Pearce denied in home event.

Having failed to start the last round of the Le Mans Endurance Series following engine problems at Monza, Team LNT driver Patrick Pearce was unlucky to miss out on a strong finish in his home round at Silverstone despite a strong drive in treacherous conditions.

The ever unreliable British weather made conditions difficult for all the teams and drivers, with a number of incidents and safety car periods on a circuit so wet that many of the cars were struggling to even stay in a straight line.

Having been chosen to start the race in the #82 TVR T400R, Pearce was faced with an extra problem aside from the rain, when the windscreen wipers on the car failed.

"The windscreen wipers failed on the formation lap, so I had to do the start of the race with no wipers," he said. "It was so, so difficult - the most difficult stint I've ever driven in a racing car.

"I had to get as close as possible to the car in front of me to make sure I could see it. I couldn't actually see the front of my own car's bonnet. The standing water was the biggest problem, and obviously I couldn't see where that was either, so I'd suddenly hit puddles with no warning. There were a few times when I was driving completely off the track and didn't even realise. I felt like a pilot flying in thick fog, it was incredibly hard and very disorientating."

Despite being virtually unable to see, Pearce was making his way up the field from his starting position of fourth in class, but with the conditions nullifying the performance advantage of the quicker prototype and GT1 cars, the TVR was soon inside the top three in GT2 and on the fringes of the top ten overall when LNT were informed that the car had been given a two-minute stop-go penalty.

"The penalty was very hard, especially as we are still not sure exactly what it was for," Pearce said. "Officially the mechanics had stayed on the grid too long because they were trying to fix the wipers, but that doesn't account for the full two minutes of the stop-go."

Rejoining the track, Pearce completed his stint inside the top 20 before pitting to hand the car over to team-mate Marc Hynes but within a couple of laps of rejoining the circuit, he was involved in an accident with the sister car of Warren Hughes with the #82 car left requiring lengthy repairs in the pits.

With the car repaired, and the windscreen wipers now fully functioning, the TVR would end the race eleventh in class.

"Obviously a collision between team-mates is the worst thing that can happen in motor racing, but the conditions had got so bad that you really couldn't see anything out there by that time," Pearce said. "After that we just treated the rest of the race as an extended test session.

"It was a remarkable race and it was a shame that we couldn't be involved in the real fight at the end of it, but once the car was fixed it was running extremely well. We had some engine problems in recent races, but the engine ran perfectly for the full distance. Other than the wiper problem and Marc's incident with Warren, everything went fine and it was really encouraging."