15 Sep 05
Racing for 24 hours demands a slightly different technique to give a car any chance of making it through the night and all of the following day. You still brake and corner as hard as you can, but you keep off the kerbs that can bust your suspension in a moment, you keep about 500rpm clear of the engine's red-line and you're gentle with the gearbox - almost as gentle as you'd be on the road. And if this sounds like a life made easier, believe me, it is not. For out there, in the dark, lurks a panoply of potential calamities, just waiting to stick you in the wall or put you out of the race. There's the rain shower at the far end of the track, unseen by you or your pit crew until it's too late. There are the corners you can't really see, so you have to turn into them blind and trust your judgement and that they haven't moved in the last lap. Sometimes, it seems that they do. And then there's the old favourite of 24-hour racing - the tired engine in the car in front giving up the ghost and depositing the contents of its sump all over the track, just in time for you to arrive at 130mph. But there's nothing that can be done about that; you cannot plan around it, so your only option is to forget it. If you thought that even one of the dozens of things that can happen to you during a 24-hour race would actually happen to you, you'd never get in the car.
Mercifully, none of these did happen, at least not to me. The weather stayed sufficiently treacherous to put a BMW driver in hospital after 18 hours of racing, and even caused our car to spin in a circle three times during the race - though mercifully not on my shift - but as day turned to night, back to day again, and then morning turned to afternoon, it looked as if not only might we finish, we might even do rather well.
This was not part of the plan - not the spoken one at least. Mazda's only request was that all three of their cars made the finish, for that would be an incredible achievement in its own right. To pressure us into chasing positions would be to potentially pressure us into making mistakes which would then jeopardise the whole plan. Even so, with 22 and a half hours out of 24, our car was not only 14th overall out of 55, but, crucially, it was second in its class of 15. And, unlike the other two RX-8s which were still running but had fallen down the order thanks to unscheduled pit-stops, our car had run near enough perfectly.
