UNDEFEATED; AUDI WINS ANOTHER PETIT LE MANS.(NEWS)

Byline: GARY WATKINS

The 11th running of the American Le Mans Series Petit Le Mans was packed full of drama, and Allan McNish was at the center of most of it.

The Audi driver damaged his R10 on the way to the grid, started two laps down and, nearly 10 hours later, was in the thick of a thrilling dash to the flag through the darkness.

If you had presented this as a Hollywood script, it would have been thrown out as totally implausible, but there was the Scot up on the podium with teammates Rinaldo Capello and Emanuele Pirro, celebrating Audi's ninth-straight win in the 1,000-mile race at Road Atlanta.

McNish reckoned that he and his co-drivers were "dead ducks when he spun his R10 TDI on cold tires during the reconnaissance lap 45 minutes before the green flag. His crew managed to get the car back on track not long after the race started. Almost miraculously, McNish was back on the lead lap in the span of two hours and 20 minutes. He came from almost nowhere to catch the leaders and pulled off an audacious maneuver to deprive Peugeot of victory.

With a little more than an hour to go in the 10-hour race, McNish seemed to be out of it. A sequence of troubles for Capelloa problem with the pit crew, a tire issue and an overheating engineleft McNish with a lot of work to do. More phenomenal work by the Champion Audi team during the ninth of 11 caution periods got the Scot back on the lead lap.

McNish quickly dispatched IndyCar regular Helio Castroneveswho is facing federal tax-evasion charges off the track (see Competition, page 45)in the best of the Penske Racing Porsche RS Spyders for fourth. He was catching Peugeot's Christian Klien when the 908 HDi blasted past race leader Marco Werner's Audi down the long back straight.