LM24: McNish expects Audi resurgence

According to three-time Le Mans winner Allan McNish, Audi's brand-new R18 chassis, which incorporates a move to the more powerful 6 megajoule energy recovery system class, could be the hot ticket to knock Porsche off its perch.

The veteran Audi man, who retired after the 2013 season where he scored his final LM24 victory, remains active with the team, and readily admits his bias, but the Scot is also known for his honest assessments of where the brand stands at any given time.

"The biggest thing was towards the end of the year we saw, we knew we needed to make a big step forward with performance," McNish (left) told RACER. "Part of it is with the megajoule class, with the hybrid, because we were giving away a little bit too much there. The whole car is new. From front to back it is basically new or at least very developed. The engine is probably the area that has had the least bit, but even still then it has had quite a bit of work done on it."

With Porsche's 919 Hybrid, which won the 24 Hours of Le Mans last year with relative ease, and Toyota's new TS050 Hybrid, which has shown increased potential over its predecessor, playing in the top 8 megajoules class, Audi made the move from 4MJ in 2015 to 6MJ this year after the benefits were clearly demonstrated at the famed endurance race.

Along with a radical shift in aerodynamic philosophies, and the production of a comparatively narrow chassis, the latest R18 is far from an evolution; it's a big departure from previous R18s which has been needed to keep pace with the 919s. So far, during the first two FIA WEC rounds, and at the Le Mans test day (top), the extensive efforts by Audi Sport appear to have paid off.

"The thing for me was as soon as the guys got out of the cars and both cars at the [Le Mans test], they said, yes, the car feels quite good. OK, we need to improve this, we need to improve that, but the underlying feeling was that the car was actually working quite well," McNish said.

"That gives me the feeling that [Audi] will be able to work on it and develop it and just optimize it, as opposed to chasing it. And I think that's a very positive thing. It also means that all the work they've done over the winter and also all the correlations between wind tunnel simulation, X, Y and Z, to actually get it onto the circuit has actually worked."

McNish also weighed in on this year's reduced LMP1 Hybrid car count at Le Mans, and how it might affect the race's outcome.

"There's less cars, there's six of them now," he said. "Obviously, it came down to decisions at the end of last year where Porsche and Audi had to scale back to two cars which in a way puts them on a balanced playing field with Toyota. So if I take my Audi hat off and put on my racing side of things then I would say it looks pretty balanced across the whole P1 field.

"On the other side of it though, I think this is a year that you would want an extra car, a third car because everybody's pushing to the limit. Certainly, from an Audi perspective, going to the 6MJ with the battery system as well, and all of the things that come from that, plus the fact that you have had to step up a level of performance because of the competition, then it has brought it to the point that, as we saw in the first two races, reliability is definitely not a given."

Answers on reliability will have to wait for the race to start, and while it's hard to predict who'll win, McNish expects fierce competition to be on display.

"I think it will be a good race because they were a lot closer than I thought [they would be] at the test," he added. "I thought the lap times would be spread out more, if I'm honest with you. I didn't expect... at half-time at lunch, I was standing with [Audi Sport boss] Dr. Ullrich, we looked at it, and the last time I remember it being that close with all of the cars within I think it was 1.2 seconds, was the 1998 pretest. All sort of bunched up because normally, you maybe get one or two that's really close, but not the whole stack. As a fan, I think it was a pretty good sign.

"As an Audi fan and slightly biased to say the least, [I liked] the fact that we were in the mix, because I also expected Porsche to be maybe one step ahead in the pretest. But we were in the mix and we were in the mix pretty much all the way through. So it's not a given by any stretch because we don't know exactly what everybody's doing, but I think it's going to be pretty tight up at the front."