Date: 24 August 2009, Nürburgring, Germany

The penultimate round of the 2009 Le Mans Series was the ADAC 1,000 km of The Nürburgring. It was a 195 lap, 6-hour long marathon of a race. Despite this, the top four cars fought amongst each other as if it was a short sprint. It was a tough battle between the 3 Lola Aston Martins, who eventually finished 1-2-3, and the No 14 Kolles Audi R10TDI, driven by Narain Karthikeyan, Charles Zwolsman & Andrew Meyrick, who finished just 14.5 seconds behind the No 008 Aston Martin.

Andrew Meyrick started the race for the No 14 car, and drove a steady first stint, climbing from their 7th place start to a strong 5th place, before handing over the car to Narain. Narain set about putting in some very quick laps, and had soon worked his way up to 3rd position. Unfortunately, while lapping a slower car, Narain had to go off the racing line, and picked up some metallic debris which was strewn on the road surface. This debris got sucked up through the bodywork, causing enough damage that it required an unscheduled and extra pit-stop, not just to repair the damage, but also to replace the tyres, which had also picked up a lot of debris, thus causing a serious lack of grip & performance.

This incident allowed the No 008 Aston Martin to take over 3rd place, and Narain rejoined the track in 4th place. The final stint in the No 14 Kolles Audi R10TDI was driven by Charles Zwolsman, who despite driving faultlessly & with a good turn of speed, could not re-take the 3rd position and final spot on the podium. At the finish line, the No 14 Kolles Audi R10TDI was only 14.592 seconds behind the 3rd place Aston Martin.

Despite narrowly missing out on a podium finish, Narain was quite pleased with the race weekend as a whole. He said, “It’s very disappointing for both me & the rest of the Kolles Audi team not to finish on the podium because we had an excellent car all weekend long. The car had perfect reliability, it had the pace too, and our pit-stop strategy was absolutely spot-on. It’s very unfortunate that just one piece of debris can change the entire outcome of the weekend. Nevertheless, we have one more race in the championship in 3 weeks time at Silverstone in the UK, and we fully intend to make it count!”

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