André Lotterer: The one that got away
“I love Le Mans – so much so that you could say I got divorced for it. Audi and I share a great history together and I could still be racing race for them but obviously not at Le Mans. But to enter this race with Porsche has a unique appeal because the brand is so closely knit with Le Mans and has been involved in motor sports from the beginning. This goes deep. When I was drawing sports cars as a kid, they always had the shape of a 911. In recent years I’ve been in the fortunate position to buy several Porsche cars for my collection. Now I’ve got two more: a company car and the 919 Hybrid!
“Le Mans is such a huge project, a tremendous race. Sports cars mean to share a car with your best buddies – the relationship with Benoît (Tréluyer) and Marcel (Fässler) was very special. Endurance racing is team sport through and through and Le Mans takes everyone to his limit.
“Winning this race is absolutely fantastic. I had this experience three times but regard my first win in 2011 as the biggest success of my career. It was the first one and you never know if you have a chance to fight for victory in this race for a second time. But it was also a very special race. The Safety Cars were on track for hours and we swapped the lead with Peugeot 40 times. With a difference of six seconds between us after almost 24 hours of racing we came in for our last pit stops at the same time. In the end I won the race with a 13.8-seconds advantage. I had been in the car for five stints, nearly four hours. Allan McNish’s car had retired at the end of the first hour after a big crash. In the night Mike Rockenfeller suffered his heavy accident. It was bad. We had two garages closed. Benoît, Marcel and I were racing all alone against Peugeot.”
