series

Petit Le Mans - Hour 9: It’s not over yet…

© Creation Autosportif

Well into the final part of the race with the only light coming from the floodlights and headlights the race seemed to be consolidating. There was no real fighting for position in the last hour and it looked like teams were preparing for the final few laps of the race.
Things went different thanks to Creation Autosportif though. At first the team had to come into the pit to undergo a lengthy stop-and-go penalty and when Campbell-Walter went out on the track again he lost the car. The car got stuck on the kerbstones. The safety car came out and the sixth full course yellow was a fact. Campbell-Walter managed to get the #88 Creation back on the track and rejoined the race. Due to the penalty and the incident the car dropped from third to fifth overall. The team could not believe what had happened.

After almost 25 minutes of driving in the dark behind the safety car, because of extensive track cleaning, the race was about to get underway. When the safety car went in with 29 laps to go Marco Werner had to catch up again as he had spun just before the lights on the safety car went out.

Right from the green flag Bill Auberlen in the #21 BMW went after Bourdais in the Panoz and an interesting fight started. Auberlen passed Bourdais, but the French driver did not let go of the driver from California. The two fought on with several prototypes and GT1 cars passing them during these fights. With 25 laps to go it looked like Auberlen was the winner of the battle, he pulled away from the Panoz. Bourdais did everything he could to get back into third but was unable to get closer to the BMW.

The leading LMP2 Porsche came into the pit for a splash-and-dash.

With 15 laps to go there was less than 30 minutes left in this edition of the Petit Le Mans race as we passed the 9 hour mark. Th