Stéphane Mücke drives the Audi R-18 e-tron two seconds per lap faster than the Ferrari chasing him at the 2012 Bahrain 6-hour race. Live commentary tracks pit stops, tire wear, and the tight margin between Mücke and Tony Vilander heading into the finish.
As you say, they just ran it into the ground and that was all there was to it. Stéphane Mücke came across the line 0.034 behind Tony Vilander last lap, i.e., just fractions. He came across the line 1.8 seconds in front of Tony Vilander this lap. So he's 2 seconds a lap quicker than the Ferrari behind him. Down pit road comes James Rosseter. And again, this is their second stop.
This is out of sync. He's only been out there— He's come and gone. Yeah. So where's the 32? It's Tonioliuzzi.
He's taking it over. Up to 36. That's only 10 laps. Okay, again, either tire wear or driver fatigue.
Yeah, I think it's a big, big gamble to try and double stint the tires. Nicolas Lapierre puts in the fastest lap of the race on lap number 39. A 47.463 by a couple of tenths. Of thousandths of a second. It was coming. That's very impressive. Half a minute now at the head of the field. Half a minute at the head of the field. And there's got to be— I'm going to say this even at this point, an hour and 15 minutes in— there's got to be a quiet confidence in the Toyota pit, because what we are seeing here is exactly a mirror image of what we saw at São Paulo. The lap times consistently 7 tenths to a full second better than the Audis. The fuel mileage similar enough that it's not going to make a huge difference. And the performance in the pit lane in terms of how long the car is in to the car coming out of the pits, again, close enough for anything up to about 4 seconds is going to be fine. What does seem to be the big difference with the Toyota Martin, and it's been pointed out by a couple of people on the Midweek Motorsport listeners collective, the forum at radiolemon.com, the Toyota with the ability to use their extra boost of power from the supercapacitor from a lower speed have an
