Great Bit!

[Greg Johnson]

Thought you'd appreciate this -- it's from the middle of Aaron
Robinson's article: SPORT: At Le Mans, Money Talks.
C&D, Sept 2000.

.....With light peeking over the eastern horizon, the team burned
another half-hour changing a gearbox on Andy Wallace's Cadillac. Both of
the factory Cadillacs also needed new clutches during the night. "We'll
keep going until we finish," pronounced a defiant Cockney-hearted
Wallace, "because to finish is to win." One wonders if Audi Sport
director Wolfgang Ullrich was planning to use the same argument with VW
chairman Ferdinand Piech had the Audis failed to achieve victory.

As if to prove a point, the second-place Audi of Allan McNish pitted in
the darkness with gearbox problems. The crew descended on the car like
an Olympic sushi team. They pushed it into the garage, zipped off the
four bolts holding the gearbox bell housing to the engine, lifted away
the box and rear suspension, dropped a new assembly in using an overhead
gantry that looked as if it had been pilfered from the Ingolstadt
assembly line, and buttoned it up. Total time for the change: 3 minutes
and 55 seconds. Faint groaning could be heard from the other end of the
pits.......

Greg J