Tr?luyer: I just cried like a baby...
An emotional Beno?t Tr?luyer has confessed that his and team-mates Andr? Lotterer and Marcel F?ssler's brilliant success in last weekend's Le Mans 24 Hours made him 'cry like a baby' - as he described the result as a victory for the entire Audi team, and the race as one that caused him more stress than he had ever previously experienced.
Tr?luyer impressed with pole position in qualifying aboard Audi's all-new R18 TDi, and after a steady start during which it fleetingly gave best to the two sister cars, the #2 machine soon settled into the lead. What's more, barring brief battles with the #7 and #9 Peugeots, there it generally remained.
From 11pm onwards on Saturday night, indeed, the Tr?luyer car was the sole remaining Audi in contention following the dramatic accidents that claimed the #3 driven by Allan McNish and the #1 of Mike Rockenfeller, and the Frenchman admits that at first he feared the old adage about bad luck coming in threes would come to cost the Ingolstadt manufacturer dear.
"Honestly, when you see an accident like that, you don't feel that good," he told Crash.net of Rockenfeller's high-speed shunt, "and when you jump in the car after that, you say, 'it's happened twice...and we're in the third car!' You don't want it to happen to you as well, so you're a bit stressful!"
There were further nail-biting moments, Tr?luyer recalled, in the closing stages of the race, as he sat in the garage watching Lotterer out on-track endeavouring to stave off the chasing Peugeot of Simon Pagenaud - "It was terrible, honestly terrible...I'd never had such stress in my life!" he quips - and you could add to that a number of close calls with other Peugeot drivers palpably unwilling to be lapped, which he magnanimously concedes 'was a bit of a shame, but that's racing'.
In truth, though, much of the hard work had already been done thanks to a superbly aggressive performance by a driver who clearly wanted to do his overtaking on the circuit rather than in the pits.
"It's a fight everywhere," the former Japanese Super GT and Formula Nippon Champion reasons. "You cannot wait for the effort only from the mechanics in the pits. You have to do your job on the track, and okay, you take risks, but that's part of the race.
"It was a great moment [when Lotterer took the chequered flag]. I couldn't control myself, and I just cried so much. I got that feeling when I won the Formula Nippon Championship. When you work really hard for many years for a target and you achieve it, the pressure is just released and you cry like a baby.
"I realised that it's just super-cool to win Le Mans. We won an incredible race, and it was a super feeling. The team did a great job, and thanks to all the people who worked on the car; they were so disappointed by the incidents in the race for the two other cars, because they knew the R18 could win. It was big pressure for us after that to win this race for all the people who have worked on the project.
"Without a reliable car, you can't finish the Le Mans 24 Hours, and without a fast car, you can't win it! It's like in a football team - if you lack just one person, you won't win - so this victory is for the whole team."
Praising the R18's remarkable raw speed and flawless reliability first time out at La Sarthe, Tr?luyer stated in the immediate aftermath of the race that 'to share it with all the team is the only thing I really want to do right now...I want to see my parents, my wife, my son and hug everyone!' He also revealed that he intended to pay a visit to 'Rocky' to see how the German is after his accident, and mused that with six of the nine drivers on the LMP1 podium being French, the current generation of home-grown talent is a potent one indeed.
And what about the fact that prior to last weekend, Messrs. Tr?luyer, Lotterer and F?ssler were the only members of the Audi line-up not to have conquered the race frequently referred to as the toughest in the world? Well, he ponders, 'there's a first time for everything - and you have to start someday...'
