Off to Nurburgring to qualify for Le Mans

Warren Luff and I are racing an Audi R8 at the famous Nurburgring circuit to gain eligibility for the Le Mans 24-hour race. At this point we don't have anything secured for next month's Le Mans, but hopefully we can look at doing it next year.

Ever since our second place in the Bathurst 12-hour Warren and I have had a very good ongoing relationship with Audi, so when this opportunity came up they contacted us to fill a car. It should be much the same R8 as we drove at Bathurst.

From the info we have the Audi will do about 8.5 minute laps, so on calculations with pit stops we should do about 27 laps in Saturday's race. Mark Batting from the winning German Audi team at Bathurst knows the Nurburgring like I know Mt Panorama and he will hopefully give us some tips and guidance.

There's no time for sightseeing as we are back on the plane and home again by Monday for a debriefing on Winton and then a test day at Queensland Raceway on the Wednesday. Winton was a bit of an up and down affair and we ended up marking time, staying in second place in the championship.

It started ok with the car working exceptionally well and scoring my first pole there. My bad start on the Saturday was my undoing.

We have a process for operating the clutch and I was still getting used to the method. I bogged it down on the line and got swamped. We were three wide in the first corner and there was a bit of biff and barge which bent the steering. We didn't know it was bent until the boys were checking it on Saturday night.

Before Sunday morning qualifying we also had to change engines. But I got the clutch right on the Sunday and had the best start I've had all year, and with a handful of laps remaining we were running in fourth. We had been trying to get 26 laps out of a set tyres but the tyre life is really only good for about 22 laps, so we lost rear tyre grip right at the end.

We also had a very noisy third gear which I haven't experienced for a long time. Thankfully it didn't affect speed or performance, but no doubt the team will have a look at that.

Jason Bright had the best race strategy of pitting late and only doing about 19 laps on his last set of tyres. He was able to easily come through the pack and grab another victory after his win in Perth. Jason has always been very quick, it was just a matter of getting his car sorted. Now he's done it two rounds in a row, so the team is obviously getting things together.

It was also great to see the other Jason (Richards) get up on the podium and accept the team trophy.