Le Mans Series - Spa 1000kms - Post Race  

Sebastien Bourdais

“Hopefully there won’t be too many more races like these because I don’t want to die young..! It was a hard race to be honest. We chose a medium tyre compound and it was hard to keep it on the island at first but we knew we had a good car and we struggled on, then the rain came and we found ourselves in a more comfortable position.”

Pedro Lamy

“The start conditions were pretty difficult – I had no temperature in the tyres so I lost quite a bit of time at the beginning. But I knew we had a good car so I just tried to be patient.”

Simon Pagenaud:

“I thought it was a great race. My first stints were fairly easy, but towards the end when the weather was changing I was checking what Tom was doing with his tyres and whether he was on inters. I did what I could to keep going on slicks -  I saw that the rain was localised and tried to survive and it worked.”

Allan McNish:

“The weather wasn’t easy for anyone, but with Le Mans downforce we struggled early on with grip. After it dried we were able to push and the car balance was better. If we had come here with Spa downforce we would have been better.

“The out of sequence strategy played into our hands, but we lost that with the red flag.”

Dindo Capello:

“I am happy that the red flag period was due to the power issue rather than what I thought was a big incident with the Peugeot. I saw the Peugeot, and then when the red flag came I thought the worst. After the re-start it was hard to get temperature into our tyres. Our low downforce set up cost us time towards the end. “

Tom Kristensen:

“I had to change the tyres towards the end as I couldn’t go flat between Stavelot and Blanchimont, so we had to take the risk of a different tyre.

“It’s a shame that the circuit decided to try to save money on electricity. If they had needed to put some money in the meter we couldn’t have helped – we have a Scotsman on our team!”

Bas Leinders:

“To win our first LMS outing at Spa is great, and good preparation for Le Mans. The VDS team delivered a really good package, and with Matech making it a 1-2-3 it proves the Ford GT is a very good car.”

Marc Lieb:

“My first stint was a really exciting one against Jaime Melo and we had to run hard to get ahead. In the end despite the challenges we had a clean race with no incidents. The red flag handed us some luck and the second half of the race was untroubled.”

Luca Moro:

“Of course the car was lucky to get into the race. It was a hard weekend for everyone with my heavy crash. The team worked really hard so I have to thank them. “

Wolfgang Kaufmann:

“It was a special race for us for many reasons. Firstly to overcome the problems to make the start, but also to deal with the conditions. The rain at the beginning made it quite hard work, and the electrical problems were quite unique! 

“Formula Le Mans is pretty good. It’s an LMP2 class in one sense, but you are really fighting with the GT2 cars. It would be nice if we had a little more power so we could have a bit more advantage and not have to be passed by GT1 cars.”